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has had a great deal of trouble processing the queues seen outside the Convention Centre in Dublin’s Docklands.
Management have reportedly been turning away some of those with tickets saying that the venue is filled beyond capacity.
25,000 people were expected to attend the event over the course of today and tomorrow.
The delays being seen have led to outcries on social media, with parents venting angrily at the situation they have found themselves in with their children. A suggestion that the event was oversubscribed beyond the Convention Centre’s legal capacity has likewise gained much traction on social media.
after 3 hours in the queue with my 7 year old we gave up and left. #Frustrating #GamerCon sux. Never again — Guilherme Macedo (@guilmacedo) March 18, 2017 Source: Guilherme Macedo /Twitter
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Rohn McDonnell, from Clonsilla in west Dublin, was stuck in the VIP queue for the event with his family from 11am until just before 2pm.
The event officially opened at 9.30am and will close its doors for the day this evening at 6.30pm.
“Management were saying that they’re only allowed to hold 7,000 in the venue,” Rohn told TheJournal.ie. “Some of these people have been stranded in the other queue since 10.30am this morning, they’ve come from across the country with their kids.”
About an hour ago they walked down the queue to tell people to leave.
Rohn, whose VIP family ticket cost €120 with an additional €32 spent on accessing a meet-and-greet session with well-known YouTubers at the event, added that it might be the case that the event organisers had expected the crowd to “rotate in and out”.
“But that was never going to happen with kids,” he said.
Anita McGuinness, from County Clare, meanwhile told TheJournal.ie that a security representative had told her by phone “that the event was oversold by 4,000 tickets”.
“We expected to have to wait to get in but two hours later we were still standing in the rain with no idea as to why,” she said.
I now have two heartbroken children in my arms and nothing is worse when you’re a mother. It is meant to be on again tomorrow and I fear that more children will be in the same boat then.
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GamerCon has now committed to providing ticket refunds to unhappy customers “once the event has been completed next week”.
“GamerCon sincerely apologises for the significant delays that our attendees experienced this morning,” event founder Ferdi Roberts said in a statement.
As a first time event we underestimated the traffic flow that we forecast for the event and have very strict health and safety related capacities which we must adhere to.
That temporarily impacted our ability to process the queue which resulted in a longer than expected wait time for our attendees. We are managing this proactively and expect the situation to ease as the day progresses.
We have offered full refunds to those affected and have communicated this to attendees via mobile app and all social media channels.
Roberts subsequently issued an updated statement, with just the final sentence differing from that which was initially released:
“We have offered full refunds to those who decide not to attend and have communicated this to attendees via mobile app and all social media channels,” that sentence now reads.
The relevant condition on the GamerCon terms and conditions site Source: GamerCon
A term and condition on the GamerCon website, which is printed in a different font to the other terms and conditions, says that “access (to the event) is not guaranteed” as the organisers “are required to maintain a safe environment for our attendees at all times and as such are subject to the capacities of the venue and the rooms/halls therein”.The following article is by CrazyBuster, Micksbabe :
When I was a young woman in my twenties, the concept of burning my bra sounded glamorous. However, I never did get around to actually burning a bra. Bras are expensive.
I thought Gloria Steinem was a brave trailblazer and subscribed to New Woman magazine. I got a job and contributed my share to the household expenses. And I feigned all kinds of outrage at the social injustices inflicted against women, past and present.
There was a time, not that long ago in the grand scheme of things, when women were treated like second class citizens. The women who stood up against all of society, to the detriment of themselves, their families and sometimes their own lives, in protest of the mistreatment of women, are truly heroes.
But feminism has, in my opinion, carried the cross too far.
Women can vote. We can educate ourselves. We can control our own reproduction, and we have laws in place to protect us against discrimination in the workplace.
It seems to me that what many women want and expect from society is not equality, but rather a handicap. Having a handicap in life is not the same thing as having equality, and it makes the men who are suffering slights at our expense, resent us for it. It’s counter-intuitive.
And nowhere is this phenomenon more unjust than within our own justice system.
Witnessing the way the Family Courts work, from the viewpoint of my husband in dealing with his abusive, high-conflict (HCP) and potentially personality-disordered ex-wife, it’s not only unjust, but, in many cases, the “best interests of the children” are completely overlooked in favor of the best interest of the Golden Uterus.
There is an across-the-board presumption in divorces involving child custody, that the child(ren) should automatically be awarded into the primary custody and care of the mother, with the father paying child support and, in many cases, spousal support as well. In the rare instances where the father manages to retain primary custody of his children, there is usually no support of any kind mandated from the mother to the father.
I know of a man who has primary custody of his children, who is also still mandated to pay “child support” to his ex-wife, who has the option of seeing her children or not, and often chooses the latter. Yet, if this man were to miss a “child support” payment, he would find himself in court and quite possibly face jail time. The double standards in the family courts are disgusting.
If you are in this forum, you have likely been forced to or are facing the very strong reality of being forced to hand over primary custody of your child(ren) to a woman that you know first-hand, is capable of very malicious intent, against both you and your children, in retaliation for being abandoned by you.
As a person who was the child of a woman with Borderline Personality Disorder, I can attest to the fact that Borderlines enjoy abusing their children, at least it seemed that way to me when I was on the receiving end of it with nowhere to escape. And if you are a child left in the primary “care” of one of these individuals, odds are life will be miserable.
Despite this fact, the courts fail to recognize or acknowledge that HCPs and abusive personality disordered individuals (APDIs) can be a danger to their own children. In fact, the courts view a diagnosed disordered parent as having a handicap or a disease, like cancer, where they should be pitied and their “rights” to be a parent protected at all costs. Never mind the “best interests of the children.”
As a woman who wants to be seen as an equal in society, I am embarrassed by the way the courts practice some unwritten kind of affirmative action plan to elevate women in divorces, to the point where divorce, for a high-conflict and/or abusive personality disordered woman, is profitable.
Counseling with Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD
Dr. Tara J. Palmatier, PsyD helps individuals work through their relationship and codependency issues via telephone or Skype. She specializes in helping men and women trying to break free of an abusive relationship, cope with the stress of an abusive relationship or heal from an abusive relationship. Coaching individuals through high-conflict divorce and custody cases is also an area of expertise. She combines practical advice, emotional support and goal-oriented outcomes. Please visit the Schedule a Session page for more information.
Want to Say Goodbye to Crazy? Buy it HERE.
Photo credit:
image 11. In which year were the Bengals founded? 1962 1964 1966 1968
2. Who holds the record for all time passing yards? Boomer Esiason Carson Palmer Ken Anderson Andy Dalton
3. Who holds the record for all time touchdowns? Chad Johnson Pete Johnson Carl Pickens James Brooks
4. Who is the Bengals longest serving head coach (in terms of regular season games)? Paul Brown Sam Wyche Marvin Lewis Bruce Coslet
5. How did the Bengals finish the 2014 season? 10-5-1 9-6-1 12-4 11-5
6. Which was the last season the Bengals contested the Super Bowl? 1985 1986 1987 1988
7. Who were the opponents the last time the Bengals played in the Super Bowl? New York Giants Chicago Bears San Francisco 49ers Washington Redskins
8. How many AFC Conference Championships have the Bengals won? 3 2 1 4
9. Who holds the record for all-time points scored for the Bengals? Shayne Graham Horst Muhlmann Doug Pelfrey Jim Breech
10. Which was the first season at the Paul Brown Stadium? 1999 2000 2001 2002Photo: Gene Page/AMC
The Walking Dead’s executive producer Glen Mazzara says two major issues arose in the show’s writers’ room this year: (1) do zombies climb ladders? (Consensus: no.) And (2), will people blame Carl for Dale’s death? “We had a debate,” Mazarra tells the L.A. Times. “Everyone wants to know why Carl’s not in the house” — indeed! — “[and it’s because] it’s boring to sit in a house. And he’s a little boy and he wants to mix it up and stuff,” Mazzara says. But one of Carl’s bored-busting excursions involved him antagonizing a mud-trapped zombie, who later escaped and killed Dale. Mazzara says he and the writers worried that “because Dale is a beloved character and if this other character is involved and responsible for that death, is the audience going to now hate Carl?” Attention, Glen Mazzara: Everyone already hated Carl! No worries on the Dale front.10 things I think I know about the Lions: Preseason Week 3 Heading into the Lions’ preseason dress rehearsal, here are a few things I think I know.
The Detroit Lions came away with their second straight win this preseason. As they head into Week 3, here are 10 things I think I know.
1) I think Quandre Diggs is a lock to make the team. If you’ve been paying attention to our Detroit Lions Bubble Watch at all this season, you’ll notice I’ve been one of the only staffers to consistently lock Diggs onto the roster. Yes, Jamal Agnew has flashed throughout the preseason, but teams don’t just give up on young talent, especially at the nickel cornerback position. I think Diggs makes the team and will play a lot if healthy.
2) I think the starting defensive line played well against the Jets, but remember, it was the Jets. Beating up against Christian Hackenberg isn’t the same as going up against Aaron Rodgers. The positive side of that coin is that the Lions took advantage of a weaker opponent. It’s always good to see the team not play down to the competition.
3) I think it’s smart of the Lions to use caution with Ezekiel Ansah’s injury. Ansah went on the Physically Unable to Perform (PUP) list as soon as training camp opened up. The injury has been a complete mystery, and we may never know what’s ailing Ansah unless it lingers into the regular season. For now, I’m perfectly okay with them being cautious.
4) I think the Lions new uniforms look great, but the numbers are horrible to decipher on television. The nines look like zeroes. The fives looks like sixes.
I mean, what number is that? 38? 36? 35? It’s a mess. Anyone else having this problem?
5) I think it’s time to start worrying Eric Ebron’s health. I love the dimension he adds when he’s on the field, but soft tissue injuries like a pulled hamstring can linger throughout the season.
6) Speaking of tight ends, I think Darren Fells may be the steal of free agency. Fells is head and shoulders above any tight end on the roster not named Eric Ebron. I thought he had a very nice showing against the Jets last Saturday. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if he doubles the amount of snaps he had last season (370).
7) I think the Lions end up keeping end up keeping six cornerbacks. In a league where your team is in nickel defense 70 percent of the time, you can never have enough good defensive backs. In the end, here’s who I think they keep:
8) I think it’s a good thing Jim Bob Cooter took the offseason to retool the Lions’ run game. Last season the Lions ranked 30th in the NFL in rushing last year, averaging just under 82 yards per game. Now compare that to the Buffalo Bills, who ranked No. 1 in the league with 164.4 yards per game. I don’t think anyone expects them to quite get to that level, but an improved run game could do wonders for this offense.
9) I think the Lions could have one of the better offensive lines in the NFL (even without Taylor Decker) if TJ Lang and Rick Wagner can stay healthy. Lang got his first action of the season against the Jets and said he “felt pretty good” afterward. If Lang comes out on Friday and plays significant snaps against the New England Patriots, that would be an encouraging sign for the Lions.
10) I think no one nationally cares about the Lions. And I think that’s right where they want to be. I remember prior to the 2012 season, coming off of their first playoff birth of the 21st century, the hype for the Lions was nearly uncontrollable. The reality soon set in as the team limped their way to a 4-12 season. It’s much easier to “overachieve” than it is to try and live up to expectations.
No one is really talking about the Lions right now, and I think I like it.Chris Wallace, host of “Fox News Sunday,” prepares for his role as moderator of Thursday’s first Republican primary debate of the 2016 election season. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/For The Washington Post)
Chris Wallace tapped the black three-ring binder resting on the corner of his desk. “I’ve got some doozies in there,” he said, eyebrow raised provocatively.
The unlabeled binder holds the veteran Fox News anchor’s questions for Thursday’s Republican primary debate, for which he will serve as a moderator. Clamped inside it are newspaper clippings, memos to his researcher and outlines of what the hodgepodge of presidential candidates vying to top the GOP field have been saying about the issues and about each other.
It has become a primary-season ritual for Wallace, a fixture at Fox News for more than a decade, to challenge and goad the packed roster of Republican candidates. But this debate in Cleveland, the first of the 2016 election season, may be in a league of its own.
Aside from what Wallace calls the “Trump factor” — Donald Trump, the unpredictable tycoon whose off-the-cuff quips and slams have been roiling the GOP — there’s the unwieldy size of the field. Of the 17 declared candidates, Fox will allow only the top 10, as determined by five of the most recent national polls, into Thursday’s debate.
“There’s so doggone many,” said Wallace, 67, sitting at his desk in Fox’s Washington bureau. The decision to pack the stage was made above his pay grade, he adds. “Will [the debate] be as great as it would be if there were three or four candidates? No. But it’s clear from the polls, people are far from decided.”
But now the decision-making begins, with an event that TV analysts predict could draw the highest ratings in cable-news history. And as the candidates attempt to make their first impressions before a national audience, you can count on the veteran newsman to leave his imprint on this moment by interrupting, prodding and pressing the debaters in his trademark fashion.
“I certainly think my style is adversarial,” he said, absentmindedly pushing his penny loafers around under his desk with socked feet.
[Here are the questions most likely to be asked at next week’s GOP debate]
Wallace’s goal, he says, is to push politicians off their scripts — a strategy his old colleague Sam Donaldson used to call “unlocking their minds.” When they were both on the White House beat in the 1980s — Wallace for NBC, Donaldson for ABC — they found themselves tag-teaming President Reagan, peppering him with questions about the 1985 incident in which the United States intercepted an Egyptian airliner carrying Palestinian terrorists. Reagan ignored them until Wallace asked, bluntly, “Do you have anything to apologize for?”
That unlocked Reagan’s mind.
“Never!” shouted the president, who had planned not to comment on the issue.
That kind of “get” during years of covering politics paved Wallace’s path to hosting his own Sunday show on Fox starting in 2003 — a way to move out of the shadow of his late father, the “60 Minutes” icon Mike Wallace.
Chris says he endured the “mixed blessing of being the son of anyone so famous.”
“Not that he sort of got me jobs or anything like that, but you have access to things. You meet people. You see how things are done just by going to visit your father. The negative side is you’re under a cloud. Did you get this because of your dad? When you’re talking to people, they’ll call you Mike instead of Chris. As I got older, it became less and less of an issue.”
And a certain stylistic resemblance to his father didn’t hurt.
“They both had this tenacious style of take no prisoners,” said Donaldson, who once got into a pushing match with Chris over a podium spot when the two correspondents were covering Reagan for competing networks. Donaldson had claimed the space but left to make a phone call. When he came back, Wallace was there and jostling ensued.
“Chris is straight ahead, right onto you,” Donaldson said. “He doesn’t sugarcoat it.”
Chris Wallace works in his office at the Fox studios near Capitol Hill. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/For The Washington Post)
Wallace reviews his debate-prep binder. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/For The Washington Post)
Wallace has been heavily focused on the Thursday debate (which he will moderate alongside Bret Baier and Megyn Kelly) since late June, when he used some of his vacation time in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., to start working through the binder.
On a recent Thursday morning, Wallace walked the few steps from his small, memorabilia-filled office — his father’s Rolodex, a photo of him playing hoops with Michael Jordan — to the more spacious suite of his boss, Bill Sammon, the vice president of news, who had called together a small debate-prep meeting.
[2016 GOP presidential debate schedule]
“It’s insane interest,” Sammon said as Wallace took a seat. Sammon was fielding calls from campaigns that wanted him to walk them through the debate rules, while he was also trying to finalize the program. Sammon is against opening statements. Ten statements from 10 candidates would be a buzz kill, he argued. Wallace nodded.
“I talked with Bret. He’s written 54 questions,” Sammon said.
“I’ve written 22,” Wallace said.
Twenty-two is about as many as each moderator will have time to ask. With 10 candidates — each vying for a knockout moment — the anchors will have to keep their questions precise and their eyes on the clock.
“We’ll have a murder board Monday,” Sammon said. “Another Wednesday and Friday. The week of the debate, every day; and two a day if we need to.”
“Murder boards,” in Fox parlance, are sessions in which each moderator’s questions are refined — pared if they are too long, scuttled if they are too “weedy.” Sammon, Wallace, Kelly and Baier will harshly criticize each other’s work.
“We’ve all got thick skin,” Sammon said to Wallace, who shot him a speak-for-yourself look.
“I’m a sensitive guy,” Wallace said.
He wasn’t joking. On camera, he wants to be seen as effective. Off camera, Wallace wants to be liked. There was a time, during the GOP primary for the 2012 presidential election, when Wallace was perceived by some to be neither. Near the start of a December 2011 Republican debate in Ames, Iowa, he asked Newt Gingrich how he could be expected to run the government when his campaign was in debt and much of his staff had recently quit.
Gingrich used his response to go after Wallace.
“I wish you would put aside the ‘gotcha’ questions,” the former House speaker said to sustained applause. “I’d love to see the rest of tonight’s debate asking us about what we would do to lead an America whose president has failed to lead, instead of playing Mickey Mouse games!”
Wallace tried to save face but was booed loudly by the crowd.
Later, Wallace was asked by a friend how he felt in that moment. “What do you think? It hurt my feelings,” Wallace told him. But he understood that Gingrich was being strategic.
Gingrich said recently, “Among conservatives, there’s a real desire to see people who are willing to stand up to the media, and I was able to use that to my advantage.”
Wallace threw what he thought was a hardball, but Gingrich hit it out of the park. Usually, Wallace’s questions are tougher to parry.
“He’s able to — without being hostile — be very firm,” Gingrich said. “I regard him as one of the more aggressive moderators, because he does his homework and he’s willing to fight his way past your first two or three answers and try to really make you answer the question that he’s going after.”
Chris Wallace and his father, the late Mike Wallace, in 2006. (Courtesy of the Wallace family)
The Wallace family in 2014, back row from left: Chris Wallace’s eldest son, Peter, and his wife, Jennifer; Lorraine and Chris; Peter and Jennifer’s children, James, Caroline and William. (Courtesy of the Wallace family)
For a guy who can seem pugnacious and terse on camera, Wallace is mostly self-effacing when off.
Before a recent Sunday show, tape was playing of an F-16 jet fighter rolling through the sky, and a cameraman asked if Wallace had ever flown in one. Wallace had, and he started describing how cool it was before interrupting himself: “I wore a jet fighter pilot uniform. You know those? You know how they talk about the right stuff? Well I had the wrong stuff.” The room erupted in laughter.
At home, his sense of humor is the same, said his wife, Lorraine. She and Wallace have been married for 17 years with a “Brady Bunch”-like family — his four kids from his first marriage to Elizabeth Farrell, and her two children from a previous marriage to the comedian Dick Smothers.
Chris is a “change is overrated” kind of guy, said Lorraine, who instituted family traditions for him such as Soup Sunday, a different recipe every week after his “Fox News Sunday” broadcasts. (She turned that routine into a best-selling cookbook, “Mr. Sunday’s Soups.”)
[Five smart details that upgraded Lorraine Wallace’s kitchen]
“He’s not fussy,” she said. “When we were dating he told me, ‘Lorraine, you’ll have to learn this about reporters: When you see a bus, get on it. When you see food, eat it. When you see a bathroom, use it.’ ”
“He’d be on the evening news at 6:30, and at 7:02, he’d walk in for family dinner,” said Wallace’s eldest son, Peter, a senior managing director with the private-equity firm Blackstone Group. “He never missed any of my soccer games Saturday morning.”
It was a childhood unlike Chris’s own. Wallace did not get to know well his father, Mike, until he was a teenager. He was raised by mother Norma Kaphan and stepfather Bill Leonard, who as president of CBS News encouraged him as much as Mike Wallace did to get into broadcasting.
It is at Fox News that he has established himself and also become a favorite of Roger Ailes, who hired Wallace away from ABC in 2003. Ailes moved aside Tony Snow, who was then the Sunday show host, to give Wallace the slot.
“He asks well-thought-out, probing questions without a lot of words,” said Ailes, Fox News’s chairman and chief executive. “I always worry that sometimes interviewers don’t go deep enough in terms of the issue. If someone gives a surface answer, the interviewer will go on, but Chris stays after them to answer the question.”
”There are other people who are going to want to make a statement on the stage, who are going to want to push at somebody, and to a certain degree, you’d like those fireworks,” Wallace says of Thursday’s Republican primary debate. (T.J. Kirkpatrick/For The Washington Post)
Wallace is wary of talking debate strategy in front of a reporter, but he acknowledges that he is keeping a confidential list tracking the polls that will determine who makes it into the Fox debate. Fox hasn’t revealed which polls it will use yet.
He is thinking a lot about Trump, who is leading in most major polls and will thus have the central position on the stage. On Twitter last week, John Weaver, senior adviser to the Republican presidential campaign of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, drew this analogy: “Imagine a NASCAR driver mentally preparing for a race knowing one of the drivers will be drunk. That’s what prepping for this debate is like.”
Wallace might agree with that.
“He’s a big wild card, because you don’t know how he’s going to react,” Wallace said, back in his office. Will Trump go after one of the candidates standing beside him? Will he abide by the moderators’ directions? When the red light flashes telling him his time is up, will he abide by the limit?
[Trump’s presence in first GOP debate makes prep challenging for candidates]
With most candidates, Wallace has an idea of what they would like to accomplish on the debate stage. “If you’re Jeb Bush, you pretty much want to stay out of any clinches,” Wallace said. “There’s nothing to be gained by him to punch down on somebody below him. What he’s going to want to do is establish his conservative bona fides, to say: ‘I’m not Bush III, I’m the former conservative governor of a state.’... There are other people who are going to want to make a statement on the stage, who are going to want to push at somebody, and to a certain degree, you’d like those fireworks.”
Enter Trump, who has been trash-talking just about everyone in unusually impolitic terms — disparaging Scott Walker (“Wisconsin is in terrible shape”), insulting Lindsey Graham (“a stiff”... “a total lightweight”), mocking Rick Perry (“he put on glasses so people think he’s smart”). (And yes, Wallace has a researcher keeping track of all of these comments.)
“Trump, you know he wants to go after people,” Wallace said. “And you can be sure there will be a moment — whether it’s in my questioning or Bret’s or Megyn’s, where somebody is going to give him a fat juicy ball right in there so he can go after Bush and see how he responds to it. It’s sort of like playing three-dimensional checkers.”
That is exactly Wallace’s kind of game.As shown in the graph here, this is an example of a general
phenomenon. All species suffer population collapse or species extinction if they overshoot and degrade the carrying capacity of their ecology.
In the process, the article moves on to talk about how humanity is in a similar trajectory and how humanity is vitally dependent on oil for it's current way of living.
Source: http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3188
The article also talks about my other favourite 'fantasy' which I've always wanted to come true but I know its just pollyannaish to expect it to come true: Singularity. Sure, sure - humanity's acts of intelligence are awesome. What on earth can invent a GPS and the Internet?
A lot of my friends to whom I talk about cite incidents that have happened in the past - the 1973 oil crisis, the 1979 oil crisis, the threat to Ozone depletion, the food shortages post WWII and how humanity had overcome all these issues. One thing I'd just like to point out is that the first two oil issues were temporary unavailability of oil due to nations withholding supplies. Secondly, during all these other issues that needed technological advancement, cheap oil came to the rescue. Now, when oil becomes expensive and unaffordable and at the same time when food production becomes a difficulty due to lack of oil / petrochem and other componded issues of our population's demand, I doubt if the energy needed to 'tackle' this technologically will ever be supplied by the tiny slice of renewable energy sources options at hand.In America, after a startling homicide occurs, there is a lot of talk about society and guns and violence culture and what we should ban, everything from guns to video games. Much less discussed, because we don't want to demonize mental illness, is the overwhelming prevalence of psychiatric medications in those events.
It does the public and patients a disservice to dismiss one factor and focus solely on others; we could end up solving the wrong problem and helping no one at all.
A new paper finds that the situation involving mood-leveling medications could be even more dire than previously believed. A survey of 1,829 people who had been prescribed anti-depressants found large numbers of people, over half in some cases, reporting on psychological problems - thoughts of suicide, sexual difficulties and emotional numbness - due to their medication. This paper adds to growing concerns about the not only the scale of the problem, such as over-prescription of medications, but how well they solve more problems than they cause.
Psychologist and lead author Professor John Read from the University of Liverpool, said in their statement, "The medicalization of sadness and distress has reached bizarre levels. One in ten people in some countries are now prescribed antidepressants each year. While the biological side-effects of antidepressants, such as weight gain and nausea, are well documented, the psychological and interpersonal effects have been largely ignored or denied. They appear to be alarmingly common."
Each person completed an online questionnaire which asked about twenty adverse effects. The study was carried out in New Zealand and all of the participants had been on anti-depressants in the last five years. The survey factored in people's levels of depression and asked them to report on how they had felt while taking the medication.
Over half of people aged 18 to 25 in the study reported suicidal feelings and in the total sample there were large percentages of people suffering from'sexual difficulties' (62%) and 'feeling emotionally numb' (60%). Percentages for other effects included: 'feeling not like myself' (52%),'reduction in positive feelings' (42%), 'caring less about others' (39%) and 'withdrawal effects' (55%). However, 82% reported that the drugs had helped alleviate their depression.
Read concluded, "Effects such as feeling emotionally numb and caring less about other people are of major concern. Our study also found that people are not being told about this when prescribed the drugs.
"Our finding that over a third of respondents reported suicidality 'as a result of taking the antidepressants' suggests that earlier studies may have underestimated the problem."
Citation: John Read, Claire Cartwright, Kerry Gibson, 'Adverse emotional and interpersonal effects reported by 1829 New Zealanders while taking antidepressants', Psychiatry Research, 3 February 2014, DOI:10.1016/j.psychres.2014.01.042Story highlights An interaction between objects caused a visible disruption in the planet's F ring
NASA's Cassini mission, orbiting the planet since 2004, captured the disturbance
(CNN) Although it might look like a bit of smudgy celestial mischief, neither Pandora nor any of Saturn's other moons is to blame for a recent disruption of one of the planet's rings, according to NASA. Considering that the gas giant has 53 moons in orbit (and nine other moons awaiting confirmation), scientists monitoring NASA's Cassini spacecraft were curious.
Using a visible light narrow-angle camera in April, the Cassini spacecraft -- which has orbited Saturn since 2004 -- captured a view of the disruption. It was caused by what's known as a "jet" -- the interaction of a small object embedded in the ring itself and material in the core of a ring. Though the individual objects embedded in the rings are hard to see, their activities are more visible, which is one of the ways Cassini has opened our eyes to the mysteries of this outer planet.
This particular event was photographed 1.4 million miles from Saturn.
Our solar system's gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, are made up mostly of hydrogen and helium. They have rings made of ice and rock chunks that are the remains of shattered comets, asteroids and moons. Even though Saturn is known for its seven rings, which orbit at different speeds and span up to 175,000 miles, NASA's Voyager missions in the 1980s discovered that there are thousands of complicated braided rings, ringlets and spokes within the ring system. The billions of particles in this system can range from tiny ice grains to mountain-size particles.
Two small moons, Daphnis and Pan, orbit within the Encke and Keeler Gaps in the rings. Their orbits help keep the gaps open and sweep excess materials out of them, like rocks in a stream. Moons like Prometheus act like shepherds and keep the rings in line by constraining them, but others like Pandora (seen in the lower right portion of the photo above) are troublemakers that disrupt the rings.
Read MoreCover crops are great. If I thought I could get away with it, I would just grow cover crops in my garden. They protect the soil, feed microbes, build soil structure, add root channels, and support beneficial insects. I think they look cool too. When cover crop mixtures got popular a few years ago, I got excited and grew a 17 species mix. It looked really cool, I mean, diverse, with all sorts of seeds that became all sorts of plants. I took pictures, showed my kids, and even had a neighborhood open garden event! (Well, maybe not that last one) Then I grew some vegetables after the cover crop. They did OK. Just OK. I wanted it to be the best tomato/squash/cucumber/lettuce crop ever, but I could not tell the difference between these vegetables and those I had grown after many previous un-biodiverse cover crops. Recent research results may explain this.
Research thus far (summarized in these previous posts, 1, 2, 3) has consistently found that cover crop polycultures are not necessarily better than cover crop monocultures. This is now reaffirmed by a large study, done in Pennsylvania, published this year (Finney et al. 2016). The study had 18 treatments replicated four times (these studies are a lot of work). Eight species were grown as monocultures. Seven 4-species mixes, and two 8-species mixes, were the polyculture treatments, and they included a no cover crop check treatment. All this was planted in August, for two years (different field each year).
The big idea behind cover crop mixtures is that the increased biodiversity will result in increased productivity, increased ecosystem services, or both. The Finney group tested both hypotheses. They found that the mixtures produced less biomass than the best monocultures (here, canola and cereal rye). They also found that mixtures did not provide increased ecosystem services (here, weed control, nitrogen scavenging, nitrogen storage, and effect on following crop) over the best monocultures. These findings are related. Finney et al. found that most of the ecosystem services which we want cover crops to provide are related to biomass production. Because a few of the monocultures produced the most biomass, they also provided more services. From this they concluded that “a mixture may not be necessary” and “a single cover crop species may be sufficient and more economical than a mixture.” (I attended several sessions on cover crop mixtures at this year’s meeting of the Agronomy, Crop Science and Soil Science Societies, and did not hear any results that went against these findings.)
Mixtures do have one advantage, they can provide more services (multifunctionality) than a monoculture. However, in mixtures, the level of individual services provided is less than with a monoculture. For example, cereal rye is a great weed suppressor, but it does not fix nitrogen. If we mix hairy vetch, which fixes nitrogen from the air (an ecosystem service), with rye, we get both services, but the added vetch dilutes the weed suppression of the rye. There is a tradeoff in using mixtures to obtain multiple services (multifunctionality). In another strike against mixtures, Finney and Kaye (2016, same study, different paper) found that this multifunctionality was only weakly related to the number of species in a mixture. Their study, “does not support the hypothesis that increasing the number of species in a mix will lead to predictable increases in multifunctionality at levels that are agronomically or ecologically relevant.”
Why don’t cover crop mixes work better than monocultures? Well, first, some ecological theory. The idea that biodiversity is better than monoculture comes from ecologists studying natural habitats. In nature, they observe niche differentiation (Connor et al. 2011). The idea is that a diverse mix of organisms can better use the available resources because of their different use characteristics. When their resource use does not overlap much, they are complementary. Take a field of wheat. If some plant species needed different resources than wheat, then we could expect that adding |
or hierarchy of values to pursue, hold, promote, or celebrate.
9. Humans are the only animals with the ability to be dishonest with respect to reality and thus, dishonesty with self and others is the fundamental root cause of all disease, inability to flourish and early, unnatural death.
10. Non-human animals exist in various environmental niches they have evolved within to exploit, within a balance. Human animals migrated out of Africa to populate the Earth from equator to arctic and antarctic circle, and sea level to 16,000 feet of elevation, and everything in-between. Thus, human animals evolved to migrate over eons of time to exploit the environment available and along the way.
11. Each human individual has encoded within his genes the ability to survive and thrive on a wide range of food sources from terrestrial, to sea, to tree, to subterranean.
12. Non human animals don’t typically become obese (unless by nature, such as in advance of hibernation) or die unnaturally. Humans become obese. Pets become obese. Zoo animals can become obese when zookeepers stray from a naturally appropriate diet.
13. Human animals should not have any difficulty eating a mix of the right natural foods suitable to them, when available, maintaining and enjoying natural health and longevity as a result. Good health is natural. It’s not something that needs to be man made, industrialized or drugged.
14. Human animals have developed complex social structures to the extent that a few dominate all the rest, to a level of welcome cheerleading and hand-clapping, such that the few can cleverly and parasitically sustain an unearned livelihood through implicit or explicit threat of force, or more elegantly: promise of reward.
15. Modern human animals developed the propensity to believe they have power through a Neolithic device known as a democratic vote. It actually gives them about equal odds in terms of effective power to buying a lottery ticket. Conversely, we know ancient humans were individually and socially powerful, because they survived on their own. We have the anthropology and we’re here. It happened. Nobody voted on it.
16. A domesticated animal can exhibit guilt and shame, but not to the extent that they can possibly sacrifice their well being over it. Human animals invented guilt and shame, and they went on to make a place for it being unbridled and unearned. They invented religion; they conjured “reality” and got everyone to buy onto it and teach it to their offspring. They laid the seeds for control.
17. The guilt and shame works hand in hand with religious fantasies that most notably involve fear. Guilt and shame, combined with irrational fear, to make a malleable human animal who will do his part to see to the livelihood of the parasites. Anciently, it was the parasites of church and now, the parasites of State. The former is voluntary and the latter, compulsory undef threat of prosecution.
18. All humans have within themselves the ability to change everything on a dime.
19. Of self-destruction, of guilt, of shame, of fear: the worst of these is fear. While fear is natural, that’s the rub. The Neolithic, above all else, has been a massive story — fundamentally — about how to use it to advantage. The Neolithic is above all, a story about how our natural tendencies have been used against us in just about every conceivable way.
…So there’s my hour or two stab at a first cut of what I hope to refine over time. Your criticism in comments is highly encouraged.The announcement by Greenpeace India of its imminent shutdown is saddening. However, it was only a matter of time. How long could the organization have continued running with its bank accounts frozen and with a ban on foreign funds? That this has happened after the Delhi High Court’s judgments in two cases related to the government’s crackdown on Greenpeace India is telling on how the Modi government views dissenting voices in India.
The second of these judgments has arrived against the union government’s attempt to muzzle dissent by restraining Priya Pillai, a Greenpeace activist, from travel to the U.K., on account of her creating a “negative image” of the country. The judgment is unequivocal:
“Criticism, by an individual, may not be palatable; even so, it cannot be muzzled. Many civil right activists believe that they have the right, as citizens, to bring to the notice of the state the incongruity in the developmental policies of the state. The state may not accept the views of the civil right activists, but that by itself, cannot be a good enough reason to do away with dissent.”
The judgment goes on to state, “Contrarian views held by a section of people on these aspects cannot be used to describe such section or class of people as anti-national…. If the view advanced on behalf of the respondents is accepted, it would result in conferring uncanalised and arbitrary power in the executive, which could, based on its subjective view, portray any activity as anti-national”. This kind of action by the executive is unacceptable in a democratic republic, the Court has ruled.
The earlier judgement, delivered on 20 January 2015 is even more unambiguous in criticising the government’s attempt to suffocate the organization by drying up its funds. It clearly states that there is “no material on record to restrict the petitioner (Greenpeace India Society) from accessing the bank account with IDBI bank in Chennai,” and observes that the “amount in fixed deposited [sic.] in the bank be unblocked and transferred to the NGO’s account”.
The government of India has, clearly, been in no mood to listen and has responded to the Court directive by suspending the FCRA registration of Greenpeace India and freezing all its accounts on grounds termed by the organization as “arbitrary”. The government has, however, attributed the decision to the failure of the organization to inform the authorities concerned about the transfer of foreign contributions received in the designated FCRA account and from that account to other ones.
Though answering these allegations and challenging them legally is Greenpeace India’s job, the crackdown is clearly aimed at sending a categorical message to the civil society at large, more so those opposed to aggressive “development” policies being adopted by the current regime at huge human and environmental cost. Many of the these projects have resulted in displacing communities and accelerating deforestation and the government’s singling out of Greenpeace is perhaps because the organization has successfully stalled several such projects, the Mahan projects in Madhya Pradesh being the most recent.
More sinister than the crackdown on Greenpeace India, is the arbitrariness of the allegations the government has made against the organisation. There is no doubt that the government can take action against any legal or financial irregularity committed by any organization. But, taking such action on the grounds that the organisation is adversely affecting “public interest” and/or the “economic interests of the state” opens a Pandora box where anything, as Delhi High Court observed, can be declared antinational.
It is in this context that the Indian civil society must resist the attack on Greenpeace India with all its might. It is not a mere organization but the overall democratic framework of the country that is at stake now. This is thus also a wakeup call for the Indian civil society to put its own house in order. It must remember how easily the government could cancel the licenses of a whopping 8,975 non government organisations not on the easily challengeable “adversely affecting public interest” ground but for failing to file annual returns for the years 2009-10, 2010-11, and 2011-12 in a row, and then failing to do the same within a 30 days notice period. Though this failure does not presume any guilt or wrongdoing, it does give the State a stick with which to silence dissent.
For information and comments contact:
In Hong Kong: +852 – 26986339, Email: india@ahrc.asiaExclusive: Every day, The New York Times – America’s “paper of record” – sinks deeper into the swamp of propaganda, now reliably touting predictable neocon notions about the Middle East and Russia, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The New York Times’ downward spiral into a neoconservative propaganda sheet continues with another biased lead article, this one on how the Syrian war has heightened U.S.-Russia tensions. The article, bristling with blame for the Russians, leaves out one of the key reasons why the partial ceasefire failed – the U.S. inability to separate its “moderate” rebels from Al Qaeda’s jihadists.
The article, written by Michael R. Gordon and Andrew E. Kramer (two of the paper’s top national security propagandists), lays the fault for the U.S. withdrawal from Syrian peace talks on Russian leaders because of their “mistrust and hostility toward the United States,” citing a comment by former White House official Andrew S. Weiss.
Gordon and Kramer then write that the cessation of hostilities agreement came undone because of the “accidental bombing of Syrian troops by the American-led coalition and then because of what the United States claimed was a deliberate bombing by Russian aircraft and Syrian helicopters of a humanitarian convoy headed to Aleppo.” (The Times doesn’t bother to note that the Russians have questioned how “accidental” the slaughter of 62 or so Syrian troops was and have denied that they or the Syrian government attacked the aid convoy.)
The article continues citing U.S. intelligence officials accusing Russia and Syria of using indiscriminate ordnance in more recent attacks on rebel-held sections of Aleppo. “Unfortunately, Russia failed to live up to its own commitments,” said a State Department statement, according to Gordon and Kramer.
However, left out of the article was the fact that the U.S. government failed to live up to its commitment to separate U.S.-backed supposedly “moderate” rebels from Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front, which has recently changed its name to the Levant (or Syria) Conquest Front. By contrast, this key point was cited by Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, which noted:
“Russia has complained that Washington wasn’t upholding its end of the bargain by failing to separate U.S.-backed Syrian rebels from more extremist groups tied to al Qaeda.”
Doubling Down with Al Qaeda
Indeed, The Wall Street Journal has actually done some serious reporting on this crucial topic, publishing an article from Turkey on Sept. 29, saying: “Some of Syria’s largest rebel factions are doubling down on their alliance with an al Qaeda-linked group, despite a U.S. warning to split from the extremists or risk being targeted in airstrikes.
“The rebel gambit is complicating American counterterrorism efforts in the country at a time the U.S. is contemplating cooperation with Russia to fight extremist groups. It comes after a U.S.-Russia-brokered cease-fire collapsed last week and the Syrian regime and its Russian allies immediately unleashed a devastating offensive against rebel-held parts of Aleppo city that brought harsh international condemnation. …
“The two powers have been considering jointly targeting Islamic State and the Syria Conquest Front — formerly known as the al Qaeda-linked Nusra Front — a group that is deeply intermingled with armed opposition groups of all stripes across Syria’s battlefields. The U.S. has also threatened to attack any rebels providing front-line support to the group. …
“Some rebel groups already aligned with Syria Conquest Front responded by renewing their alliance. But others, such as Nour al-Din al-Zinki, a former Central Intelligence Agency-backed group and one of the largest factions in Aleppo, said in recent days that they were joining a broader alliance that is dominated by the Front. A second, smaller rebel group also joined that alliance, which is known as Jaish al-Fateh and includes another major Islamist rebel force, Ahrar al-Sham. …
“In a call with Mr. Kerry on Wednesday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Syrian rebels ‘refused to follow the U.S.-Russian agreement…but instead merged with [Nusra Front].’”
So, it should be clear that a major obstacle to the agreement was the failure of the U.S. government to persuade its clients to break off alliances with Al Qaeda’s operatives, a connection that many Americans would find deeply troubling. That public awareness, in turn, would undermine the current neocon P.R. campaign to get the Obama administration to supply these rebels with anti-aircraft missiles and other sophisticated weapons, or to have U.S. warplanes destroy the Syrian air force in order to impose a “no-fly zone.”
Since the start of the Syrian conflict in 2011, the powerful role of Al Qaeda and its spinoff, the Islamic State, has been a hidden or downplayed element of the narrative that has been sold to the American people. That storyline holds that the war began when “peaceful” protesters were brutally repressed by Syria’s police and military, but that version deletes the fact that extremists, some linked to Al Qaeda, began killing police and soldiers almost from the outset.
Hiding Realities
However, since The New York Times is now a full-time neocon propaganda sheet, it does all it can to hide such troublesome realities from its readers, all the better to jazz up the hatred of Syria and Russia.
As the Times and the Journal both made clear in their articles on Tuesday, the neocon agenda now involves providing more American armaments to the rebels either directly through the CIA or indirectly through U.S. regional “allies,” such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey.
Though pitched to the American people as “humanitarian” assistance needed to shoot down Syrian and Russian planes, the arming-up of the rebels will likely extend the war and the bloodletting even longer while strengthening Al Qaeda and the Islamic State,.
If the new U.S. weapons prove especially effective, they could even lead to the collapse of the Syrian government and bring about the neocons’ long-desired “regime change” in Damascus. But the ultimate winners would likely be Al Qaeda and/or the Islamic State, which could be expected to follow up with the mass slaughter of Christians, Alawites, Shiites, secular Sunnis and other “heretics.”
More likely, however, the U.S.-supplied weapons would just cause the war to drag on indefinitely with an ever-rising death toll. But don’t worry, the dead will be blamed on Vladimir Putin and Bashar al-Assad.
Although never mentioned in the mainstream U.S. media, the delivery of weapons to these Syrian rebels/terrorists are a clear violation of international law, an act of aggression and arguably a crime of aiding and abetting terrorists.
International law is something that the Times considers sacrosanct when the newspaper is condemning a U.S. adversary for some violation, but that reverence disappears when the U.S. government or a U.S. “ally” is engaged in the same act or worse.
So, it is understandable why Gordon and Kramer would leave out facts from their story that might give Americans pause. After all, if the “moderate” rebels are in cahoots with Al Qaeda, essentially serving as a cut-out for the U.S. and its “allies” to funnel dangerous weapons to the terror organization that carried out the 9/11 attacks, Americans might object.
Similarly, if they were told that the U.S. actions violate international law, they might find that upsetting, too, since many Americans aren’t as coolly hypocritical as Official Washington’s neocons and liberal war hawks.
Beyond the devolution of The New York Times into a neocon propaganda organ, Gordon and Kramer have their own histories as propagandists. Gordon co-wrote the infamous “aluminum tube” story in September 2002, launching President George W. Bush’s ad campaign for selling the Iraq War to the American people. Gordon also has gotten his hands into disinformation campaigns regarding Syria and Ukraine.
For instance, Gordon and Kramer teamed up on a bogus lead story that the State Department fed to them in 2014 about photographs supposedly taken of soldiers in Russia who then turned up in other photos in Ukraine – except that it turned out all the photos were taken in Ukraine, destroying the premise of the story and forcing an embarrassing retraction. [For more on that screw-up, see Consortiumnews.com’s “ Another NYT-Michael Gordon Special? ”]
For his part, Kramer has been a central figure in the Times’ anti-Russian propaganda regarding Ukraine. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “ NYT Is Lost in Its Ukraine Propaganda. ”]
So, between the Times’ neocon institutional bias – and the apparent personal agendas of key correspondents – one can expect very little in the way of balanced journalism when the topics relate to the Middle East or Russia.Jennifer Gable, an Idaho transgender woman who died of a brain aneurysm in October, was presented at an open casket and buried as a man by her family.
Gone was Gable’s long, wavy brown hair and smokey eye shadow shown in several Facebook photos.
In her place, friends found Geoffrey Charles Gable wearing a striped suit at Magic Valley Funeral Home, her hair cut short, according to photos obtained by the Daily News, and an obituary that skipped a decade of her life transitioning to Jennifer.
“They tried to make her look like a boy,” Stacy Hudson told the Daily News.
Her friends, appalled by the funeral’s display, are standing up for Jennifer’s life - not Geoffrey’s.
Gable's friends were disgusted after seeing their friend dressed up as a man by her family for the Oct. 20 service. (Courtesy of Stacy Hudson) Photos at Jennifer Gable's funeral showed only her years living as a man. (Courtesy of Stacy Hudson)
The obituary and tributes at the small Oct. 20 service detailed Geoffrey's love for baseball, jazz, singing with a “nice tenor voice,” but it also mentioned a failed marriage to a woman.
“She would not have wanted to relive the horrible life of Geoffrey,” her friend for the past two years, Brandan Klosterman, told the Daily News. “She wouldn’t want to be buried that way.”
She had changed her legal name to Jennifer, but even her death certificate listed Gable as a man, according to the Miami Herald.
Gable learned of a brain aneurysm in early October, according to her Facebook page, and it later led to her collapse and death while working at a Wells Fargo bank.
Dozens of condolences shared to Gable’s memorial page all address Jennifer, the woman described as “kind and outgoing,” but who also struggled to fit in as an outcast to the family she dearly missed.
“What her parents have done is just a horrible thing,” Klosterman added. “There was a lot of bigotry from her family and I don’t even think they talked to her anymore.”
Gable’s grandparents, who raised Gable and her brother, refused to comment on her funeral — calling it a “family situation” — when the Daily News called Saturday.
A call to the Magic Valley Funeral Home by the Daily News was not immediately returned either.
The obituary published by Jennifer Gable’s family shortly after her death addressed her as Geoffrey Gable, a 32-year-old Boise resident, her identity at birth. (magicvalleyfuneralhome.com) She had been transitioning to a woman in the past five years, friends say, and wished to leave her life as Geoffrey behind. (Facebook)
At one point, Gable contacted Meghan Stabler, of the LGBT-focused Human Rights Campaign’s Board of Directors, when she began her difficult transition to a woman.
“She would reach out for guidance or just to learn if life would get better,” Stabler told the Daily News.
nhensley@nydailynews.com
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Sign up for BREAKING NEWS Emails privacy policy Thanks for subscribing!OTTAWA • The pace of inflation in Canada accelerated faster than expected last month, but economists said that prices are not rising at a level that would force the Bank of Canada to change course.
[np_storybar title=”Nearly half of Canadians are within $200 a month of being unable to pay their bills, poll finds” link=”https://business.financialpost.com/news/economy/nearly-half-canadians-within-200-a-month-of-being-unable-to-pay-bills-poll-finds”%5D
And that’s not the worst of it: A quarter of respondents are already unable to cover their bills and almost a third said an interest rate hike could throw them into bankruptcy.
[/np_storybar]
Food, shelter and transportation costs all rose in January as the consumer price index registered a two per cent jump for the month, the strongest level since November 2014 and higher than the 1.8 per cent consensus forecast.
Canadians shopping for groceries received one of the biggest sticker shocks, as data shows that prices for fresh vegetables jumped 18.2 per cent in January year-over-year, following a 13.3 per cent increase in December. Even gasoline prices saw a 2.1 per cent rise, despite the low oil price environment.
The surprise uptick will certainly catch the attention of the central bank, but the recent rebound of the loonie to 73 cents U.S. should help temper prices for consumers, say economists.
“Given the strengthening in the currency since the Bank’s January decision, there is less likelihood that these pass-through effects intensify further,” said David Tulk, head of global macro strategy at TD Securities. “As a result, we see the Bank comfortable to remain on the sidelines in anticipation of the announcement of the fiscal stimulus.”
January’s upward move in prices was broad, with seven of the eight areas tracked by Statistics Canada seeing higher prices (only clothing and footwear registered a small decrease). Core prices, which exclude food and energy because they tend to be more volatile, also rose two per cent for the month.
Stronger prices complicate the picture for the Bank of Canada, which has loosened monetary policy in the past year by cutting interest rates from one per cent as of last January to the current 0.50 per cent mark. The moves have contributed to the weaker dollar, something the bank noted last month when Governor Stephen Poloz opted to keep the bank’s overnight rate unchanged.
“The combination of slowing growth and rising inflation is a trend that the Bank of Canada would not want to see continue,” said Tulk.
Canada’s dollar is currently trading at roughly 73 cents U.S. after falling to a 13-year low of just under 69 cents last month. The currency has been steadily retreating against its American counterpart since it was last at parity three years ago.
Weaker purchasing power means goods have become more expensive to import. Vegetable and fresh fruit prices bear some of the biggest sticker shocks because a large amount of produce in the country is imported.
Retail sales data released by Statistics Canada Friday also showed that even as sales dropped in December, retailers raised their prices by an average of two per cent in the month.
“Retailers could be adjusting prices to reflect higher import costs, courtesy of a much depreciated Canadian dollar,” said Krishen Rangasamy, senior economist at National Bank of Canada.
Paul Ashworth, chief North America economist at Capital Economics, said that rising inflation in recent months is beginning to eat into Canadian real incomes. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development noted Thursday that core inflation in Canada is the highest among its 34 members of primarily high-income countries.
“Rising prices at the grocery store are already gaining media attention and could begin to eat into consumer confidence,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether the consumers will ramp down spending if prices continue to rise. Statistics Canada reported that retail sales fell 2.2 per cent in December, or 2.3 per cent on a real basis accounting for the impact of prices, which was the biggest drop since 2008.
But economists have noted that December retail sales have been weak in Canada in the past three years, owing to factors such as more Canadian retailers participating in Black Friday Sales in November. Mild weather further worsened sales as building materials, winter clothing and winter sporting goods sales all dropped off.
One area where the weakness may linger is vehicle sales. Statscan said that new sales fell 4.1 per cent in December, while used sales were down 2.5 per cent for the month. Scotiabank said in a report last month that it expects Canadian car sales to be flat this year, after experiencing record growth in 2015. Weakness in oil provinces is expected to weigh on strong sales in more robust economies such as Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec.
Overall, retail sales in December were weakest in the resource provinces, with Alberta seeing a 3.1 per cent decline in sales and its third drop in the past four months. Sales in Saskatchewan dropped 1.1 per cent while those in Newfoundland and Labrador were down 4.4 per cent.SHE Fund Description SHE tracks a market cap-weighted index of US large-cap companies with a relatively high proportion of women in executive and director positions.
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PERFORMANCE [as of 02/25/19] 1 MONTH 3 MONTHS YTD 1 YEAR 3 YEARS 5 YEARS 10 YEARS SHE 4.43% 5.71% 11.12% 5.87% -- -- -- SHE (NAV) 4.40% 5.81% 11.14% 5.80% -- -- -- SSgA Gender Diversity Index 4.44% 5.52% 11.16% 5.60% 13.59% 9.10% -- MSCI USA Large Cap Index -- -- -- -- -- -- -- All returns over 1 year are annualized. All returns are total returns unless otherwise stated.
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Ultimate Carry On is a new smart brand of suitcase offering modern travelers a better way to travel. We cater to Families, Business Travelers, men and women who want to take control of their luggage, time and expenses. Our patented vacuum shrink pack system offers expanded packing options providing extra space to accommodate clothing alternatives for longer trips or for those with bigger families. The compression system provides cost savings for families on a budget and gives international travelers more packing options.
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Special Thanks - Melissa Efron & Lori AnkielGov. John Kasich (R-Ohio) says the GOP erred by pledging it would repeal ObamaCare during the 2014 midterm elections.
“You’ve been supporting conservative candidates, [and] in 2014 they told you that they were going to repeal ObamaCare,” he said on “The Jay Weber Show,” as first reported by BuzzFeed.
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“Do you realize that that’s just a big joke?” the GOP presidential candidate asked. "It got all these conservatives stirred up and angry because they didn’t keep their word.
“I mean, what a stupid promise. The base of the party is furious because you didn’t repeal ObamaCare. How are you going to repeal ObamaCare when Obama’s president?”
Kasich also argued that his political experience renders him capable of achieving real results on issues such as healthcare reform.
“I can get these things done,” he said. "I can put a team together, and the proof is in the pudding.”
Kasich’s expansion of Medicaid under ObamaCare in Ohio has angered some conservative voters.
Critics say his move neither reduces the size of government nor curbs wasteful entitlement spending.
Kasich has countered that Ohio would be leaving tax dollars in Washington, D.C., if it rejected the expansion.
The federal government foots the entire bill for expanding the program during its first three years, eventually reducing that total to 90 percent of costs.
Kasich has also charged that he expanded Medicaid in Ohio on moral grounds, suggesting it helps drug abusers, the poor and the mentally ill.
“Now, when you die and get to that meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you what you did about keeping government small,” he said in 2013. "But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. And you better have a good answer."It is incredibly rare for big city police chiefs to publicly come out in favor of an armed citizenry, regardless of their privately held views. That is because police chiefs are typically appointed to their positions, and most urban areas have a long history of hiring anti-gun Democrats to the positions (Mayors, city Councils, etc) that hire police chiefs.
As a result, it is something of a bombshell that Detroit Police Chief James Craig has stated his belief that an armed citizenry deters crime.
If more citizens were armed, criminals would think twice about attacking them, Detroit Police Chief James Craig said Thursday. Urban police chiefs are typically in favor of gun control or reluctant to discuss the issue, but Craig on Thursday was candid about how he’s changed his mind. “When we look at the good community members who have concealed weapons permits, the likelihood they’ll shoot is based on a lack of confidence in this Police Department,” Craig said at a press conference at police headquarters, adding that he thinks more Detroit citizens feel safer, thanks in part to a 7 percent drop in violent crime in 2013. Craig said he started believing that legal gun owners can deter crime when he became police chief in Portland, Maine, in 2009. “Coming from California (Craig was on the Los Angeles police force for 28 years), where it takes an act of Congress to get a concealed weapon permit, I got to Maine, where they give out lots of CCWs (carrying concealed weapon permits), and I had a stack of CCW permits I was denying; that was my orientation. “I changed my orientation real quick. Maine is one of the safest places in America. Clearly, suspects knew that good Americans were armed.” Craig’s statements Thursday echoed those he made Dec. 19 on “The Paul W. Smith Show” on WJR (760 AM), when he said: “There’s a number of CPL (concealed pistol license) holders running around the city of Detroit. I think it acts as a deterrent. Good Americans with CPLs translates into crime reduction. I learned that real quick in the state of Maine.”
I wonder: how many urban police chiefs like Craig know the empirical data that shows concealed carry saves lives, but refuse to believe the facts because they are more worried about doing what their typically anti-gun bosses want, and don’t want to risk losing their jobs?
Perhaps now that Craig has “come out”—admittedly in a unique situation where the mayor cannot fire him without approval of the city’s Republican-appointed bankruptcy oversight manager Kevyn Orr—other police chiefs might have the confidence to challenge the “big city wisdom” that sees urban areas account for so many homicides of citizens that are largely disarmed due to restrictive “may issue” concealed carry permitting.
The facts are on our side. Eventually, more politicians and police chiefs will be forced to acknowledge them. In the meantime, it is nice to know that Detroit has a police chief that has the courage to learn and be open to new ideas....
It appears safe at this point to pronounce the thrash revival officially dead. I can’t think of the last notable piece of work from that scene to remain on my iPod—either Havok’s Point of No Return or Vektor’s Outer Isolation. Both of those works dropped in 2011. That makes for one year with no signs of life, except for another release, like clockwork, from Municipal Waste.
As it happens, Municipal Waste’s first album, Waste ‘Em All, just had its tenth birthday. I like the band but don’t hold a torch for their debut—I prefer its successor, Hazardous Mutation. This will sound like a circular critique for an album more-or-less designed to provoke nostalgia, but Waste ‘Em All sounds dated. The record is about having fun, but it feels square. I felt the same way about last year’s The Fatal Feast. The most interesting things about that album—the synthesizer interludes and vague outer space theme—seemed added to the record simply so publicists would have something new to comment on.
It’s an inglorious endpoint for the sub genre that Digby Pearson believed would jump-start heavy metal out of a commercial rut. Admittedly, Pearson was not completely off-base: re-thrash has done some big business. After all, a re-thrash band, Black Tide, played the main stage on Ozzfest 2007 while Nile and Behemoth played the the smaller Jagermeister stage (to be fair, the band was slated to play the small stage as well, but were kicked off due to the band being under the legal drinking age, but they signed to Interscope so they still count as big money in my book.) More recently, Municipal Waste recorded a commercial for Vans shoes—how many bands get to endorse clothing?
The commercial shows off every cliché of the re-thrash movement: skateboards, urban decay, and of course high-top shoes. I half expected to see someone in a pizza delivery car, maybe a beat-up Iroc or Cutlass Supreme. The only element missing is beer, and Vans can’t have people beer bonging in a commercial aimed at teenage boys. All of these objects—none of which have anything to do with the music itself, or metal in general—make an aesthetic language that re-thrash spoke fluently right out of the gate.
Re-thrash’s aesthetic was probably the most marketable thing about it, and having a distinct visual style goes a long way toward getting outsiders interested in a kind of metal. It gives people a hook, a reason to work past any abrasiveness in the music itself. As silly as it is, corpse-paint probably kept black metal alive in America long enough for well-to-do urbanites to co-opt it. The thrasher look is an easier sell than the black metal one: can you imagine an alternate universe where Rimfrost make viral commercials for stage makeup or black leggings?
...
The music and the aesthetic sold a kind of fantasy nostalgia. Re-thrash didn’t just ape the sound of crossover thrash, it aped the pop culture that surrounded that music. Hell, “The Thing,” on Hazardous Mutation copies the horror film of the same name from 1980 verbatim. Perhaps the ‘aughts themselves had a bit of an ’80s obsession—both Transformers and “Reganomics” became cultural phenomena again.
But the re-thrashers dealt in escapism, not history. If everyone in Black Tide was 20 in 2007, there is no way the members themselves remember the ’80s. Their music recalls the ’80s the way those boys have been exposed to it: through the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and SOD records. It cannot authentically recall the |
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But Reuters editor Jim Bourg hit back on Sunday saying the photo was taken at exactly 12:01:18pm on Friday during Trump's inauguration.
'Only one news organization had a still photographer atop the Washington monument for the inauguration and I assigned him to be there,' he wrote on Facebook.
'This photo by Reuters News Pictures staff photographer Lucas Jackson was taken at 12:01:18 p.m. on Friday and not much earlier as many people are trying to claim.'
Trump (pictured leaving the CIA) launched his own attack on the 'dishonest' media on Saturday at CIA headquarters
Reuters editor Jim Bourg hit back on Sunday saying this photo was taken at exactly 12:01:18pm on Friday during Trump's inauguration. Some have claimed it was taken earlier in the day, which is why the crowd appeared less than Obama's inauguration in 2009
Trump and his senior team sparring with the media has dominated his first weekend in office, eclipsing debate over policy and Cabinet appointments.
It comes as Spicer is set to face the media again on Monday at the first official Trump administration press briefing.
Spicer came out swinging in his first media briefing on Saturday when he accused journalists of 'deliberately false reporting' on Trump's inauguration.
But in the five minute tongue-lashing he gave reporters on Saturday, Spicer himself used several pieces of false information as he blasted the media for comparing the crowd size to Barack Obama's inauguration.
The inaccurate information centered around the number of Metro riders on inauguration day, security measures, floor coverings and the number of viewers.
Obama: At Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration, attendance at the National Mall was filled with hundreds of thousands of people gathered to witness America's first African-American president being sworn in
Trump: This was the view towards the Washington Monument, taken from a platform a few hundred yards from the East Portico of the Capitol during Trump's inaugurationOhio Gov. John Kasich gestures during a campaign rally in Berea, Ohio, on March 15. (Matt Rourke/Associated Press)
Ohio Gov. John Kasich joins Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Jeb Bush and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) in declining to endorse Donald Trump. On “Morning Joe,” formerly a pro-Trump venue, Kasich said: “Sometimes things come about that, look, I’m sorry this happened, but we’ll see where it ends up. I’m not making any final decision yet, but at this point I just can’t do it.”
The Fix breaks down the 10 Republicans who have been most vocally opposed to Trump's nomination. (Peter Stevenson/The Washington Post)
He needn’t feel bad about it; he should be proud in putting decency, principle and conservative policy above rank partisanship. He refuses, as so many intellectually spineless conservatives are doing, to rationalize accepting an unacceptable candidate who has shown zero desire to learn or to stick to any consistent message.
Kasich is wrong about one thing. He says House and Senate leaders don’t care what he thinks. That may have been true a few weeks ago, but since then we have seen Trump’s attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel and his unhinged reaction to the Orlando massacre. Moreover, we have seen Trump begin his polling decline. If Kasich starts a trend — and 2020 contenders certainly should watch his example of actual leadership — then both House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) will care very much.
Beyond his current statement, Kasich would be wise to go back to a notion that at the time was not plausible: Winning the nomination at the convention. He did not actually need to stay in the race any more than Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) did. What matters is that he has some delegates and as good a chance as any to become the alternative if a Dump Trump movement gets liftoff.
As we suggested earlier, a simple declaration of his willingness to step up if the delegates dump Trump plus a plea for delegates to be allowed to vote their conscience should suffice to get things rolling. Once he does that, other 2016 contenders may want to join. After all, who wouldn’t want to accept a nomination IF the delegates dumped Trump?
Kasich did not get out of the race after failing to win post-Ohio primary contests, leaving some Republicans (especially on the Cruz team) miffed that he divided the not-Trump vote. In all fairness, Cruz showed no ability to attract the moderate voters Kasich had, so it is not by any means certain that his earlier exit would have led to a different result in the primary. His mistake perhaps was in failing to recognize that simply by husbanding his existing delegates he could maintain his viability at the convention. Now he can act as the party’s lifeline, dredging up the polling showing that he’d crush Clinton.
Cruz is certainly in an even stronger position to do the same as Kasich. Cruz made the misjudgment of coddling Trump for too long during the primary. His mistake was in thinking he needed to fawn over Trump in order to later inherit Trump’s voters. He could have been quiet or mildly critical rather than gushy, thereby making his later anti-Trump rhetoric more credible. In any case, his own ideological rigidity never made him an attractive figure for Trump voters. At the convention, however, he’d have a credible pitch that he was the “runner-up” and thus deserving of the nomination if Trump fell out. In his favor, Cruz could argue, is his superb campaign operation and ground game that are ready to reignite if the nomination fell into his lap.
And frankly, if Cruz and Kasich could see the forest for the trees, they’d realize that collectively they won more than 700 delegates and would make for a balanced ticket. They can flip for who goes in the No. 1 slot.Melo Trimble nearly set a school freshman record with 31 points as Maryland toughed out a 78-73 victory against a game Arizona State team Monday night. It was originally reported by ESPNU and Maryland that Trimble set the record, but Joe Smith scored 33 in his freshman year vs. Rider. Dez Wells and Jake Layman also scored in double digits for the Terps. Trimble, Richaud Pack, Wells, Layman and Damonte Dodd started for Maryland, and Jon Graham played just one late minute in the game.
Maryland missed their first six shots, but a Damonte Dodd offensive rebound led to Melo Trimble sinking a three for their first points of the game. During their offensive rut, the Terrapins were able to force three turnovers in the first four minutes of the game to keep it close, and got three offensive rebounds (two from Dodd) to give the offense more opportunities to score.
Trimble dominated the first half, scoring 18 points, and got right back to it to start out the second. He hit a three for Maryland's first basket of the period, giving the Terps the lead and followed that up by drawing a foul and hitting both free throws.
Maryland's issues defending the three kept up in the second half. Up four points with under five minutes to play, the Terrapins left two Sun Devil shooters wide open beyond the arc, surrendering their lead. After the Under-4 timeout, Trimble responded with a much-needed three, taking the lead back at 69-68. Arizona State answered back with a three-pointer of their own, and Wells tied the game with a putback off his own missed shot.
With less than a minute left, Wells hit a turn-around shot to give Maryland the 75-73 lead. The Terps were able to put it away with free throws, advancing to the finals of the tournament.
Box score:
Three things we learned
1. Melo Trimble can take over games if needed. Maryland's offense struggled early on with both Dez Wells and Jake Layman in cold stretches. Wells was one-for-seven in the first half from the floor, while Layman was only able to get off three shots. Enter Melo Trimble, who scored 18 points in the period. Wells ended up recovering for a nice game, but Trimble kept up his pace and helped clinch the victory.
2. There is potential in the front court. Against a strong perimeter defense like Arizona State with a good frontcourt player like Jacobsen, Maryland needed some help from their big guys on the offensive and defensive end end. They got it -- Damonte Dodd and Michal Cekovsky combined for 12 points, eight rebounds (seven offensive) and five blocks, and Cekovsky forced a shot clock violation by standing an opposing player up with a block.
It wasn't all good -- Cekovsky struggled to get off a screen and allowed an easy dunk and had four fouls on the night, but they both appear to have progressed as players in the early season.
3. Maryland faced a tough matchup and won. Arizona has a strong interior presence in Eric Jacobsen and one of the best perimeter defenses in the country. Combine that with some shooting luck and the Sun Devils could have easily run away with this one (and they nearly did). Maryland was able to fight back and grab an important victory, easily showing they're the team with the higher ceiling and doing what they needed to do: move on to face a very stern test in Iowa State.
This was the first challenge of the year for the Terps, and while they didn't necessarily pass with flying colors (especially on the defensive end, giving up 14 of 27 threes), they did pass. Next up, the Cyclones.759 Bracketeers voted in Batch 219, and 7.03m votes have now been cast.
Visual results are here and today’s results are:
Sen Triplets defeats Dizzying Gaze with 94.53% of the vote
Sword of Kaldra defeats Young Wei Recruits with 94.07% of the vote
Undermine defeats Metathran Elite with 92.84% of the vote
Day’s Undoing defeats Lost Soul with 87.45% of the vote
Fury of the Horde defeats Brimstone Dragon with 86.59% of the vote
Take Possession defeats Lightbringer with 85.73% of the vote
Voyage’s End defeats Plague Fiend with 85.27% of the vote
Mystic Remora defeats Cloud Manta with 84.88% of the vote
Anafenza, the Foremost defeats Two-Headed Giant of Foriys with 81.88% of the vote
Boldwyr Intimidator defeats Nullstone Gargoyle with 80.72% of the vote
Imi Statue defeats Vug Lizard with 74.97% of the vote
Campaign of Vengeance defeats Wildslayer Elves with 74.86% of the vote
Dungeon Geists defeats Haunter of Nightveil with 74.67% of the vote
Tempt with Immortality defeats Spring Cleaning with 74.00% of the vote
Built to Smash defeats Explosive Apparatus with 73.33% of the vote
Time Elemental defeats Strength of Unity with 71.25% of the vote
Temple Garden defeats Cannibalize with 70.69% of the vote
Purging Scythe defeats Longhorn Firebeast with 67.76% of the vote
Tormentor Exarch defeats Common Cause with 66.39% of the vote
Congregate defeats Squall with 66.03% of the vote
Ethereal Haze defeats Consuming Sinkhole with 65.10% of the vote
Ramses Overdark defeats Clockwork Beetle with 64.81% of the vote
Heavy Fog defeats Saprazzan Outrigger with 64.02% of the vote
Threads of Disloyalty defeats Heron’s Grace Champion with 63.41% of the vote
Mishra’s Bauble defeats Gerrard’s Verdict with 59.63% of the vote
Caverns of Despair defeats Cloud Elemental with 57.90% of the vote
Undead Leotau defeats Crimson Roc with 55.76% of the vote
Timbermaw Larva defeats Equipoise with 55.49% of the vote
Minister of Inquiries defeats Stinging Licid with 52.79% of the vote
Larger Than Life defeats Cho-Manno’s Blessing with 52.18% of the vote
Augur of Bolas defeats Spitemare with 52.15% of the vote
Haazda Snare Squad defeats Screeching Silcaw with 51.31% of the vote
Full results to date can be seen here.A PhD student explained his “TRANIMAL hippopotamus identity and why he prefers being transpecies to transgender in a peer-reviewed paper published in May.
Yes, you heard that correct. Florentin Félix Morin feels like he is a Hippo, so he IS a Hippo!
I am guessing that means he gets full rights to the Hippopotamus pen at the local zoo and may take his baths and do his business there.
This upcoming generation is a mess!!!!!!!!!!
Writing in the Journal of Theoretical Humanities, University of Arizona visiting scholar Florentin Félix Morin argued that his hippo alter-ego has allowed him to navigate the world free from the constraints that “govern human bodies.”
His paper is entitled “EGO HIPPO: The subject as metaphor,” in which he explained “how his metaphorical hippo-self is collectively produced and performed.”:
“This article explores the formation of a tranimal, hippopotamus alter-ego. Confronting transgender with transpecies, the author claims that his hippopotamus “identity” allowed him to (verbally) escape, all at once, several sets of categorization that govern human bodies (“gender,” “sexuality,” age). He starts with an account of how his metaphorical hippo-self is collectively produced and performed, distinguishing the subjective, the intersubjective and the social. The article then investigates the politics of equating transgender and transpecies, critically examining the question of the inclusion of “xenogenders” in the trans political movement.”
Keep in mind that some call this kid a scholar…
“For a while, if someone was asking me how I ‘identified,’ I would joke about being a hippopotamus trapped in a human’s body,” says Morin, a transgender man, “later, a human trapped in a hippopotamus’ body, until my humorous ‘truth’ solidified and I began announcing myself as an old butch hippo dyke trapped in a young human faggy transboy’s body.”
They may call him a transpecies scholar, I call him nuts!
“Such an ‘identity’ allowed me to (verbally) escape, all at once, several sets of categorization that govern human bodies (‘gender,’ ‘sexuality,’ age),” he continued.
Sit down for this one…
“I do strongly love when my friends call me ‘hippo,’ refer to my ‘paws’ and pretend that they see no difference between me and one of my stuffed hippopotamuses, except that I’m a little bigger than most of them,” writes Morin.
These are the thoughts and words of a young child, not an adult!
On the University of Arizona’s website, Morin is touted as an ‘exciting’ addition to the institution’s LGBT Studies program. I bet!
“Let me put it this way,” Felix continues. “Something about being a hippo makes me feel cute, confident, sexy and safe. I discovered that another self was available for me: being a hippo means that I don’t have to be a boy or a girl, a child or an adult, normal or strange.”
Now, I can almost try to imagine thinking you are a Hippo stuck in a man’s body, but when he claims that the Hippo is sexy…Huh?
Our future generations are sincerely in YUUUUGE trouble. This is the result of our education system. Weird stuff is being taught between kindergarten and graduate school. Young minds are being warped.
What is next? Who knows!
Transpecies…
Insanity!
Hippopotamus asserts control in the African wildlife.Earlier this offseason, we talked a little bit about the sobering history of teams that lose the Super Bowl and how they rarely achieve the same heights again the next season. It is with a heavy heart that I inform you that the same is true of MVP.
Let’s step back and take a second to applaud Matt Ryan for winning the MVP, the first such award the Atlanta Falcons have snagged in 50-plus years as a franchise. He deserved it, playing one of the finest seasons in NFL history (and certainly the finest in Falcons history) and leading Atlanta to their second Super Bowl. He was, in a word, awesome.
Next year, though, will Ryan be able to win the MVP again? While offensive coordinator Kyle Shanahan is gone, the offense promises to be extremely talented and productive again, and Ryan is clearly playing at the height of his powers. You’d be unwise to bet against him being in the mix, but you might also be unwise to bet that he’ll come away with the prize.
The last player to win it two years in a row in the Associated Press poll was Peyton Manning back in 2008-2009 and 2003-2004 (he shared it with Steve McNair in 2004). It also happened in 1995-1997 for Brett Favre (who shared it with Barry Sanders in ‘97), 1989-1990 for Joe Montana, and 1957-1958 for Jim Brown. That is the entire list, and you’ll note that it features arguably the greatest quarterback of all-time twice. Even if Ryan can equal his stellar 2017 campaign, there may be some sportswriters who elect not to vote for him.
For all that, I’m bullish on Ryan’s ability to pilot this offense to a top five finish, and if he does so he’ll deservedly be mentioned again. Let’s hope I’m right.Image copyright Getty Images Image caption A radicalised teen attacked two police officers at this Melbourne location before being shot dead in 2014
The age of Australians being radicalised by the Islamic State (IS) group is increasingly getting younger, the country's top spy has warned.
Data showed a significant rise in young suspected extremists from 2013 to 2015, said Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) chief Duncan Lewis.
He said adherents of an extremist interpretation of Sunni Islam posed the greatest terror threat to Australia.
But he stressed "99.9% of Australian Muslims" were of no interest to ASIO.
Mr Lewis said in 2013, 45% of suspected Sunni Islamic extremists were aged between 25 and 34. Two years later, 40% were aged between 15 and 24.
"It basically dropped by a decade in the space of a couple of years," he told a senate estimates hearing on Tuesday night.
"We are still looking at a very young cohort that are impacted and influenced by this... extremist, violent message."
He said the trend would continue to affect Australia's security environment.
"The other 99.9% of Australian Muslims are not involved in activities of security concern in any way and are of no interest to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation," Mr Lewis said.
His comments came hours after a 42-year-old Australian man was arrested on suspicion of trying to advise IS on missiles.“His mother’s screams remained etched in his mind. He promised himself that night he would never again stand by as people he cared for suffered, and he would one day kill Volcseck. He intended to keep those promises.”
Falcon Hyatt has a problem. For reasons unknown to him he can wield all the elements, not only basics like fire and water, but also those more advanced, like space and poison. And now the chaos element, the same one his parents’ killer Shal-Volcseck wields, has awakened within him, with catastrophic results.
To complicate matters, the Suteckh Empire has declared war on the capital cities of Va’siel. Now he must venture out into the world with his friends Lao, Faith, and Aya on a mission to stop the Suteckh from taking over Va’siel, and find his parents killer, as all the while he struggles to suppress his newfound abilities.
In his quest Falcon is forced to question what he’s really fighting for, where his loyalties lie, and his own character. Is he truly a good person, or an even more dangerous menace than the dreaded Shal-Volcseck? Element Wielder is the story of faith, love, and a young man’s struggle to continue on his quest, when surrendering to his emotions and giving up is so much easier.The empty building at Poplar and S. Perkins, where Kroger closed in March, may be the site for a planned Sprouts Farmers Market. (By Thomas Bailey/The Commercial Appeal)
SHARE A Sprouts Farmers Market, like this one that opened in Lakeland in May, could be planned for East Memphis. (Stan Carroll/The Commercial Appeal)
By Thomas Bailey Jr. of The Commercial Appeal
An Arizona retail consultant is considering the empty Kroger at Poplar Avenue and Perkins Road for a potential supermarket.
The Office of Planning and Development received an email on Sept. 1 from a firm named Fitch asking about the local approval process involved for adapting the vacant East Memphis space for a grocery.
Fitch describes itself as a leading consultant for Arizona-based Sprouts Farmers Markets’ national expansion.
"We are the natural food grocer's primary architects and prototype designers, rolling out ambitious expansion in the United States, as it has market leader Wholefoods in its sights,'' Fitch’s website states.
Fitch and Sprouts officials declined Thursday to speak about the prominent location at 567 S. Perkins Road vacated by Kroger.
"All I can say honestly is I can’t comment. They don’t allow us to comment on anything,'' Fitch official Eric Harris told The Commercial Appeal.
Harris' name appears on the email sent to local planning officials. "We are working on a proposed grocery store at the above intersection and have some process questions,” the email says.
Attracting the grocer would continue the upgrades in the Poplar Avenue corridor. Nearby, a Nordstrom Rack is going into the former Sears site, Whole Foods has renovated its store, and Clark Tower’s owners are renovating the skyscraper and planning landscape improvements.
Kroger closed its store in March. The grocer has two larger locations nearby and is spending more than $100 million renovating and expanding its sites in the Mid-South.
Fitch's office in Phoenix has worked with Phoenix-based Sprouts more than 10 years and "has been responsible for" 90 percent of the nearly 200 Sprouts stores that have opened in the past 10 years, according to fitch.com.
The plan is to open at least 1,000 more over the next 15 years, according to the Fitch website.
Two of those new Sprouts have recently opened locally, but neither inside Memphis city limits.
A 28,000-square-foot Sprouts at 9050 U.S. 64 in Lakeland, the first Sprouts in Tennessee, opened in May. Another opened in July at 3150 Village Shops in Germantown.
The groceries employ about 100 people each.
The commercial real estate broker for the East Memphis property, Danny Buring of The Shopping Center Group, declined to comment.
The Fitch email to local government planners stated, "We are looking at modifying and upgrading the building exterior.''
Sprouts describes itself as offering low prices on fresh produce, bulk foods, vitamins and supplements, groceries, natural body care products and household goods.Nine is the absolute minimum figure. Nine wins could squeeze the Rams into the postseason, but it’s not going to win the West. An 8-8 season eliminates them from playoff contention, as I think both the Seahawks and 49ers are easily capable of hitting double digit wins in 2013, and several other NFC teams will be at [or above] nine wins by season’s end.
You may or may not agree with these games being ‘must win,’ because clearly - at this juncture - they’re not. There are several games I think can go either way, but I’m ready to give the Rams the nod in these nine games…
Week 1: Arizona Cardinals
Week 3: @ Dallas Cowboys
Week 4: San Francisco 49ers
Week 5: Jacksonville Jaguars
Week 7: @ Carolina Panthers
Week 8: Seattle Seahawks
Week 9: Tennessee Titans
Week 14: @ Arizona Cardinals
Week 16: Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Home Record: 6-2
Away Record: 3-5
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Week 1: Arizona Cardinals at Home - It’s a tone-setting statement game, and it must happen. The Rams owned the Cardinals in 2012, and they cannot afford to lose in the team’s home opener. The Cardinals are going to be a formidable opponent in 2013, but it’s going to take time for all the new pieces to gel. The same could be said about the Rams’ offense. Their defense, however, could come out in midseason form, and will be the difference-maker in Week 1. Offenses typically look sloppy in the early stages of the season, and therefore this one will be closer than fans would like. Final Score - Rams: 21, Cardinals: 16Henrik Zetterberg was officially named the captain of the Red Wings yesterday afternoon. All the players and coaches were present in the press conference, supporting ‘Z.’
General manager Ken Holland began the press conference by stating “Today is the evolution of a leader. Mike Babcock and I feel really good about the leadership of our team going forward. He’s a fierce competitor, the bigger the game, the better he plays…He leads by example. I think Hank is one of the best 2-way forwards in the world. [He’s] a role model on and off the ice.”
After turning it over to Zetterberg and handing him his new captain’s jersey. Hank was very humble about the promotion. “It’s a true honor,” he said. He then quoted Steve Yzerman, after he was named captain in 1986. “It made it a lot easier by having the locker room filled with leaders.”
When the press conference ended Ken Holland stuck around to answer questions from the media. He talked at great length about Zetterberg’s leadership qualities. “He’s a great player, day-in and day-out. He’s an every-dayer. In practice he sets the tone. He’s a great 2-way player.” Ken mentioned how Scotty Bowman started the Red Wings tradition of playing a 2-way game. “It’s been passed down from one generation to the next. It’s Henrik’s task and responsibility now to set the tone for going forward.”
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Over 3500 excited hockey fans packed the Compuware Arena, home of the OHL’s Plymouth Whalers to see the Red and White game. The game featured a mix of Red Wings and Grand Rapids Griffins players on both sides. It is the first time that Ken Holland and coach Mike Babcock could see their players play in a game since last season. Babcock and Holland watched the game from above the press box, leaving the assistant coaches and Griffins coaches on the benches to manage the two teams.
The Red Team consisted of: Red Wings – Henrik Zetterberg, Damien Brunner, Drew Miller, Jordin Tootoo, Niklas Kronwall, Jonathan Ericsson, and Jonas Gustavsson. Griffins – Jan Mursak, Cory Emmerton, Tomas Tatar, Riley Sheahan, Gustav Nyquist, Tomas Jurco, Louis-Marc Aubry, Mitch Callahan, Nathan Paetsch, Brian Lashoff, Chad Billins, and Brennan Evans.
The White Team was comprised of: Red Wings – Johan Franzen, Valterri Filpulla, Mike Knuble (hopeful), Todd Bertuzzi, Justin Abdelkader, Dan Cleary, Patrick Eaves, Kyle Quincey, Brendan Smith, Jakub
Kindl, Ian White, Carlo Colaiacovo, and Jimmy Howard. Griffins – Landon Ferraro, Trevor Parkes, Jeff Hoggan, Adam Almquist, and Max Nicastro.
After the national anthem concluded, and the puck was dropped, everyone in the stands burst into a resounding Let’s Go Red Wings chant that gave even the casual fan chills of excitement. If there were any thoughts of boycotting, it certainly didn’t happen here. For true hockey fans, the Red Wings were back, and that’s all that mattered.
Trevor Parkes scored first for the White Team with 43.9 seconds left in the first period, when he deked past the defense and scored a very nice goal on Jonas Gustavsson. Jonas had an amazing glove save earlier in the period when a deflected shot caromed off a stick, causing him to make a desperation cross-crease save.
20 minutes into the game, the tempo was very quick, and it was clear that the players wanted to treat this game as an exhibition game before the NHL season starts this weekend.
Just over one minute into the second period, Drew Miller scored for the Red Team on Jimmy Howard, tying the game. 4 minutes later Griffin Jeff Hoggan slipped the puck past a sprawling Gustavsson, who had no chance to make the save. Louis-Marc Aubry scored for the Red Team to tie the game at two.
Filpulla received the game’s first penalty, as he was called for hooking 8 minutes into period number two. Tootoo received the other penalty in the game, coming just 3 minutes later.
When the White Team set up in the offensive zone late in the period, Kyle Quincey one-timed a shot from Ian White that actually broke Jan Mursak’s stick. New captain Henrik Zetterberg scored on a deflection from a Damien Brunner shot (a perfect 2-line pass from Jonathan Ericsson set Brunner up with a breakaway).
Griffin Nathan Paetsch of the Red Team closed out the scoring to make it 4-2, which would be the final score of the game.
After the 3rd period ended, the teams delighted their fans with a full team shootout, still Red vs. White. Todd Bertuzzi and Brendan Smith scored the two best goals. Bert’s goal was a behind the legs Datsyuk-like beauty. Smith’s goal was very similar to a shootout goal that both Bertuzzi and Zetterberg scored last season (deke, head-fake, arm extension while skating in the opposite direction). The puck rolled on its side very slowly as it crossed the goal line. Gustavsson once again had no chance. The hockey-starved fans roared with excitement as the players proceeded to skate off the ice.
After the game I asked Henrik: Q: “How did it feel wearing the “C” for the first time today?” Z: “It was nice, pretty cool to skate out there for the first time with it on. I think it’ll feel more special this weekend and next Tuesday (first home game for Detroit).”
Q: How much will it mean to finally be back at Joe Louis Arena. Z: “We’re really looking forward to it. On Thursday when we go down there, it’ll be pretty cool to just come back and skate there.”
Q: Did it feel good to have the “Let’s-Go-Red-Wings” chant going 10 seconds into the game?
Z: “Yeah that was pretty nice. It’s been awhile.”
When asked to comment on the fan turnout he said: “It was pretty amazing to see the fans showing up, and we really appreciate that. Really looking forward for Tuesday night.”
Follow me on Twitter @yungsporkHalf of the helicopters in the German Navy are not cleared to fly, Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports citing a document produced by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Defense.
MOSCOW, September 22 (RIA Novosti) - Half of the helicopters in the German Navy are not cleared to fly, Sueddeutsche Zeitung reports citing a document produced by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Defense.
The report comes as a response after Navy helicopter flights were suspended when the crew aboard the Luebeck frigate discovered a 20-centimeter crack in the tale of a Sea Lynx Mk88A helicopter, according to the document. Similar defects were later found on other helicopters of that type.
On August 7, helicopter flights were resumed. However, all 22 Sea Lynx Mk88A helicopters remain grounded and are undergoing further maintenance checks lasting until next year, according to the document. As a result, the fleet’s flying hours are being reduced by 75 percent.
Furthermore, two Sea Lynx Mk88A helicopters were unable to land on the Luebeck on September 18 due to ongoing maintenance. They were supposed to take part in the EU’s Operation Atalanta, which is aimed at fighting piracy off the coast of Somalia.
Sea Lynx Mk88A helicopters, in service since 1981, make up half of Germany’s rotorcraft fleet, Sueddeutsche Zeitung pointed out. Sea King helicopters make up the rest.Documents released by the National Archives Thursday illustrated the broad swath of the investigation into the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, including memos about Communist sympathizers, anti-Fidel Castro activities and U.S. intelligence assets offering information about Cuba.
The documents related to the investigation into Kennedy's murder -- consisting of files from the CIA, the FBI, the Defense and State departments and other agencies -- were scheduled to be released 25 years after the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. The law called for the records to be made available based on the approval of the president. Over 2,800 were made public Thursday, but some remained withheld due to national security concerns, according to a memo from President Donald Trump.
The collection, which spans from the early years of the Kennedy administration into the 1970s, includes discussions of investigative leads about assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s travels, including a trip to Mexico before the assassination. Whom Oswald met with on that trip has been the subject of long-generated speculation.
One memo from then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, dictated on Nov. 24, 1963, just hours after Jack Ruby shot Oswald, says the FBI had sent an agent to the hospital hoping for a confession from the alleged assassin before he died. After the attempt was unsuccessful, the memo illustrates Hoover's urgent desire to have "something issued so that we can convince the public that Oswald is the real assassin."
Another Hoover memo details information from a source within the USSR on the Soviet reaction to Kennedy's death. The source says the news was met with "great shock and consternation and church bells were tolled in the memory of President Kennedy." The Soviets were shocked by the development and preferred Kennedy as the head of the U.S. government as they felt they had a "mutual understanding" with him.
The Soviet Communist Party believed the assassination was an "ultraright" act and in effect a "coup." The source also said the Soviets immediately began instructing their agents to gather information on the new president, Johnson.
A document memorializing information obtained by the CIA said, "Circumstances already developed here point to possibility that Oswald may have been Castro’s agent. Mexicans are also keenly aware of the possibility." A note in the margin makes clear that the source of that information is unknown, and the information "varies" from at least one other account.
Many of the documents contain raw intelligence information that is uncorroborated, but will surely fuel already widespread speculation about the plot. The total collection contains more than 5 million records, making any single document a miniscule portion of all the intelligence.
Trump issued a memo to the heads of executive departments certifying the declassification Thursday, but also noted that some expressed reservations and therefore ordered that federal agencies be given 180 days to re-review whether certain documents related to national security require continued redaction or withholding.
"Executive departments and agencies have proposed to me that certain information should continue to be redacted because of national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns," reads the memo from Trump. "I have no choice -- today -- but to accept those redactions rather than allow potentially irreversible harm to our nation's security. To further address these concerns, I am also ordering agencies to re-review each and every one of those redactions over the next 180 days."
The 2,891 records that were released were posted on the National Archives' website, with more expected to be made public following the continued review.
Trump said on Twitter Friday that the files are being "carefully released," but his hope to get "just about everything to [the] public."
JFK Files are being carefully released. In the end there will be great transparency. It is my hope to get just about everything to public! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 27, 2017
The vast majority of records related to the assassination -- roughly 88 percent -- have been available since the late 1990s, with an additional 11 percent of the documents released, with redactions, since then.Senator Bernie Sanders Jason Merritt/Getty Images President Donald Trump and Sen. Bernie Sanders feuded on Twitter on Thursday over the senator's single-payer healthcare proposal, which the president called a "curse" that he would veto "because I love our country."
The Vermont independent and former Democratic presidential candidate then shot back at Trump, arguing that healthcare should be a right for every American and that Trump's support for the GOP's plans to repeal Obamacare is the real offense.
"Bernie Sanders is pushing hard for a single payer healthcare plan - a curse on the U.S. & its people," Trump wrote. "I told Republicans to approve healthcare fast or this would happen. But don't worry, I will veto because I love our country & its people."
Sanders responded in his own tweet a few minutes later: "No Mr. President, providing health care to every man, woman and child as a right is not a curse, it's exactly what we should be doing."
He continued, "What is a curse is your support for throwing 23 million off health insurance. That's the curse and we won't allow you to get away with it."
Sanders unveiled his Medicare-for-all legislation on Wednesday, with the support of 15 Democratic co-sponsors, including several anticipated front-runners in the 2020 presidential election.
"Now is the time to expand and improve Medicare to cover all Americans," Sanders wrote in a New York Times op-ed on Wednesday. "Under this legislation, every family in America would receive comprehensive coverage, and middle-class families would save thousands of dollars a year by eliminating their private insurance costs as we move to a publicly funded program."
Some top Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, have been hesitant to fully support the proposal.
"We want to move the issue forward," Schumer said, adding that " |
mail, which is normally a week or two after the bank purchase.
To purchase your I Bonds from Treasury Direct, you’d go to www.TreasuryDirect.gov, open an account and link it to your bank account. Once that’s done, you can buy and sell I Bonds online. When you buy, the Treasury takes the money out of your linked bank account, and when you redeem all or a portion of your I Bonds, Treasury deposits the money into your linked account.
Purchasing and Redeeming Strategies
You can purchase I Bonds anytime during the month, up to and including the final business day of the month. (Note that Saturday and Sunday are not considered business days by the Federal Reserve, even if your bank is open on those days.)
I Bonds only carry the month and year of purchase as their issue date, not the exact date you purchased them. So even when you purchase your bonds at the end of the month, you’ll still get the same issue date that you would have gotten had your purchased your I Bonds on the first day of the month. And, you’ll earn that full month’s interest, since interest for the month is credited to everyone who owns the bonds on the last day of the month. Therefore, there’s no advantage to buying early in the month unless that’s more convenient for you. And, when you redeem your I Bonds, you may as well redeem them at the beginning of the month, since you won’t earn any additional interest for holding them any later in the redemption month.
If you know of a better risk-free, tax-deferred flexible investment that’s currently available, then you should grab it while you can. As for me, I’ll be in line at the bank to purchase my I Bonds at the end of May. And, based on the recent buzz about the new I Bond rate on the Bogleheads.org forum, I suspect many others will be in line, too. Maybe I’ll even see you in line.
Mel Lindauer, CFS, WMS is one of the founders of the Bogleheads community and co-author of The Bogleheads’ Guide to Investing along with Taylor Larimore and Michael LeBoeuf. He is also co-author of The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning along with Taylor Larimore, Richard Ferri, and Laura Dogu.The Japanese island of Okinawa sees one of the biggest demonstrations in two decades, involving at least 50,000 people who protest against heavy US military presence after a local woman was murdered by an ex-Marine and a string of other incidents.
The rally, which organizers said numbered more than 65,000 – including Governor Takeshi Onaga and officials from opposition parties – has taken place in Okinawa’s capital Naha located in close proximity to US air bases Kadena and Futenma. Simultaneous solidarity protest took place outside the national parliament in Tokyo.
The demonstrators were protesting against heavy US military presence and grave crimes repeatedly committed by servicemen against the residents. In the most recent case that resonated amongst the locals, a 20-year-old woman has been murdered by an ex-Marine employed as civil worker at the US military base.
Tens of thousands people are taking part in the largest Anti-American #rally in two decades in Okinawa. #Okinawapic.twitter.com/Q0LTAW2Tqn — Musun Kim (@MusunKIM) June 19, 2016
The Naha rally started with a minute of silence for the murdered woman, then a message written by her father has been read from the stage.
Happening Now in #Okinawa
Tens of 1000s observe a minute of silence for 20 year old woman murdered by US base worker pic.twitter.com/jv2n7ZZzQb — Kjeld Duits (@KjeldDuits) June 19, 2016
Demonstrators have also protested plans by Washington and Tokyo to move a major US Marine base from the center of the island to pristine waters off Okinawa’s northern coast. Okinawa's Governor Takeshi Onaga, who has spoken at the Naha protest, argues against the plan and wants the base to be removed from Okinawa completely.
Happening Now in #Okinawa
And that is the end of #Japan's largest anti US base protest in 20 years pic.twitter.com/84WCTUtuCI — Kjeld Duits (@KjeldDuits) June 19, 2016
The rally ended with signing a petition, demanding that Japan and US governments offer apologies to the family of the murdered 20-year-old woman, and also to all Okinawans.
Okinawa hosts several major US military bases that occupy nearly one fifth of the island’s territory and accommodate about 50,000 U.S. nationals, including 30,000 military personnel, Reuters reports. The bases have long been blamed for noise and air pollution, but they are also seen by many locals as uneasy legacy of post-WWII American military occupation.
"Japan is still a military colony of the United States," 59-year-old teacher Noboru Kitano was quoted as saying by France24. "This base symbolizes that."
READ MORE: Self-defense seminar in high demand in Okinawa after US base employee detained as murder suspect
In May, the 20-year-old woman, Rina Shimabukuro, was raped and murdered by a 32-year-old civil contractor and former US Marine Kenneth Franklin Gadson, who goes by his Japanese wife’s family name of Shinzato. He admitted he strangled and stabbed his victim.
In a separate case, a 24-year-old Marine Justin Castellanos has been charged with the rape of a drunk and passed-out Japanese woman at a Naha hotel, where he was also staying.
On June 5, a 21-year-old US Navy sailor Aimee Meija was caught in a drunk-driving head-on collision with two other cars, injuring two people, with her blood alcohol level six times the legal limit, according to Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Facing public outcry, the US military has introduced curfews, movement restrictions and alcohol ban off base, lifted 11 days after it was imposed.
Okinawa hosts about 75 percent of all US military installations in Japan, and is an important geopolitical outpost for Washington allowing to project power in the region that neighbors China and the Southeast Asia.Microsoft's design for the Xbox One is intended to keep the console on—and quiet—for the console's entire 10-year life cycle, according to a report yesterday by Eurogamer.
The upcoming Xbox One appears to be larger than the Xbox 360 and significantly larger than the upcoming PS4. That "relatively voluminous piece of console hardware" allows for greater heat dissipation, with fan noise being "only noticeable during gaming when the AMD processor is really being put through its paces," Eurogamer reported based on anonymous sources. With a good heat sink and a relatively large fan that spins more slowly than a small one, the console is expected to be "almost entirely silent in standby and during its media functions," the report states.
Early versions of the Xbox One sent to developers were reportedly loud because a "thermal control algorithm—which monitors the heat output of the major chips on the motherboard and adjusts fan speed accordingly—simply wasn't implemented in the developing OS, and so to avoid damaging the hardware, the fans were set to 100 per cent all the time," Eurogamer wrote. This problem was resolved in a software update in March.
The fact that the Xbox One is designed to be always on had already been revealed. As we wrote in May, turning it off simply switches the machine to a "low-power state where it can download system and game updates and listen for certain Kinect voice commands."
The Eurogamer article has plenty of interesting details about how Microsoft is achieving this always-on state.× Michigan native injured in baseball shooting improving, family says
WASHINGTON — The Michigan native shot multiple times in his chest and arms last week during practice for a congressional baseball game has undergone multiple surgeries but is improving, family says.
The family of Matt Mika, 38, issued a statement Saturday saying they expected him to remain in the ICU through at least this weekend. But Mika’s family says his physicians remain positive.
“We want to thank the team at George Washington University Hospital for their world-class care, and we continue to be grateful beyond words for the heroic actions of the U.S. Capitol Police this week. In addition, the positive thoughts, prayers and words of encouragement from across the nation have meant the world to Matt and to all of us.”
Mika’s family said he’d been successfully community through notes and was even able to sign the game ball that used during Thursday’s bi-partisan match-up.
Game ball signed by Matt Mika #cleareyesfullheartscantlose pic.twitter.com/JYn9I9xgvw — Congressional Game (@thehillbaseball) June 16, 2017
Mika was among several people wounded when a gunman opened fire Wednesday as a congressional baseball team practiced in Alexandria, Virginia. Police killed the gunman.
On Thursday, Mika’s family said he’d suffered “massive trauma.”
The lobbyist currently working for Tyson Foods previously attended Western Michigan University after graduating from Albion College in 2001. Mika previously worked for several Michigan lawmakers, including Republican Reps. Tim Walberg and Dave Camp.
Here is the statement from Matt Mika’s family:
“Matt has undergone additional surgery and his physicians have reported positive results. Matt will remain in the ICU through at least this weekend. He continues to communicate with us through notes, and even signed the game ball for the Congressional Baseball Game. Matt especially valued the professionalism of the officers of the Capitol Police, and would appreciate contributions to the Capitol Police Memorial Fund, one of the designated charities at Thursday night’s ballgame. While we know there will be difficult and challenging days ahead for Matt and our family, the physicians and specialists at Matt’s side expect a full recovery. This will be our final update pending Matt’s discharge from the hospital. We again ask for your understanding and respect of our family’s privacy.”
Republican Rep. Steve Scalise was also critically injured in the shooting. Scalise, who remains in serious condition, underwent another surgery Saturday but “continues to show signs of improvement,” according to an update issued by his family."The Golden Streets of Gotham": Reporter Elana Karadian interviews aging thespian Richard Grayson to hear from his perspective the legendary tale of the Batman, a worker's hero during the [[wikipedia:Industrial Revolution|Industrial Revolu
It is not a crime to demand honest wage for honest work. -- Batman
Contents show]
Appearing in "The Golden Streets of Gotham"
Featured Characters:
Supporting Characters:
Antagonists:
Other Characters:
Locations:
Synopsis for "The Golden Streets of Gotham"
Reporter Elana Karadian interviews aging thespian Richard Grayson to hear from his perspective the legendary tale of the Batman, a worker's hero during the Industrial Revolution.
Bruno Vanekow, a laborer, returns to his home in Gotham City after working on the railroad for a number of years. He finds that both of his parents burned alive in a large industrial fire caused by the negligence of their boss, one Joseph Chillingham, a symptom of the terrible conditions for workers and the lower-class in Gotham at the time.
Determined to find something he can do in his parents' memory, Bruno begins looking for evidence against Chillingham, who cast the entire blame onto his foreman Jack Smart, believed to have perished in the fire as well. Through Barbara Gordon, a local reporter he meets in the courthouses, he is introduced to Selina Kyle, local Union Organizer and the Mayor's daughter. A discussion with her about workers' rights inspires Bruno to begin seeking justice for himself.
Bruno begins robbing the rich to help provide the poor with necessities. To mask his identity, he takes a Bat costume from the first house he robs, that of Chillingham himself. He also attends union meetings, led by an unknown individual who wears the mask of a Cat. Meanwhile, a serial killer begins stalking and murdering lower-class women.
Inadvertently, while waiting in his flat to interview him, Barbara Gordon discovers Bruno's double identity. After uncovering a plot involving her father to frame the Bat-Man for both industrial disasters, and the recent killings, Selina asks Barbara to warn him, believing she knows who he is. Barbara tells Bruno he should leave town, but he doesn't want to. He goes to see the Cat, who reveals herself to be Selina in disguise.
The next day, the Mayor holds a large speech in which he announces that the Bat-Man is believed to be the city's killer, and that his connection with the unions negatively implicates them in the eyes of the law as well. There is a minor riot, involving brutal beatings from the police. When Bruno acts out, defending citizens violently from the assault, he immediately becomes suspect and is forced to go into hiding.
After accidentally falling through a skylight, Bruno takes up residence in Alfred Pennyworth's Burlesque Theater, where he also meets a young acrobat, Dick Grayson. Seeing that even honest policemen like Gordon are meeting with legal penalties for speaking out during the riots, Bruno goes to meet with Barbara and her father. He offers to trade evidence he has found towards the identity of the serial killer, in exchange for help in fighting the corruption of the city's administration.
After giving his own final speech to those who have joined Selina's organization, Bruno and the others prepare for their final movements. The serial killer is Jack Smart, former foreman of Chillingham's factory, driven insane by all of the death he inadvertently caused, and murdering the survivor's to try to finish the job. Jack had been posing as a clown in Pennyworth's theater. Bruno stops the Clown before he can murder Joe Chillingham, saving Chillingham's life. The Clown apparently dies after setting fire to Chillingham's manor.
The next day, during a speech in which the Mayor condemns the actions of his peers, Selina unmasks herself, and has her father arrested for corruption as well. His work done, Bruno says goodbye to all of his friends, and turns himself in to the police to face judgment.
Finished with the interview, when asked what eventually happened to the Batman, Grayson tells Elana that people like him don't really die. Outside, satisfied that his story lives on, Elana pays her respects to the Vanekow tombstone.
Notes
This book was first published on January 2, 2003.
Other characters from the Batman mythos are mentioned in this book, although they do not actually appear. Doctor Thompkins is a medical worker sympathizing with the unions. Mister Bertinelli owns a sewing factory.
Trivia
The death of Bruno Vanekow's parents bares many similarities to the historical Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
See Also
Recommended ReadingWant to Work at Miller Park This Season? Apply for the Brew Crew or Try Out for the Diamond Dancers!
Caitlin Moyer Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jan 29, 2014
If you’re looking for a way to see Brewers Baseball for free this summer — and maybe even get paid to do it, then listen up.
I just heard from Drew Olsen, our Broadcast and Entertainment Manager, that we’re hiring for our entertainment staff and that the Diamond Dancers are hosting auditions!
First up, we’ve got openings on our Brew Crew.
Are you outgoing, friendly, enthusiastic, confident, and love interacting with people? If so, we want you to join our gameday entertainment seasonal Brew Crew staff!
The Brew Crew is an integral part of the Miller Park fan experience, with job duties that directly impact our guests and their enjoyment of Brewers games. The Brew Crew also represents the Club throughout the state at mascot appearances.
As a former Brew Crew member myself, I can tell you that it is a lot of fun and a great learning experience — a perfect job for a college student!
A little-known fact about Cait: She got her feet wet here at the Club as first, an intern in the Corporate Marketing department and then as a member of the Brew Crew.
As a member of the Brew Crew, you’ll do things such as:
• Work Klement’s Racing Sausage mascot appearances on non-gamedays
• Assist with and execute between-innings promotions
• Staff all interactive areas throughout Miller Park, including the US Cellular Power Playground, Bernie’s Terrace, and Speed Pitch
• Greet fans and snap their pictures as part of the FanFoto program
• Entertain fans before the game as the Klement’s Racing Sausages and their escorts
• Tie balloon animals for kids
• And More!
Applicants must be available to work at least 40 games, arriving 2 hours prior to gametime. Having a flexible schedule that allows for working some or all weekday day games is a plus. Please note this is NOT a full-time position, it is a part-time, seasonal position. Applicants must also live in the Milwaukee area year-round in order to be considered for the Brew Crew.
Click here for the full job description and application information.
Diamond Dancer Auditions
The 2014 Diamond Dancers auditions will take place on Saturday, March 1, 2014. Registration begins at 11 AM and the audition begins at 11:30 AM at Elite Sports Club in Brookfield, WI 600 N. Barker Road).
Please visit www.wiprodance.com for additional audition details. There, you can also register for the audition clinics and fill out your application for audition day.
So, if you’re interested in working at Miller Park this season, as either a Brew Crew member or a Diamond Dancer, make sure you check out those sites for more information.
Good luck! I hope to see you at Miller Park this year!
-Cait
johnandcait@brewers.comMEMORANDUM FOR: The President
FROM: Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
SUBJECT: Those “Damn Emails” – “Really a Concern”
Introduction
Last Wednesday Robert Gates, CIA Director under President Bush-41 and Defense Secretary under President Bush-43, publicly commented that Secretary Hillary Clinton’s “whole email thing … is really a concern in terms of her judgment,” adding, “I don’t know what originally prompted her to think that was a good idea.”
What originally prompted her does not matter. As your Secretary of State and your subordinate, she willfully violated laws designed to protect classified information from unauthorized disclosure. It may be somewhat difficult for those not as immersed in national security matters as we have been to appreciate the seriousness of the offense, including the harm done in compromising some of the most sensitive U.S. programs and activities. This is why we write.
Pundits and others are playing down the harm. A charitable interpretation is that they have no way to gauge what it means to expose so much to so many. We do know, and our overriding concern is to protect the national security of our country from further harm. It would be a huge help toward this end, if you would order Attorney General Loretta Lynch to instruct the FBI to stop slow-walking the email investigation and release its findings promptly.
If you choose, instead, to give precedence to politics over national security, the American people will be deprived of timely appreciation of the gravity of the harm done; national security officials who do follow the rules will be scandalized; FBI investigators will conclude that that their job is more political than professional; and the noxious impression will grow that powerful people cannot be held accountable when they break the law. Worse: if the results of the FBI investigation remain under lock and key, dangerous pressures are likely to be exerted on the most senior U.S. officials by those who have the key – as we explain below.
* * *
We the undersigned Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) have spent 400 years working with classified information – up to and including TOP SECRET, Codeword, and Special Access Programs (SAP). Given that experience, we believe that much of the commentary on the former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton email controversy has been misplaced, focusing on extraneous issues having little or nothing to do with the overriding imperative to protect classified information.
As intelligence, military, and foreign service professionals, we are highly aware not only of that compelling need, but also of the accompanying necessity to hold accountable those whose actions compromise – whether for reasons of convenience or espionage – sensitive operations, programs and persons. In addition, we know that successful mutual cooperation with foreign intelligence services depends largely on what they see as our ability to keep secrets secret.
Background
Last August, Secretary Clinton handed over her private email server to the FBI, five months after she acknowledged she had used it for work-related emails as Secretary of State. She admitted to having deleted about 31,000 emails she described as personal. Media reports last fall, however, indicated that the FBI was able to recover the personal emails, and was reviewing them, as well as the 30,000 others she had described as work-related.
In January, the Department of State announced that, of the 30,000 work-related emails, at least 1,340 contained classified material. The Department retroactively classified 22 of those TOP SECRET and prevented their release. Among the 22 were some that, according to media reports, included information on highly sensitive Special Access Programs (SAP).
The White House has said it will do nothing to impede the FBI investigation and possible filing of charges against Clinton, if the facts should warrant that kind of action. Inasmuch as the outcome of the investigation is bound to have major political consequences, such White House assurances stretch credulity.
By all indications, the FBI is slow-walking the investigation and mainstream media are soft-pedaling the issue. As things now stand, most Americans remain unaware of the import of this industrial-scale compromise of very sensitive national security information in Secretary Clinton’s emails.
Our concern mounted in January when the Inspector General of the intelligence community wrote to the chairs of the congressional intelligence committees that he had received from one of the intelligence agencies two “sworn declarations” asserting that Secretary Clinton’s emails contained not only CONFIDENTIAL and SECRET information, but also information at the TOP SECRET/SAP level.
In 2009, you signed an Executive Order regarding SAP (Special Access Programs), so we assume you were briefed on their extremely high sensitivity and the consequent need to sharply limit the number of people allowed to be “read-in” on them. The mishandling of SAP information can neutralize intelligence programs costing billions of dollars, wreck liaison relationships assiduously cultivated for decades, and get a lot of people killed.
‘It Wasn’t That Bad’
All those directly or peripherally involved in the investigation of the Clinton email issue know very well that it could have a direct impact on who is likely to become the next President of the United States, and they will be making decisions with that reality in mind. They know that it is with you that “the buck stops,” and they are sensitive to signs of your preferences. Those were not difficult to discern in your commencement address at Howard University on May 7, in which you strongly advocated the same basic policy approaches as those espoused by one Democratic presidential candidate – Hillary Clinton.
Your White House has also made excuses for deliberate security violations by Secretary Clinton that would have gotten senior officials like us fired and probably indicted. We look with suspicion at what we see as contrasting and totally inappropriate attempts by the administration and media to play down the importance of Secretary Clinton’s deliberate disregard of basic security instructions and procedures.
It appears that the option chosen by the White House is using the declared need for “thoroughness” to soft-pedal and delay completion of the investigation for several more months, while the corporate media sleeps on. Four months have already gone by since the smoking-gun-type revelations in the intelligence community Inspector General’s letter to Congress, and it has been well over a year since Secretary Clinton first acknowledged using an insecure email server for official business.
Another claim emanating from your White House is that Clinton was careless in managing her emails and has admitted as much, but that she has not damaged American national security. She has called it a “mistake,” but security officials of the National Security Agency explicitly forewarned her against violating basic laws and regulations designed to prevent the compromise of classified information.
NSA, FBI Have Enough Evidence
Surely, enough time has passed, and enough material has been reviewed, to permit a preliminary damage assessment. The NSA has the necessary information and should, by now, have shared that information with the FBI. Secretary Clinton’s server in her house in Chappaqua, New York, was not a secured device. Her email address incorporated her initials, “hdr” (apparently for her maiden name, Hillary Diane Rodham). It also included the “clinton” server identity, so it was easy for a hacker to spot.
Anyone with the proper equipment, knowledge and motivation might have been able to obtain access. That is what hackers are able to do, with considerable success, against government servers that are far better protected than the private email server located in her New York State home.
In fact, there have been reports that Secretary Clinton’s emails were, indeed, hacked successfully by foreigners. The Romanian hacker who goes by the name Guccifer claimed earlier this month that he had repeatedly hacked her email server. He described the server as “like an open orchid on the Internet” and that “it was easy … easy for me, for everybody.” Guccifer has been extradited from Romania and is now in jail in Alexandria, Virginia, where the FBI is said to be questioning him on the emails. There have also been credible claims that Russian intelligence and other foreign services were able to hack the Secretary’s server.
Another argument being surfaced, in a transparent attempt to defend Secretary Clinton, has to do with intent. It is said that she did not intend to have classified information on her computer in New York and had no intention of handling secret material in a way that would be accessible to foreign intelligence or others lacking the proper security clearances and the need-to-know.
But while intent might be relevant in terms of punishment, it does not change the fact that as a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, then Senator Clinton had clearances for classified information for years before becoming Secretary of State. She knew the rules and yet as Secretary she handled classified information carelessly after a deliberate decision to circumvent normal procedures for its safeguarding, thus making it vulnerable to foreign intelligence, as well as to criminal hackers.
Anyone who has ever handled classified material knows that there are a number of things that you do not do. You do not take it home with you, you do not copy it and share it with anyone who does not have a clearance and a need-to-know, you do not strip off the classification marks and treat it as unclassified, and you do not transfer it to another email account that is not protected by a government server.
If you have a secured government computer operating off of a secure server that means that what is on the computer stays on the computer. This is not a matter of debate or subject to interpretation. It is how one safeguards classified information, even if one believes that the material should not be classified, which is another argument that has been made in Clinton’s defense. Whether or not the classification is unnecessary is not your decision to make.
Apart from the guidelines for proper handling of classified information, outlined in Executive Order 13526 and 18 U.S.C Sec. 793(f) of the federal code, there is some evidence of a cover-up regarding what was compromised. This itself would be a violation of the 2009 Federal Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act.
Numerous messages both in New York and in Washington have reportedly been erased or simply cannot be found. In addition, the law cited above explicitly makes it a felony to cut and paste classified information removing its classification designation. Retaining such information on a private email system is also a felony. In one of Secretary Clinton’s emails, she instructed her staff simply to remove a classification and send the information to her on her server.
So the question is not whether Secretary Clinton broke the law. She did. If the laws are to be equally applied, she should face the same kind of consequences as others who have been found, often on the basis of much less convincing evidence, guilty of similar behavior.
Some More Equal Than Others
Secretary Clinton’ case invites comparison with what happened to former CIA case officer Jeffrey Sterling, now serving a three-and-a-half-year prison term for allegedly leaking information to New York Times journalist James Risen. Sterling first came to the media’s attention when in 2003 he blew the whistle on a botched CIA operation called Operation Merlin, telling the Senate Intelligence Committee staff that the operation had ended up revealing nuclear secrets to Iran. When in 2006 James Risen published a book that discussed, inter alia, this amateurish cowboy operation, the Department of Justice focused on Sterling as the suspected source.
In court, the federal prosecutors relied almost entirely on Risen’s phone and email logs, which reportedly demonstrated that the two men had been in contact up until 2005. But the prosecutors did not provide the content of those communications even though the FBI was listening in on some of them. Risen has claimed that he had multiple sources on Operation Merlin, and Sterling has always denied being involved.
Jeffrey Sterling was not permitted to testify in the trial on his own behalf because he would have had to discuss Operation Merlin, which was and is still classified. He could not mention any details about it even if they were already publicly known through the Risen book. No evidence was ever produced in court demonstrating that any classified information ever passed between the two men, but Sterling, an African American, was nevertheless convicted by an all-white jury in Virginia based on “suspicion” and the presumption that “it had to be him.”
The contrast between the copious evidence – some of it self-admitted – of Secretary Clinton’s demonstrable infractions, on the one hand, and the very sketchy, circumstantial evidence used to convict and imprison Jeffrey Sterling, on the other, lend weight to the suspicion that there is one law for the rich and powerful in the United States and another for the rest of us.
Failing to take steps against a politically powerful presidential candidate and letting her off unscathed for crimes of her own making, while an institutionally unprotected Jeffrey Sterling sits in prison would be a travesty of justice not dissimilar to the gentle wrist-slap given Gen. David Petraeus for giving his mistress extremely sensitive information and then lying to the FBI about it.
Your order to then-Attorney General Eric Holder to let Gen. David Petraeus off easy created a noxious – and demoralizing – precedent in the national security community indicating that, whatever the pains taken at lower levels to prevent compromise of duly classified information, top officials are almost never held accountable for disregarding well-established rules. These are some of the reasons we are so concerned that this is precisely the direction in which you seem to be leaning on the Clinton email issue.
In our view, the sole legitimate reason for disclosing classified information springs from the only “oath” we all took – “to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.” When, for example, Edward Snowden saw the U.S. government grossly violating our Fourth Amendment right to be “secure” against warrantless “searches and seizures,” he gave more weight to that oath (ethicists call it a supervening value) than to the promise he had made not to disclose information that could harm U.S. national security.
Possibly Still Worse Ahead
You might give some thought, Mr. President, to a potentially messy side of this. What is already known about NSA’s collect-it-all electronic practices over the past several years strongly suggests that NSA, and perhaps the FBI, already know chapter and verse. It is virtually certain they know what was in Secretary Clinton’s emails – including the ones she thought she had deleted. It is likely that they have also been able to determine which foreign intelligence agencies and other hackers were able to access the emails.
One ignores this at one’s peril. Secretary Clinton’s security violations can have impact not only on whether she becomes your successor, but also on whether she would, in that case, be beholden to those who know what lies hidden from the rest of us – perhaps even from you.
Intelligence professionals (in contrast to the occasional political functionary) take the compromise of classified information with utmost seriousness. More important: this is for us a quintessentially nonpartisan issue. It has to do, first and foremost, with the national security of the United States.
We are all too familiar with what harm can come from blithe disregard of basic procedures designed to protect sensitive intelligence and other national security information. Yes, the lamentable unevenness in how such infractions are handled is also an important issue – but that is not our main focus in the present context.
The Truth Will Out
Not all workers at the NSA or the FBI are likely to keep their heads in the sand, as they watch very senior officials and politicians with their own agendas disregard laws to safeguard the nation’s security. We know what it is like to do the difficult, disciplined work of protecting information from being compromised by strictly abiding by what often seem to be cumbersome rules and regulations. We’ve been there; done that.
If you encourage the Department of Justice and the FBI to continue slow-walking the investigation, there is a good chance the truth will come out anyway. As you are aware, the Justice Department, the FBI, and NSA have all yielded recent patriots who, in such circumstances, decided that whistleblowing – rather than silence – was the only way to honor the oath we all swore – to support and defend the Constitution.
To sum up our concern regarding how all this plays out, if you order the Justice Department and FBI to pursue the investigation with “all deliberate speed,” so to speak, and Secretary Clinton becomes president, the juicy email secrets in the hidden hands of the NSA and FBI are likely to give those already powerful institutions a capacity for blackmail that would make J. Edgar Hoover’s mouth water. In addition, information hacked by foreign intelligence services or Guccifer-like hackers can also provide useful grist for leverage or blackmail.
Taking Care the Laws Are Faithfully Executed
We strongly urge you to order Attorney General Loretta Lynch to instruct FBI Director James Comey to wind up a preliminary investigation and tell the country now what they have learned. By now they – and U.S. intelligence agencies – have had enough time to do an early assessment of what classified data, programs and people have been compromised. Realistically speaking, a lengthier, comprehensive post-mortem-type evaluation – however interesting it might be, might never see the light of day under a new president.
We believe the American people are entitled to prompt and full disclosure, and respectfully suggest that you ensure that enforcement of laws protecting our national security does not play stepchild to political considerations on this key issue.
On April 10, you assured Chris Wallace, “I guarantee that there is no political influence in any investigation conducted by the Justice Department, or the FBI – not just in this [Clinton email] case, but in any case. Full stop. Period.”
We urge you to abide by that promise, and let the chips fall where they may. Full stop. Period.
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)
William Binney, Technical Director, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Thomas Drake, Senior Executive, NSA (former)
Philip Giraldi, CIA, Operations Officer (ret.)
Sen. Mike Gravel, D, Alaska; earlier, Army Intelligence
Matthew Hoh, former Capt., USMC, Iraq & Foreign Service Officer, Afghanistan (associate VIPS)
Larry C. Johnson, CIA & State Department (ret.)
Michael S. Kearns, Captain, USAF Intelligence Agency (ret.), ex-Master SERE Instructor
John Kiriakou, Former CIA Counterterrorism Officer
Ray McGovern, former US Army infantry/intelligence officer & CIA analyst (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East, CIA (ret.)
Todd Pierce, MAJ, US Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Scott Ritter, former MAJ, USMC, former UN Weapon Inspector, Iraq
Diane Roark, DOE, DOD, NSC, & professional staff, House Intelligence Committee (ret.)
Robert David Steele, former CIA Operations Officer
Peter Van Buren, U.S. Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.) (associate VIPS)
Kirk Wiebe, former Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA, (ret.)
Ann Wright, U.S. Army Reserve Colonel (ret) and former U.S. DiplomatStory highlights Sprawling Los Angeles property donated for war vets in 1888
ACLU sues to let thousands of homeless vets live there
"Born on the Fourth of July" vet Ron Kovic calls for "occupation" protest
VA asks judge to throw case out of court
The connection seems obvious: nearly 400 acres of land set aside to house veterans and thousands of veterans who need a place to call home.
But Los Angeles' estimated 8,000 homeless vets have been barred from living at the sprawling campus for decades. The West Los Angeles property -- some of the most valuable in the nation -- was donated in 1888 to "establish, construct and permanently maintain" a branch of a national home for veterans, according to the original deed.
And for nearly a century, that's what happened: permanent veterans facilities sprang up, including a post office, a trolley system and housing for as many as 4,000 vets, said American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Mark Rosenbaum.
But "beginning with the Vietnam War era, vets were kicked out," said Rosenbaum, who's leading a class-action suit over the property against the Department of Veterans Affairs.
Now, a generation after Vietnam, the facility's abandoned buildings are off limits to the veterans they were intended to serve.
"It's a shame," said Carolina Barrie, a descendant of the heiress who donated the land. Veterans should be "given every single opportunity to rehab their lives -- and if they have no place to live, a place to live."
Iraq war veteran Robert Rissman has struggled with homelessness and post-traumatic-stress disorder.
Homeless vets want housing at a sprawling campus, seen here in 1890, where thousands of veterans once lived.
CNN's initial requests to the VA for its side of the lawsuit were referred to the Justice Department, which said it wouldn't comment while the case is still pending.
Vet: 'I just wanted to die or go to prison'
Iraq war veteran Robert Rissman, 22, isn't part of the lawsuit, but he has spent years battling addiction, post-traumatic-stress disorder and homelessness.
As an 18-year-old high school senior, Rissman signed up with the Army intending to "go to college and make something of myself," he said. "And the Army said they'd pay for it. "
He was deployed to Iraq for a year as part of a quick response unit that saw constant action. Upon his return to Colorado's Fort Carson, Rissman was diagnosed with PTSD. Nightmares and paranoia haunted him.
It got worse. According to Army papers, he once spent a day drinking and sitting on his bed pointing with the barrel |
erself.”
Daesh writes in its Twitter account that, “The Islamic State of Iraq and Levant is stable and will remain firm with the help of God, Divine rules will be implemented by it and violated rights of Muslims will be regained”. Daesh considers anyone who rejects this, even Muslims, as enemies and a killing target.
These “new invaders”, as the writer describes, try to show themselves as traditional and committed to Sunnat (traditional way of life), but they are moving forward with the modern life and benefit from every new technology.
They have several Twitter accounts with different names, each with a different mission; “Lions of the Islamic State”, “Falcons of the Islamic State”, Companions of the Islamic State”, and “Shaam State” are among the most famous ones.
They have different missions, but they share the same goal: Establishing Khilafa.
Daesh official account has 60,000 followers and they are campaigning to attract more.
According to Daesh rules, having facebook pages is illegal and there are just a couple of pages which their followers do not exceed from several hundred.
The group leadership has also banned follower from using the name “Daesh” and anyone who uses this name in his account will be lashed 70 times.
They have an advertising ministry-like setup which issues statements on different subjects such as, Do not wear jeans, Do not use makeup, Do not shave your face, etc, and they get their statements from their clerics.
Most recently the advertisement ministry is training its followers how to “kindly cut human’s head” because they don’t want to seem violent. They teach followers how they started their war, and justify their acts and lead people to their other pages and groups to join them.
The war in Syria started in March 2011, when pro-reform protests turned into a massive insurgency following the intervention of western and regional states.
Since the start of the war al-Qaeda affiliated groups have been emerging under different names in Syria, fighting at the side of the US-backed opposition which is leading one of the bloodiest conflicts in recent history.
According to the United Nations, more than 100,000 people have been killed and millions displaced due to the turmoil that has gripped Syria for over two years.'Saturday Night Live' alum Jane Curtin also will co-star in the family comedy.
Rob Riggle and Jane Curtin are headed to Fox.
The 21 Jump Street alum and Saturday Night Live vet have been tapped to star in comedy pilot 48 Hours 'Til Monday, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.
Read more TV Pilots 2015: The Complete Guide
The single-camera comedy from The Mindy Project's Charlie Grandy centers on one husband's desperate struggle to not let every weekend go completely to hell.
Riggle will star as Charlie Bishop, an energetic, overcommitted yet blindly confident father of three kids who is happily married. At work all week, Charlie relies on weekends to reconnect with his family and be the kind of "hands-on" father he didn't have growing up.
Curtin will play Louise, the wry and fun mom to Kelly who's currently living at — and smoking cigarettes in — Kelly's and Charlie's house with her husband, Doug. Forced to babysit, Louise has a more relaxed attitude toward child rearing than Kelly and Charlie, and has no problem leaving her three grandchildren alone while she and Doug walk to the Mini Mart.
Grandy will pen the script and exec produce the Universal Television and TBD Productions comedy alongside Peter Traugott and Rachel Kaplan.
Riggle's credits include NBC comedy pilot The Pro, Adult Swim's NTSF:SD:SUV, Drunk History and Modern Family as well as features 21 Jump Street and its sequel and Dumb and Dumber To. He's repped by WME, Principato-Young and Sloane Offer. He also was the subject of a proposed Modern Family spinoff.
For Curtin, the role marks her return to broadcast following runs on Unforgettable, Gary Unmarried, Crumbs, '80s comedy Kate & Allie as well as 3rd Rock From the Sun. She's repped by ICM Partners
Email: Lesley.Goldberg@THR.com
Twitter: @Snoodit“They never should’ve let George Karl go.”
That’s the most common comment we get at Denver Stiffs. Often times they come after a tough loss, something that Nuggets fans are becoming increasingly familiar with. Karl’s departure from the team has followed the Nuggets like a ghost, haunting the fanbase every time the team goes on a losing streak or blows a fourth quarter lead. “Where would the team be if Karl was still coaching?”
Few moments have been as pivotal for an NBA franchise as the final weeks of George Karl’s tenure. Under coach Karl, the Nuggets had reached the pinnacle of relevancy here in Denver. The team made the playoffs for eight straight years under Karl, including a trip to the western conference finals in 2009. After the departure of Carmelo Anthony in 2011, many fans thought the run of success would be over but Karl and a feisty group of underrated players like Andre Iguodala, Ty Lawson, and Danilo Gallinari helped lead the team to a franchise-best, 57 regular-season wins.
Karl won coach of the year that season, receiving the honor on May 7th. One month later, he was let go.
For many, the circumstances for his departure seemed obvious. Despite the eight year streak of reaching the playoffs, the team had a few high profile meltdowns in the playoffs, being bounced in the first round despite home court advantage one year and underwhelming efforts against higher seeds almost every other year. There was a sense among many fans that Karl could get the team to a certain point but would not lead them over the hump.
That narrative was probably false and over the four years since his departure, the Nuggets have been mired in failed coaching experiments, locker room revolts, and lots and lots of regular season losses. But as his controversial tell-all book is set for release later this month, it is increasingly clear that there is much more to the story that has not been told.
As you’ve probably heard by now, coach Karl held nothing back in his assault on players that he coached (and some that he did not), opposing coaches, teams, and even the league itself. At points in the book, Karl questions Kenyon Martin’s toughness, speculating that he is a problem in part due to the fact that Kenyon didn’t have a father. He also brings up Kenyon’s speech impediment and “yellow” skin as reasons that he was “insecure.”
Karl accused the league of widespread steroid use but offers absolutely no evidence other than the fact that players are bigger, stronger, and faster. It’s a damning accusation from such a high-profile coach and one that could threaten the integrity of the league itself. It’s a strange and reckless accusation for someone who claims over and over again to respect the game that provided him so many opportunities (not to mention millions and millions of dollars).
The book crosses the line on far too many occasions to list in this article. But more damning than the shocking anecdotes or misguided pop-psychology is the way in which Karl appears to see almost no redeemable qualities in any of the superstar players that he coached here in Denver. Karl wants you to know that he alone carried the Nuggets to the playoffs despite all of the character flaws he inherited from players to ownership to the media.
According to Karl himself, “the main purpose of the book is to get the final word in.” Karl wrote the book in part because he wanted the world to know just how lazy, selfish, ignorant, and misguided everyone in the world is except for George Karl. Often times, he has a point. The Nuggets teams that he coached had many players that struggled with both on-court and off-court issues and it was clear to anyone that watched guys like Carmelo Anthony that he had a hard time sticking with the program. Guys like Ty Lawson must’ve been a nightmare to coach, as evidenced in part by the failure of Brian Shaw. No one is rushing to J.R. Smith’s defense about his DUI’s or horrible shot selection.
But despite his best efforts, this book isn’t actually about any of that. The unintended purpose that this book really serves is to show how flawed George Karl was and is as a leader. The book outlines over 30 years of Karl’s experience as a head coach and from his first year to his last he has something negative to say about his players. From “fat” Mel Turpin to “childish” Allen Iverson, Karl would like you to know that he had to deal with divas and jerks everywhere he went.
However, as much as this is an indictment on the players he was given, it is much more an indictment of Karl’s chops as a leader. Iverson once led a team to the NBA Finals, Smith played a crucial role in last year’s NBA finals, and Melo has become a leading voice on social issues. None of those guys are close to perfect, but true leaders find the good in individuals and help them tap into their potential.
Contrast Karl’s own words in this book to those of Gregg Popovich’s words to Tim Duncan upon retirement. Obviously Duncan and Melo are not the same players, leaders, or people, but the biggest takeaway from watching Popovich hold back tears when talking about Duncan is that he truly and deeply loves him. He goes as far as to call Duncan “like a son.”
George Karl wrote over 200 pages of memories and an overwhelming majority of them are about how much he hated his players. And if hate is too strong of a word (it’s not, but just for argument sake) then consider that virtually no former players of Karl’s have rallied to his side. Even the Denver Nuggets as an organization have yet to honor Karl in any meaningful way despite being the 2nd winningest coach in franchise history.
Karl has been gone from Denver for four seasons now. The team wandered aimlessly for a few seasons without a clear path back toward relevancy but have finally found a few promising things to build on. They’re far from a decent ball club and there’s no guaruntee that the new coach will work out. It’s not clear if the team has what it takes to make a push for the 8th seed or if ownership and management will be able to pull off the deal(s) that will get them over the hump.
But if the Karl era still lingered in the minds of nostalgic Nuggets fans, this book should wipe clean all of that. Karl will never coach in the NBA again. He barely got another job after leaving Denver and his one year stint in Sacramento was as forgettable as his memoir. It’s a bitter way to punctuate the legacy of a man that helped bring the team to unprecedented heights, but there is no longer any sense in dwelling in the past.
Hopefully someday soon the Nuggets as a franchise will recognize Karl for the good things that he did for the city of Denver and for the Nuggets as a franchise. But there will be no cleansing Karl of things that he has said or the relationships that he didn’t care to nurture when he was at the head of the table.
Karl wanted to get in the final word. What he ended up giving us all was a chance to finally move on.I have always enjoyed scripture study. I was attempting to “feast on the words” of the Bible but it had always been difficult for me. There seemed to often be some bit of historical context I was missing, or certain passages that seemed to contradict Mormon doctrine. To make matters worse, each time I would look through all of the Mormon resources I had available to me, the verses or chapters I had the most questions about seemed to be completely ignored. I looked everywhere to find Mormon-written books on the Bible to provide answers: Institute and Seminary manuals, commentaries available at Deseret Book, etc. I found almost all of them to be unsatisfying; most were devotional in nature, and typically used the verses as a starting point from which to quote from prophets and apostles, which meant it didn’t really address the scriptures directly.
I went on a search for non-Mormon commentaries and first found a lot of Evangelical commentaries which were often more scholarly and certainly longer and more in-depth, but just as frustrating. When it came to interpretations of scripture, everything had to fit in an evangelical belief system. So while I had found more detailed commentaries, I was simply trading one religious interpretation for another. Eventually I found more academic commentaries such as the Anchor Bible series. Some may argue that these commentaries still have a bias, simply an academic or even non-believing bias. However, I found them refreshing. Rather than sweeping confusing passages under a rug and quoting from other parts of the Bible to support a position, the commentators actually read what the scriptures said, and tried to interpret what it means, even if it contradicts other scripture.
This academic approach also created problems, however. I quickly ran into areas of academic consensus which were either superficially, or entirely opposed, to Mormon Doctrine. While Mormons emphasize the importance of scripture written by Prophets, I learned that many books attributed to famous Biblical figures were actually not written by them. A big chunk of the Book of Isaiah is almost certainly not written by Isaiah. A good number of the letters of Paul, the books of Peter, etc. were all written by others and ascribed to authoritative figures. Some of these problems could be solved with the “translated correctly” caveat, but Joseph Smith didn’t throw these books out during his translation. And many influential Mormon “scriptorians” like Bruce R. McConkie stated emphatically that a person must believe that these books were written by the authors ascribed to them (Scriptorian is a completely made-up Mormon word, by the way).
I started my re-reading of the Bible with the beginning: Genesis. I decided to tackle these stories head on: to find out how the story of Noah’s flood, the tower of Babel, creation, etc. could be proved true. Unfortunately, the “theories of men” proved more convincing and this created many problems for my belief. It turned out even Bible characters like Abraham and Moses were most likely legendary figures who never existed. These figures were created to give an epic tale of where the people of Israel came from, why they are special, and what their purpose is. I was shocked to find through careful study of the Old Testament that there were no prophecies of Jesus in there. The verses quoted throughout the Gospels are all proof texts which are not about Jesus when read in context. They applied these verses after the fact to Jesus even when the originals were about another person or another topic altogether.
It felt like my faith was being eroded from the very foundation. If the Bible was full of legends, misinterpretations of previous scripture, and forgeries, what am I doing believing in Mormonism? I had not ever run into major questions of Mormonism itself, but it felt like the core was rotten so any religion built on top couldn’t be any better. I had to change my belief system to remain a believer. Revelation and scripture are imperfect. And I mean much more than simply imperfect. I had always viewed scripture as having essentially perfect words of God, and our leaders as effectively infallible conduits to the divine. I was forced to confront the fact that everything was much messier. Scripture was not a case of perfect revelation being written in imperfect speech. The revelation itself was completely human. They were just humans attempting to reach God. And sometimes they weren’t anywhere close. I decided that revelation was a progressive and continuous process. It wasn’t only line upon line; sometimes we erased all of the other lines first. Whether or not God existed or actually revealed things to us, the only way we can reach a more “divine” understanding of the world and the universe is through our combined knowledge and continued learning and sharing.
How does Joseph Smith and his scripture match up with the Bible? Is it a pale imitation? Something completely different? An obvious fraud when compared with the ancient and widely read Bible? Let’s compare with the “problems” I had with the Bible:
1) Forgeries – Joseph Smith also wrote books and claimed they were authored by Bible figures: Abraham, Moses, John, etc. Those who have issues with supposed non-historical scripture authored by Joseph may have a different perspective if they knew this is a long and proud tradition in the Bible: books written by some guy but ascribed to a famous figure.
2) Myths and Legends – Joseph Smith wrote an entire book of scripture to explain where Native Americans came from, just like the Israelites wrote stories about where their people came from. Both come from a similar place – the desire to understand the world around them.
3) Proof texting of Scripture – Just like New Testament authors, Joseph Smith and future Mormon prophets used proof texting of scripture to prove Doctrines or that a current event was predicted by scripture. We can argue all day long whether Ezekiel 37 is a prophecy of the Book of Mormon or a prophecy about the kingdoms of Israel, but in the end it doesn’t matter. Proof texting of scripture is for believers, not for proof to others. Some evangelicals have attempted to prove Mormonism is false by showing that common Mormon proof texts do not work in the original context. However, if they applied the same level of rigor to prophecies of Jesus they would find similar issues.
4) Imperfect process – Joseph Smith, just like Biblical prophets, put strange or even disturbing ideas into the mouth of God. The purpose of revelation is to think about these ideas, and some must be rejected. I don’t believe in a God who destroys people for seemingly no reason (1 Chron. 21 for one example), and I don’t believe that polygamy as a requirement for heaven was inspired.
A common element of a testimony is the statement, “Joseph Smith was a prophet.” I know of few other ways of testing that claim than to compare against other prophets who wrote in the Bible. One of the most difficult parts of testing the prophetic claim is trying to figure out just what “prophet” means in the first place. However, based on my reading of the Bible, if we are to call Biblical writers “prophets” and then reject Joseph Smith because his writings aren’t historical or perfect, we are making a mistake. The Bible is full of non-historical writings, proof texting, and weird ideas. To me, Joseph Smith fits every definition of a prophet as seen in the Bible. I no longer see scripture as a source for direct words from God to me, but I still enjoy reading scripture. There are many fascinating historical and spiritual aspects to our Mormon scripture canon. There is also the disturbing and bizarre. After rejecting a simplistic view of what scripture is, it actually become much more interesting. Because how it was written, what the authors believed, and what they wanted to tell us, is much better. Even Joseph Smith.Fun with parallel monad comprehensions (The Monad.Reader)
This article is a re-publication of an article that I wrote some time ago for The Monad.Reader magazine, which is an online magazine about functional programming and Haskell. You can also read the article in the original PDF format as part of the Issue 18 (together with two other interesting articles). The samples from the article can be found on Github.
Monad comprehensions have an interesting history. They were the first syntactic extension for programming with monads. They were implemented in Haskell, but later replaced with plain list comprehensions and monadic do notation. Now, monad comprehensions are back in Haskell, more powerful than ever before!
Redesigned monad comprehensions generalize the syntax for working with lists. Quite interestingly, they also generalize syntax for zipping, grouping and ordering of lists. This article shows how to use some of the new expressive power when working with well-known monads. You'll learn what "parallel composition" means for parsers, a poor man's concurrency monad and an evaluation order monad.
1 Introduction
This article is inspired by my earlier work on joinads [1], an extension that adds pattern matching on abstract values to the computation expression syntax in F#. Computation expressions are quite similar to the do notation in Haskell. After implementing the F# version of joinads, I wanted to see how the ideas would look in Haskell. I was quite surprised to find out that a recent extension for GHC adds some of the expressive power of joinads to Haskell.
To add some background: the F# computation expression syntax can be used to work with monads, but also with monoids and a few other abstract notions of computation. It also adds several constructs that generalize imperative features of F#, including while and for loops as well as exception handling. The joinads extension adds support for pattern-matching on "monadic values". For example, you can define a parallel programming monad and use joinads to wait until two parallel computations both complete or wait until the first of the two completes returning a value matching a particular pattern.
How are F# joinads related to Haskell? A recent GHC patch implemented by Nils Schweinsberg [2, 3] brings back support for monad comprehensions to Haskell. The change is now a part of the main branch and will be available in GHC starting with the 7.2 release. The patch doesn't just re-implement original monad comprehensions, but also generalizes recent additions to list comprehensions, allowing parallel monad comprehensions and monadic versions of operations like ordering and grouping [4].
The operation that generalizes parallel comprehensions is closely related to a merge operation that I designed for F# joinads. In the rest of this article, I demonstrate some of the interesting programs that can be written using this operation and the elegant syntax provided by the re-designed monad comprehensions.
1.1 Quick review of list comprehensions
List comprehensions are a very powerful mechanism for working with lists in Haskell. I expect that you're already familiar with them, but let me start with a few examples. I will use the examples later to demonstrate how the generalized monad comprehension syntax works in a few interesting cases.
If we have a list animals containing "cat" and "dog" and a list sounds containing animal sounds "meow" and "woof", we can write the following snippets:
> [ a ++ " " ++ s | a <- animals, s <- sounds ] ["cat meow","cat woof","dog meow","dog woof"] > [ a ++ " " ++ s | a <- animals, s <- sounds, a!! 1 == s!! 1 ] ["dog woof"] > [ a ++ " " ++ s | a <- animals | s <- sounds ] ["cat meow","dog woof"]
The first example uses just the basic list comprehension syntax. It uses two generators to implement a Cartesian product of the two collections. The second example adds a guard to specify that we want only pairs of strings whose second character is the same. The guard serves as an additional filter for the results.
The last example uses parallel list comprehensions. The syntax is available after enabling the ParallelListComp language extension. It allows us to take elements from multiple lists, so that the nth element of the first list is matched with the nth element of the second list. The same functionality can be easily expressed using the zip function.
1.2 Generalizing to monad comprehensions
The three examples we've seen in the previous section are straightforward when working with lists. After installing the latest development snapshot of GHC and turning on the MonadComprehensions language extension, we can use the same syntax for working with further notions of computation. If we instantiate the appropriate type classes, we can even use guards, parallel comprehensions and operations like ordering or grouping. Here are some of the type classes and functions that are used by the desugaring:
class Monad m where (>>=) :: m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b return :: a -> m a class (Monad m) => MonadPlus m where mzero :: m a mplus :: m a -> m a -> m a class (Monad m) => MonadZip m where mzip :: m a -> m b -> m (a, b) guard :: MonadPlus m => Bool -> m () guard b = if b then return () else mzero
Aside from Monad, the desugaring also uses the MonadPlus and MonadZip type classes. The former is used only for the guard function, which is also defined above. The latter is a new class which has been added as a generalization of parallel list comprehensions. The name of the function makes it clear that the type class is a generalization of the zip function. The patch also defines a MonadGroup type class that generalizes grouping operations inside list comprehensions, but I will not discuss that feature in this article.
You can find the general desugaring rules in the patch description [2]. In this article, we'll just go through the examples from the previous section and examine what the translation looks like. The following declaration shows how to implement the Monad, MondPlus, and MonadZip type classes for lists:
instance Monad [] where source >>= f = concat $ map f source return a = [a] instance MonadPlus [] where mzero = [] mplus = (++) instance MonadZip [] where mzip = zip
The >>= operation, called bind, applies the provided function to each element of the input list and then concatenates the generated lists. The return function creates a singleton list containing the specified value. The mzero value from MonadPlus type class is an empty list, which means that guard returns [()] when the argument is True and the empty list otherwise. Finally, the mzip function for lists is just zip.
Now we have everything we need to look at the desugaring of monad comprehensions. The first example from the previous section used multiple generators and can be translated purely in terms of Monad :
animals >>= (\a -> sounds >>= (\s -> return $ a ++ " " ++ b))
Every generator is translated to a binding using >>=. The operations are nested, and the innermost operation always returns the result of the output function. The next snippet shows what happens when we add a predicate to filter the results:
animals >>= (\a -> sounds >>= (\s -> guard (a!! 1 == s!! 1) >>= (\_ -> return $ a ++ " " ++ s) ))
A predicate is translated into a call to the guard function in the innermost part of the desugared expression. When the function returns mzero value (an empty list), the result of the binding will also be mzero, so the element for which the predicate doesn't hold will be filtered out. Finally, let's look at the translation of the last example:
(animals `mzip` sounds) >>= (\(a, s) -> return $ a ++ " " ++ s)
When we use parallel comprehensions, the inputs of the generators are combined using the mzip function. The result is passed to the bind operation, which applies the output function to values of the combined computation. If we also specified filtering, the guard function would be added to the innermost expression, as in the previous example.
As you can see, the translation of monad comprehensions is quite simple, but it adds expressivity to the syntax for working with monads. In particular, the do notation doesn't provide an equivalent syntactic extension for writing parallel comprehensions. (Constructs like generalized ordering, using functions of type m a -> m a, and generalized grouping, using functions of type m a -> m (m a), add even more expressivity, but that's a topic for another article.) In the next three sections, I show how we could implement the mzip operation for several interesting monads, representing parsers, resumable computations, and parallel computations. At the end of the article, I also briefly consider laws that should hold about the mzip operation.
2 Composing parsers in parallel
What does a parallel composition of two parsers mean? Probably the best thing we can do is to run both parsers on the input string and return a tuple with the two results. That sounds quite simple, but what is this construct good for? Let's first implement it and then look at some examples.
2.1 Introducing parsers
A parser is a function that takes an input string and returns a list of possible results. It may be empty (if the parser fails) or contain several items (if there are multiple ways to parse the input). The implementation I use in this article mostly follows the one by Hutton and Meijer [5].
newtype Parser a = Parser (String -> [(a, Int, String)])
The result of parsing is a tuple containing a value of type a produced by the parser, the number of characters consumed by the parser, and the remaining unparsed part of the string. The Int value represents the number of characters consumed by the parser. It is not usually included in the definition, but we'll need it in the implementation of mzip.
Now that we have a definition of parsers, we can create our first primitive parser and a function that runs a parser on an input string and returns the results:
item :: Parser Char item = Parser (\input -> case input of "" -> [] c:cs -> [(c, 1, cs)]) run :: Parser a -> [a] run (Parser p) input = [ result | (result, _, tail) <- p input, tail == [] ]
The item parser returns the first character of the input string. When it succeeds, it consumes a single character, so it returns 1 as the second element of the tuple. The run function applies the underlying function of the parser to a specified input. As specified by the condition tail == [], the function returns the results of those parsers which parsed the entire input. The next step is to make the parser monadic.
2.2 Implementing the parser monad
Parsers are well known examples of monads and of monoids. This means that we can implement both the Monad and the MonadPlus type classes for our Parser type. The implementation looks as follows:
instance Monad Parser where return a = Parser (\input -> [(a, 0, input)]) (Parser p1) >>= f = Parser (\input -> [ (result, n1 + n2, tail) | (a, n1, input') <- p1 input, let (Parser p2) = f a, (result, n2, tail) <- p2 input' ]) instance MonadPlus Parser where mzero = Parser (\_ -> []) mplus (Parser p1) (Parser p2) = Parser (\input -> p1 input ++ p2 input)
The return operation returns a single result containing the specified value that doesn't consume any input. The >>= operation can be implemented using ordinary list comprehensions. It runs the parsers in sequence, returns the result of the second parser and consumes the sum of characters consumed by the first and the second parser. The mzero operation creates a parser that always fails, and mplus represents a nondeterministic choice between two parsers.
The two type class instances allow us to use some of the monad comprehension syntax. We can now use the item primitive to write a few simple parsers:
sat :: (Char -> Bool) -> Parser Char sat pred = [ ch | ch <- item, pred ch ] char, notChar :: Char -> Parser Char char ch = sat (ch ==) notChar ch = sat (ch /=) some p = [ a:as | a <- p, as <- many p ] many p = some p `mplus` return []
The sat function creates a parser that parses a character matching the specified predicate. The generator syntax ch <- item corresponds to monadic binding and is desugared into an application of the >>= operation. Because the Parser type is an instance of MonadPlus, we can use the predicate pred ch as a guard. The desugared version of the function is:
sat pred = item >>= (\ch -> guard (pred ch) >>= (\_ -> return ch))
The some and many combinators are mutually recursive. The first creates a parser that parses one or more occurrences of p. We encode it using a monad comprehension with two bindings. The parser parses p followed by many p. Another way to write the some parser would be to use combinators for working with applicative functors. This would allow us to write just (:) <$> p <*> many p. However, using combinators becomes more difficult when we need to specify a guard as in the sat parser. Monad comprehensions provide a uniform and succinct alternative.
The order of monadic bindings usually matters. The monad comprehension syntax makes this fact perhaps slightly less obvious than the do notation. To demonstrate this, let's look at a parser that parses the body of an expression enclosed in brackets:
brackets :: Char -> Char -> Parser a -> Parser a brackets op cl body = [ inner | _ <- char op, inner <- brackets op cl body `mplus` body, _ <- char cl ] skipBrackets = brackets '(' ')' (many item)
The brackets combinator takes characters representing opening and closing brackets and a parser for parsing the body inside the brackets. It uses a monad comprehension with three binding expressions that parse an opening brace, the body or more brackets, and then the closing brace.
If you run the parser using run skipBrackets "((42))" you get a list containing "42", but also "(42)". This is because the many item parser can also consume brackets. To correct that, we need to write a parser that accepts any character except opening and closing brace. As we will see shortly, this can be elegantly solved using parallel comprehensions.
2.3 Parallel composition of parsers
To support parallel monad comprehensions, we need to implement MonadZip. As a reminder, the type class defines an operation mzip with the following type:
mzip :: m a -> m b -> m (a, b)
By looking just at the type signature, you can see that the operation can be implemented in terms of >>= and return like this:
mzip ma mb = ma >>= \a -> mb >>= \b -> return (a, b)
This is a reasonable definition for some monads, such as the Reader monad, but not for all of them. For example, mzip for lists should be zip, but the definition above would behave as a Cartesian product! A more interesting definition for parsers, which cannot be expressed using other monad primitives, is parallel composition:
instance MonadZip Parser where mzip (Parser p1) (Parser p2) = Parser (\input -> [ ((a, b), n1, tail1) | (a, n1, tail1) <- p1 input, (b, n2, tail2) <- p2 input, n1 == n2 ])
The parser created by mzip independently parses the input string using both of the parsers. It uses list comprehensions to find all combinations of results such that the number of characters consumed by the two parsers was the same. For each matching combination, the parser returns a tuple with the two parsing results. Requiring that the two parsers consume the same number of characters is not an arbitrary decision. It means that the remaining unconsumed strings tail1 and tail2 are the same and so we can return either of them. Using a counter is more efficient than comparing strings and it also enables working with infinite strings.
Let's get back to the example with parsing brackets. The following snippet uses parallel monad comprehensions to create a version that consumes all brackets:
skipAllBrackets = brackets '(' ')' body where body = many [ c | c <- notChar '(' | _ <- notChar ')' ]
The parser body takes zero or more of any characters that are not opening or closing brackets. The parallel comprehension runs two notChar parsers on the same input. They both read a single character and they succeed if the character is not `(' and `)' respectively. The resulting parser succeeds only if both of them succeed. Both parsers return the same character, so we return the first one as the result and ignore the second.
Another example where this syntax is useful is validation of inputs. For example, a valid Cambridge phone number consists of 10 symbols, contains only digits, and starts with 1223. The new syntax allows us to directly encode these three rules:
cambridgePhone = [ n | n <- many (sat isDigit) | _ <- replicateM 10 item | _ <- startsWith (string "1223") ]
The encoding is quite straightforward. We need some additional combinators, such as replicateM, which repeats a parser a specified number of times, and startsWith, which runs a parser and then consumes any number of characters.
We could construct a single parser that recognizes valid Cambridge phone numbers without using mzip. The point of this example is that we can quite nicely combine several independent rules, which makes the validation code easy to understand and extend.
2.4 Parallel composition of context-free parsers
Monadic parser combinators are very expressive. In fact, they are often too expressive, which makes it difficult to implement the combinators efficiently. This was a motivation for the development of non-monadic parsers, such as the one by Swierstra [6, 7], which are less expressive but more efficient. Applicative functors, developed by McBride and Paterson [8], are a weaker abstraction that can be used for writing parsers. The next snippet shows the Haskell type class Applicative that represents applicative functors.
class (Functor f) => Applicative f where pure :: a -> f a (<*>) :: f (a -> b) -> f a -> f b
If you're familiar with applicative functors, you may know that there is an alternative definition of Applicative that uses an operation with the same type signature as mzip. We could use mzip to define an Applicative instance, but this would give us a very different parser definition! In some sense, the following example combines two different applicative functors, but I'll write more about that in the next section.
The usual applicative parsers allow us to write parsers where the choice of the next parser doesn't depend on the value parsed so far. In terms of formal language theory, they can express only context-free languages. This is still sufficient for many practical purposes. For example, our earlier brackets parser can be written using the applicative combinators:
brackets op cl body = pure (\_ inner _ -> inner) <*> char op <*> brackets op cl body `mplus` body <*> char cl
The example first creates a parser that always succeeds and returns a function using the pure combinator. Then it applies this function (contained in a parser) to three arguments (produced by the three parsers). The details are not important, but the example shows that comprehensions with independent generators can be expressed just using the Applicative interface.
The interesting question is, what operation does mzip represent for context-free grammars? A language we obtain if parses for two other languages both succeed is an intersection of the two languages. An intersection of two context-free languages is not necessarily context-free, which can be demonstrated using the following example:
A = { am bm cn | m, n ≥ 0 }
B = { an bm cm | m, n ≥ 0 }
A ∩ B = { am bm cm | m ≥ 0 }
The language A accepts words that start with some number of `a' followed by |
) form in the soil profile. The alteration and movement of materials within a soil causes the formation of distinctive soil horizons. However, more recent definitions of soil embrace soils without any organic matter, such as those regoliths that formed on Mars[72] and analogous conditions in planet Earth deserts.[73]
An example of the development of a soil would begin with the weathering of lava flow bedrock, which would produce the purely mineral-based parent material from which the soil texture forms. Soil development would proceed most rapidly from bare rock of recent flows in a warm climate, under heavy and frequent rainfall. Under such conditions, plants (in a first stage nitrogen-fixing lichens and cyanobacteria then epilithic higher plants) become established very quickly on basaltic lava, even though there is very little organic material. The plants are supported by the porous rock as it is filled with nutrient-bearing water that carries minerals dissolved from the rocks. Crevasses and pockets, local topography of the rocks, would hold fine materials and harbour plant roots. The developing plant roots are associated with mineral-weathering mycorrhizal fungi[74] that assist in breaking up the porous lava, and by these means organic matter and a finer mineral soil accumulate with time. Such initial stages of soil development have been described on volcanoes,[75] inselbergs,[76] and glacial moraines.[77]
Factors [ edit ]
How soil formation proceeds is influenced by at least five classic factors that are intertwined in the evolution of a soil. They are: parent material, climate, topography (relief), organisms, and time.[78] When reordered to climate, relief, organisms, parent material, and time, they form the acronym CROPT.[79]
Parent material [ edit ]
The mineral material from which a soil forms is called parent material. Rock, whether its origin is igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic, is the source of all soil mineral materials and the origin of all plant nutrients with the exceptions of nitrogen, hydrogen and carbon. As the parent material is chemically and physically weathered, transported, deposited and precipitated, it is transformed into a soil.
Typical soil parent mineral materials are:
Quartz: SiO 2
Calcite: CaCO 3
Feldspar: KAlSi 3 O 8
O Mica (biotite): K(Mg,Fe) 3 AlSi 3 O 10 (OH) 2
Soil, on an agricultural field in Germany, which has formed on loess parent material.
Parent materials are classified according to how they came to be deposited. Residual materials are mineral materials that have weathered in place from primary bedrock. Transported materials are those that have been deposited by water, wind, ice or gravity. Cumulose material is organic matter that has grown and accumulates in place.
Residual soils are soils that develop from their underlying parent rocks and have the same general chemistry as those rocks. The soils found on mesas, plateaux, and plains are residual soils. In the United States as little as three percent of the soils are residual.
Most soils derive from transported materials that have been moved many miles by wind, water, ice and gravity.
Aeolian processes (movement by wind) are capable of moving silt and fine sand many hundreds of miles, forming loess soils (60–90 percent silt), common in the Midwest of North America, north-western Europe, Argentina and Central Asia. Clay is seldom moved by wind as it forms stable aggregates.
Water-transported materials are classed as either alluvial, lacustrine, or marine. Alluvial materials are those moved and deposited by flowing water. Sedimentary deposits settled in lakes are called lacustrine. Lake Bonneville and many soils around the Great Lakes of the United States are examples. Marine deposits, such as soils along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and in the Imperial Valley of California of the United States, are the beds of ancient seas that have been revealed as the land uplifted.
Ice moves parent material and makes deposits in the form of terminal and lateral moraines in the case of stationary glaciers. Retreating glaciers leave smoother ground moraines and in all cases, outwash plains are left as alluvial deposits are moved downstream from the glacier.
Parent material moved by gravity is obvious at the base of steep slopes as talus cones and is called colluvial material.
Cumulose parent material is not moved but originates from deposited organic material. This includes peat and muck soils and results from preservation of plant residues by the low oxygen content of a high water table. While peat may form sterile soils, muck soils may be very fertile.
Weathering [ edit ]
The weathering of parent material takes the form of physical weathering (disintegration), chemical weathering (decomposition) and chemical transformation. Generally, minerals that are formed under high temperatures and pressures at great depths within the Earth's mantle are less resistant to weathering, while minerals formed at low temperature and pressure environment of the surface are more resistant to weathering.[citation needed] Weathering is usually confined to the top few meters of geologic material, because physical, chemical, and biological stresses and fluctuations generally decrease with depth.[83] Physical disintegration begins as rocks that have solidified deep in the Earth are exposed to lower pressure near the surface and swell and become mechanically unstable. Chemical decomposition is a function of mineral solubility, the rate of which doubles with each 10 °C rise in temperature, but is strongly dependent on water to effect chemical changes. Rocks that will decompose in a few years in tropical climates will remain unaltered for millennia in deserts.[7] Structural changes are the result of hydration, oxidation, and reduction. Chemical weathering mainly results from the excretion of organic acids and chelating compounds by bacteria[84] and fungi,[85] thought to increase under present-day greenhouse effect.[86]
Physical disintegration is the first stage in the transformation of parent material into soil. Temperature fluctuations cause expansion and contraction of the rock, splitting it along lines of weakness. Water may then enter the cracks and freeze and cause the physical splitting of material along a path toward the center of the rock, while temperature gradients within the rock can cause exfoliation of "shells". Cycles of wetting and drying cause soil particles to be abraded to a finer size, as does the physical rubbing of material as it is moved by wind, water, and gravity. Water can deposit within rocks minerals that expand upon drying, thereby stressing the rock. Finally, organisms reduce parent material in size and create crevices and pores through the mechanical action of plant roots and the digging activity of animals. Grinding of parent material by rock-eating animals also contributes to incipient soil formation. [88]
is the first stage in the transformation of parent material into soil. Temperature fluctuations cause expansion and contraction of the rock, splitting it along lines of weakness. Water may then enter the cracks and freeze and cause the physical splitting of material along a path toward the center of the rock, while temperature gradients within the rock can cause exfoliation of "shells". Cycles of wetting and drying cause soil particles to be abraded to a finer size, as does the physical rubbing of material as it is moved by wind, water, and gravity. Water can deposit within rocks minerals that expand upon drying, thereby stressing the rock. Finally, organisms reduce parent material in size and create crevices and pores through the mechanical action of plant roots and the digging activity of animals. Grinding of parent material by rock-eating animals also contributes to incipient soil formation. Chemical decomposition and structural changes result when minerals are made soluble by water or are changed in structure. The first three of the following list are solubility changes and the last three are structural changes.
Of the above, hydrolysis and carbonation are the most effective, in particular in regions of high rainfall, temperature and physical erosion.[96] Chemical weathering becomes more effective as the surface area of the rock increases, thus is favoured by physical disintegration.[97] This stems in latitudinal and altitudinal climate gradients in regolith formation.[98][99]
Saprolite is a particular example of a residual soil formed from the transformation of granite, metamorphic and other types of bedrock into clay minerals. Often called [weathered granite], saprolite is the result of weathering processes that include: hydrolysis, chelation from organic compounds, hydration (the solution of minerals in water with resulting cation and anion pairs) and physical processes that include freezing and thawing. The mineralogical and chemical composition of the primary bedrock material, its physical features, including grain size and degree of consolidation, and the rate and type of weathering transforms the parent material into a different mineral. The texture, pH and mineral constituents of saprolite are inherited from its parent material. This process is also called arenization, resulting in the formation of sandy soils (granitic arenas), thanks to the much higher resistance of quartz compared to other mineral components of granite (micas, amphiboles, feldspars).[100]
Climate [ edit ]
The principal climatic variables influencing soil formation are effective precipitation (i.e., precipitation minus evapotranspiration) and temperature, both of which affect the rates of chemical, physical, and biological processes. Temperature and moisture both influence the organic matter content of soil through their effects on the balance between primary production and decomposition: the colder or drier the climate the lesser atmospheric carbon is fixed as organic matter while the lesser organic matter is decomposed.[101]
Climate is the dominant factor in soil formation, and soils show the distinctive characteristics of the climate zones in which they form, with a feedback to climate through transfer of carbon stocked in soil horizons back to the atmosphere.[17] If warm temperatures and abundant water are present in the profile at the same time, the processes of weathering, leaching, and plant growth will be maximized. According to the climatic determination of biomes, humid climates favor the growth of trees. In contrast, grasses are the dominant native vegetation in subhumid and semiarid regions, while shrubs and brush of various kinds dominate in arid areas.[102]
Water is essential for all the major chemical weathering reactions. To be effective in soil formation, water must penetrate the regolith. The seasonal rainfall distribution, evaporative losses, site topography, and soil permeability interact to determine how effectively precipitation can influence soil formation. The greater the depth of water penetration, the greater the depth of weathering of the soil and its development. Surplus water percolating through the soil profile transports soluble and suspended materials from the upper layers (eluviation) to the lower layers (illuviation), including clay particles[103] and dissolved organic matter.[104] It may also carry away soluble materials in the surface drainage waters. Thus, percolating water stimulates weathering reactions and helps differentiate soil horizons. Likewise, a deficiency of water is a major factor in determining the characteristics of soils of dry regions. Soluble salts are not leached from these soils, and in some cases they build up to levels that curtail plant[105] and microbial growth.[106] Soil profiles in arid and semi-arid regions are also apt to accumulate carbonates and certain types of expansive clays (calcrete or caliche horizons).[107][108] In tropical soils, when the soil has been deprived of vegetation (e.g. by deforestation) and thereby is submitted to intense evaporation, the upward capillary movement of water, which has dissolved iron and aluminum salts, is responsible for the formation of a superficial hard pan of laterite or bauxite, respectively, which is improper for cutivation, a known case of irreversible soil degradation (lateritization, bauxitization).[109]
The direct influences of climate include:
A shallow accumulation of lime in low rainfall areas as caliche
Formation of acid soils in humid areas
Erosion of soils on steep hillsides
Deposition of eroded materials downstream
Very intense chemical weathering, leaching, and erosion in warm and humid regions where soil does not freeze
Climate directly affects the rate of weathering and leaching. Wind moves sand and smaller particles (dust), especially in arid regions where there is little plant cover, depositing it close[111] or far from the entrainment source.[112] The type and amount of precipitation influence soil formation by affecting the movement of ions and particles through the soil, and aid in the development of different soil profiles. Soil profiles are more distinct in wet and cool climates, where organic materials may accumulate, than in wet and warm climates, where organic materials are rapidly consumed.[113] The effectiveness of water in weathering parent rock material depends on seasonal and daily temperature fluctuations, which favour tensile stresses in rock minerals, and thus their mechanical disaggregation, a process called thermal fatigue.[114] By the same process freeze-thaw cycles are an effective mechanism which breaks up rocks and other consolidated materials.[115]
Climate also indirectly influences soil formation through the effects of vegetation cover and biological activity, which modify the rates of chemical reactions in the soil.[116]
Topography [ edit ]
The topography, or relief, is characterized by the inclination (slope), elevation, and orientation of the terrain. Topography determines the rate of precipitation or runoff and rate of formation or erosion of the surface soil profile. The topographical setting may either hasten or retard the work of climatic forces.
Steep slopes encourage rapid soil loss by erosion and allow less rainfall to enter the soil before running off and hence, little mineral deposition in lower profiles. In semiarid regions, the lower effective rainfall on steeper slopes also results in less complete vegetative cover, so there is less plant contribution to soil formation. For all of these reasons, steep slopes prevent the formation of soil from getting very far ahead of soil destruction. Therefore, soils on steep terrain tend to have rather shallow, poorly developed profiles in comparison to soils on nearby, more level sites.[117]
In swales and depressions where runoff water tends to concentrate, the regolith is usually more deeply weathered and soil profile development is more advanced. However, in the lowest landscape positions, water may saturate the regolith to such a degree that drainage and aeration are restricted. Here, the weathering of some minerals and the decomposition of organic matter are retarded, while the loss of iron and manganese is accelerated. In such low-lying topography, special profile features characteristic of wetland soils may develop. Depressions allow the accumulation of water, minerals and organic matter and in the extreme, the resulting soils will be saline marshes or peat bogs. Intermediate topography affords the best conditions for the formation of an agriculturally productive soil.
Organisms [ edit ]
Soil is the most abundant ecosystem on Earth, but the vast majority of organisms in soil are microbes, a great many of which have not been described.[118][119] There may be a population limit of around one billion cells per gram of soil, but estimates of the number of species vary widely from 50,000 per gram to over a million per gram of soil.[118][120] The total number of organisms and species can vary widely according to soil type, location, and depth.[119][120]
Plants, animals, fungi, bacteria and humans affect soil formation (see soil biomantle and stonelayer). Soil animals, including soil macrofauna and soil mesofauna, mix soils as they form burrows and pores, allowing moisture and gases to move about, a process called bioturbation.[121] In the same way, plant roots penetrate soil horizons and open channels upon decomposition.[122] Plants with deep taproots can penetrate many metres through the different soil layers to bring up nutrients from deeper in the profile.[123] Plants have fine roots that excrete organic compounds (sugars, organic acids, mucigel), slough off cells (in particular at their tip) and are easily decomposed, adding organic matter to soil, a process called rhizodeposition.[124] Micro-organisms, including fungi and bacteria, effect chemical exchanges between roots and soil and act as a reserve of nutrients in a soil biological hotspot called rhizosphere.[125] The growth of roots through the soil stimulates microbial populations, stimulating in turn the activity of their predators (notably amoeba), thereby increasing the mineralization rate, and in last turn root growth, a positive feedback called the soil microbial loop.[126] Out of root influence, in the bulk soil, most bacteria are in a quiescent stage, forming microaggregates, i.e. mucilaginous colonies to which clay particles are glued, offering them a protection against desiccation and predation by soil microfauna (bacteriophagous protozoa and nematodes).[127] Microaggregates (20-250 µm) are ingested by soil mesofauna and macrofauna, and bacterial bodies are partly or totally digested in their guts.[128]
Humans impact soil formation by removing vegetation cover with erosion, waterlogging, lateritization or podzolization (according to climate and topography) as the result.[129] Their tillage also mixes the different soil layers, restarting the soil formation process as less weathered material is mixed with the more developed upper layers, resulting in net increased rate of mineral weathering.[130]
Earthworms, ants, termites, moles, gophers, as well as some millipedes and tenebrionid beetles mix the soil as they burrow, significantly affecting soil formation.[131] Earthworms ingest soil particles and organic residues, enhancing the availability of plant nutrients in the material that passes through their bodies.[132] They aerate and stir the soil and create stable soil aggregates, after having disrupted links between soil particles during the intestinal transit of ingested soil,[133] thereby assuring ready infiltration of water.[134] In addition, as ants and termites build mounds, they transport soil materials from one horizon to another.[135] Other important functions are fulfilled by earthworms in the soil ecosystem, in particular their intense mucus production, both within the intestine and as a lining in their galleries,[136] exert a priming effect on soil microflora,[137] giving them the status of ecosystem engineers, which they share with ants and termites.[138]
In general, the mixing of the soil by the activities of animals, sometimes called pedoturbation, tends to undo or counteract the tendency of other soil-forming processes that create distinct horizons.[139] Termites and ants may also retard soil profile development by denuding large areas of soil around their nests, leading to increased loss of soil by erosion.[140] Large animals such as gophers, moles, and prairie dogs bore into the lower soil horizons, bringing materials to the surface.[141] Their tunnels are often open to the surface, encouraging the movement of water and air into the subsurface layers. In localized areas, they enhance mixing of the lower and upper horizons by creating, and later refilling, underground tunnels. Old animal burrows in the lower horizons often become filled with soil material from the overlying A horizon, creating profile features known as crotovinas.[142]
Vegetation impacts soils in numerous ways. It can prevent erosion caused by excessive rain that might result from surface runoff.[143] Plants shade soils, keeping them cooler[144] and slow evaporation of soil moisture,[145] or conversely, by way of transpiration, plants can cause soils to lose moisture, resulting in complex and highly variable relationships between leaf area index (measuring light interception) and moisture loss: more generally plants prevent soil from desiccation during driest months while they dry it during moister months, thereby acting as a buffer against strong moisture variation.[146] Plants can form new chemicals that can break down minerals, both directly[147] and indirectly through mycorrhizal fungi[85] and rhizosphere bacteria,[148] and improve the soil structure.[149] The type and amount of vegetation depends on climate, topography, soil characteristics and biological factors, mediated or not by human activities.[150][151] Soil factors such as density, depth, chemistry, pH, temperature and moisture greatly affect the type of plants that can grow in a given location. Dead plants and fallen leaves and stems begin their decomposition on the surface. There, organisms feed on them and mix the organic material with the upper soil layers; these added organic compounds become part of the soil formation process.[152]
Human activities widely influence soil formation.[153] For example, it is believed that Native Americans regularly set fires to maintain several large areas of prairie grasslands in Indiana and Michigan, although climate and mammalian grazers (e.g. bisons) are also advocated to explain the maintenance of the Great Plains of North America.[154] In more recent times, human destruction of natural vegetation and subsequent tillage of the soil for crop production has abruptly modified soil formation.[155] Likewise, irrigating soil in an arid region drastically influences soil-forming factors,[156] as does adding fertilizer and lime to soils of low fertility.[157]
Time [ edit ]
Time is a factor in the interactions of all the above.[78] While a mixture of sand, silt and clay constitute the texture of a soil and the aggregation of those components produces peds, the development of a distinct B horizon marks the development of a soil or pedogenesis.[158] With time, soils will evolve features that depend on the interplay of the prior listed soil-forming factors.[78] It takes decades[159] to several thousand years for a soil to develop a profile,[160] although the notion of soil development has been criticized, soil being in a constant state-of-change under the influence of fluctuating soil-forming factors.[161] That time period depends strongly on climate, parent material, relief, and biotic activity. For example, recently deposited material from a flood exhibits no soil development as there has not been enough time for the material to form a structure that further defines soil.[164] The original soil surface is buried, and the formation process must begin anew for this deposit. Over time the soil will develop a profile that depends on the intensities of biota and climate. While a soil can achieve relative stability of its properties for extended periods,[160] the soil life cycle ultimately ends in soil conditions that leave it vulnerable to erosion.[165] Despite the inevitability of soil retrogression and degradation, most soil cycles are long.[160]
Soil-forming factors continue to affect soils during their existence, even on "stable" landscapes that are long-enduring, some for millions of years.[160] Materials are deposited on top[166] or are blown or washed from the surface.[167] With additions, removals and alterations, soils are always subject to new conditions. Whether these are slow or rapid changes depends on climate, topography and biological activity.[168]
Time as a soil-forming factor may be investigated by studying soil chronosequences, in which soils of different ages but with minor differences in other soil-forming factors can be compared.[169]
Physical properties [ edit ]
The physical properties of soils, in order of decreasing importance for ecosystem services such as crop production, are texture, structure, bulk density, porosity, consistency, temperature, colour and resistivity.[170] Soil texture is determined by the relative proportion of the three kinds of soil mineral particles, called soil separates: sand, silt, and clay. At the next larger scale, soil structures called peds or more commonly soil aggregates are created from the soil separates when iron oxides, carbonates, clay, silica and humus, coat particles and cause them to adhere into larger, relatively stable secondary structures.[171] Soil bulk density, when determined at standardized moisture conditions, is an estimate of soil compaction.[172] Soil porosity consists of the void part of the soil volume and is occupied by gases or water. Soil consistency is the ability of soil materials to stick together. Soil temperature and colour are self-defining. Resistivity refers to the resistance to conduction of electric currents and affects the rate of corrosion of metal and concrete structures which are buried in soil.[173] These properties vary through the depth of a soil profile, i.e. through soil horizons. Most of these properties determine the aeration of the soil and the ability of water to infiltrate and to be held within the soil.[174]
Influence of Soil Texture Separates on Some Properties of Soils[55] Property/behavior Sand Silt Clay Water-holding capacity Low Medium to high High Aeration Good Medium Poor Drainage rate High Slow to medium Very slow Soil organic matter level Low Medium to high High to medium Decomposition of organic matter Rapid Medium Slow Warm-up in spring Rapid Moderate Slow Compactability Low Medium High Susceptibility to wind erosion Moderate (High if fine sand) High Low Susceptibility to water erosion Low (unless fine sand) High Low if aggregated, otherwise high Shrink/Swell Potential Very Low Low Moderate to very high Sealing of ponds, dams, and landfills Poor Poor Good Suitability for tillage after rain Good Medium Poor Pollutant leaching potential High Medium Low (unless cracked) Ability to store plant nutrients Poor Medium to High High Resistance to pH change Low Medium High
Texture [ edit ]
The mineral components of soil are sand, silt and clay, and their relative proportions determine a soil's texture. Properties that are influenced by soil texture include porosity, permeability, infiltration, shrink-swell rate, water-holding capacity, and susceptibility to erosion. In the illustrated USDA textural classification triangle, the only soil in which neither sand, silt nor clay predominates is called loam. While even pure sand, silt or clay may be considered a soil, from the perspective of conventional agriculture a loam soil with a small amount of organic material is considered "ideal", inasmuch as fertilizers or manure are currently used to mitigate nutrient losses due to crop yields in the long term.[175] The mineral constituents of a loam soil might be 40% sand, 40% silt and the balance 20% clay by weight. Soil texture affects soil behaviour, in particular, its retention capacity for nutrients (e.g., cation exchange capacity)[176] and water.
Sand and silt are the products of physical and chemical weathering of the parent rock;[78] clay, on the other hand, is most often the product of the precipitation of the dissolved parent rock as a secondary mineral, except when derived from the weathering of mica.[177] It is the surface area to volume ratio (specific surface area) of soil particles and the unbalanced ionic electric charges within those that determine their role in the fertility of soil, as measured by its cation exchange capacity.[178][179] Sand is least active, having the least specific surface area, followed by silt; clay is the most active. Sand's greatest benefit to soil is that it resists compaction and increases soil porosity, although this property stands only for pure sand, not for sand mixed with smaller minerals which fill the voids among sand grains.[180] Silt is mineralogically like sand but with its higher specific surface area it is more chemically and physically active than sand. But it is the clay content of soil, with its very high specific surface area and generally large number of negative charges, that gives a soil its high retention capacity for water and nutrients.[178] Clay soils also resist wind and water erosion better than silty and sandy soils, as the particles bond tightly to each other,[181] and that with a strong mitigation effect of organic matter.[182]
Sand is the most stable of the mineral components of soil; it consists of rock fragments, primarily quartz particles, ranging in size from 2.0 to 0.05 mm (0.0787 to 0.0020 in) in diameter. Silt ranges in size from 0.05 to 0.002 mm (0.001969 to 7.9×10−5 in). Clay cannot be resolved by optical microscopes as its particles are 0.002 mm (7.9×10−5 in) or less in diameter and a thickness of only 10 angstroms (10−10 m). In medium-textured soils, clay is often washed downward through the soil profile (a process called eluviation) and accumulates in the subsoil (a process called illuviation). There is no clear relationship between the size of soil mineral components and their mineralogical nature: sand and silt particles can be calcareous as well as siliceous,[185] while textural clay (0.002 mm (7.9×10−5 in)) can be made of very fine quartz particles as well as of multi-layered secondary minerals.[186] Soil mineral components belonging to a given textural class may thus share properties linked to their specific surface area (e.g. moisture retention) but not those linked to their chemical composition (e.g. cation exchange capacity).
Soil components larger than 2.0 mm (0.079 in) are classed as rock and gravel and are removed before determining the percentages of the remaining components and the textural class of the soil, but are included in the name. For example, a sandy loam soil with 20% gravel would be called gravelly sandy loam.
When the organic component of a soil is substantial, the soil is called organic soil rather than mineral soil. A soil is called organic if:
Mineral fraction is 0% clay and organic matter is 20% or more Mineral fraction is 0% to 50% clay and organic matter is between 20% and 30% Mineral fraction is 50% or more clay and organic matter 30% or more.
Structure [ edit ]
The clumping of the soil textural components of sand, silt and clay causes aggregates to form and the further association of those aggregates into larger units creates soil structures called peds (a contraction of the word pedolith). The adhesion of the soil textural components by organic substances, iron oxides, carbonates, clays, and silica, the breakage of those aggregates from expansion-contraction caused by freezing-thawing and wetting-drying cycles,[188] and the build-up of aggregates by soil animals, microbial colonies and root tips[189] shape soil into distinct geometric forms.[38][131] The peds evolve into units which have various shapes, sizes and degrees of development.[190] A soil clod, however, is not a ped but rather a mass of soil that results from mechanical disturbance of the soil such as cultivation. Soil structure affects aeration, water movement, conduction of heat, plant root growth and resistance to erosion.[191] Water, in turn, has a strong effect on soil structure, directly via the dissolution and precipitation of minerals, the mechanical destruction of aggregates (slaking)[192] and indirectly by promoting plant, animal and microbial growth.
Soil structure often gives clues to its texture, organic matter content, biological activity, past soil evolution, human use, and the chemical and mineralogical conditions under which the soil formed. While texture is defined by the mineral component of a soil and is an innate property of the soil that does not change with agricultural activities, soil structure can be improved or destroyed by the choice and timing of farming practices.[38]
Soil structural classes:
Types: Shape and arrangement of peds Platy: Peds are flattened one atop the other 1–10 mm thick. Found in the A-horizon of forest soils and lake sedimentation. Prismatic and Columnar: Prismlike peds are long in the vertical dimension, 10–100 mm wide. Prismatic peds have flat tops, columnar peds have rounded tops. Tend to form in the B-horizon in high sodium soil where clay has accumulated. Angular and subangular: Blocky peds are imperfect cubes, 5–50 mm, angular have sharp edges, subangular have rounded edges. Tend to form in the B-horizon where clay has accumulated and indicate poor water penetration. Granular and Crumb: Spheroid peds of polyhedrons, 1–10 mm, often found in the A-horizon in the presence of organic material. Crumb peds are more porous and are considered ideal. Classes: Size of peds whose ranges depend upon the above type Very fine or very thin: <1 mm platy and spherical; <5 mm blocky; <10 mm prismlike. Fine or thin: 1–2 mm platy, and spherical; 5–10 mm blocky; 10–20 mm prismlike. Medium: 2–5 mm platy, granular; 10–20 mm blocky; 20–50 prismlike. Coarse or thick: 5–10 mm platy, granular; 20–50 mm blocky; 50–100 mm prismlike. Very coarse or very thick: >10 mm platy, granular; >50 mm blocky; >100 mm prismlike. Grades: Is a measure of the degree of development or cementation within the peds that results in their strength and stability. Weak: Weak cementation allows peds to fall apart into the three textural constituents, sand, silt and clay. Moderate: Peds are not distinct in undisturbed soil but when removed they break into aggregates, some broken aggregates and little unaggregated material. This is considered ideal. Strong:Peds are distinct before removed from the profile and do not break apart easily. Structureless: Soil is entirely cemented together in one great mass such as slabs of clay or no cementation at all such as with sand.
At the largest scale, the forces that shape a soil's structure result from swelling and shrinkage that initially tend to act horizontally, causing vertically oriented prismatic peds. This mechanical process is mainly exemplified in the development of vertisols.[194] Clayey soil, due to its differential drying rate with respect to the surface, will induce horizontal cracks, reducing columns to blocky peds.[195] Roots, rodents, worms, and freezing-thawing cycles further break the peds into smaller peds of a more or less spherical shape.[189]
At a smaller scale, plant roots extend into voids (macropores) and remove water[196] causing macroporosity to increase and microporosity to decrease,[197] thereby decreasing aggregate size.[198] At the same time, root hairs and fungal hyphae create microscopic tunnels that break up peds.[199][200]
At an even smaller scale, soil aggregation continues as bacteria and fungi exude sticky polysaccharides which bind soil into smaller peds.[201] The addition of the raw organic matter that bacteria and fungi feed upon encourages the formation of this desirable soil structure.[202]
At the lowest scale, the soil chemistry affects the aggregation or dispersal of soil particles. The clay particles contain polyvalent cations which give the faces of clay layers localized negative charges.[203] At the same time, the edges of the clay plates have a slight positive charge, thereby allowing the edges to adhere to the negative charges on the faces of other clay particles or to flocculate (form clumps).[204] On the other hand, when monovalent ions, such as sodium, invade and displace the polyvalent cations, they weaken the positive charges on the edges, while the negative surface charges are relatively strengthened. This leaves negative charge on the clay faces that repel other clay, causing the particles to push apart, and by doing so deflocculate clay suspensions.[205] As a result, the clay disperses and settles into voids between peds, causing those to close. In this way the open structure of the soil is destroyed and the soil is made impenetrable to air and water.[206] Such sodic soil (also called haline soil) tends to form columnar peds near the surface.[207]
Density [ edit ]
Representative bulk densities of soils. The percentage pore space was calculated using 2.7 g/cm3 for particle density except for the peat soil, which is estimated. Soil treatment and identification Bulk density (g/cm3) Pore space (%) Tilled surface soil of a cotton field 1.3 51 Trafficked inter-rows where wheels passed surface 1.67 37 Traffic pan at 25 cm deep 1.7 36 Undisturbed soil below traffic pan, clay loam 1.5 43 Rocky silt loam soil under aspen forest 1.62 40 Loamy sand surface soil 1.5 43 Decomposed peat 0.55 65
Soil particle density is typically 2.60 to 2.75 grams per cm3 and is usually unchanging for a given soil.[9] Soil particle density is lower for soils with high organic matter content,[209] and is higher for soils with high iron-oxides content.[210] Soil bulk density is equal to the dry mass of the soil divided by the volume of the soil; i.e., it includes air space and organic materials of the soil volume. Thereby soil bulk density is always less than soil particle density and is a good indicator of soil compaction.[211] The soil bulk density of cultivated loam is about 1.1 to 1.4 g/cm3 (for comparison water is 1.0 g/cm3). Contrary to particle density, soil bulk density is highly variable for a given soil, with a strong causal relationship with soil biological activity and management strategies.[213] However, it has been shown that, depending on species and the size of their aggregates (faeces), earthworms may either increase or decrease soil bulk density.[214] A lower bulk density by itself does not indicate suitability for plant growth due to the confounding influence of soil texture and structure.[215] A high bulk density is indicative of either soil compaction or a mixture of soil textural classes in which small particles fill the voids among coarser particles.[216] Hence the positive correlation between the fractal dimension of soil, considered as a porous medium, and its bulk density,[217] that explains the poor hydraulic conductivity of silty clay loam in the absence of a faunal structure.[218]
Porosity [ edit ]
Pore space is that part of the bulk volume of soil that is not occupied by either mineral or organic matter but is open space occupied by either gases or water. In a productive, medium-textured soil the total pore space is typically about 50% of the soil volume.[219] Pore size varies considerably; the smallest pores (cryptopores; <0.1 µm) hold water too tightly for use by plant roots; plant-available water is held in ultramicropores, micropores and mesopores (0.1–75 µm); and macropores (>75 µm) are generally air-filled when the soil is at field capacity.
Soil texture determines total volume of the smallest pores;[220] clay soils have smaller pores, but more total pore space than sands,[221] despite of a much lower permeability.[222] Soil structure has a strong influence on the larger pores that affect soil aeration, water infiltration and drainage. Tillage has the short-term benefit of temporarily increasing the number of pores of largest size |
, we could double the numbers of mouths fed.
For the study, researchers calculated the nutritional needs of Americans and the foods that fall into each of the required food groups. Then they calculated the land required to grow each of these foods. Finally, they calculated the carrying capacity of the land in the US, taking into account how much land is available for three different agricultural uses—food crops, grazing, and land for growing food for livestock. Researchers used these calculations to this to determine how much land is used and how many people are fed under different diet scenarios, with our current diet as a baseline.
The various omnivore scenarios included different percentages (100, 80, 60, 40 and 20) of the U.S. population consuming a diet that includes meat, with the remainder eating an ovo-lacto vegetarian diet. There were three wholly vegetarian scenarios: ovo-lacto, lacto, and vegan. With the exception of our current diet which exceeds dietary guidelines, all of the diet scenarios were equal in calories and met recommended dietary guidelines; what changed was the source of the protein.
When it comes to the footprint of agriculture, four of the diet shifts didn’t produce any changes, even while they increased the number of people fed. The scenarios in which 40 percent and 20 percent of the U.S. are omnivore and all three vegetarian diets shrank agriculture’s footprint, to varying degrees.
When it comes to mouths fed, if we all ate meat, but had a healthy diet that met dietary guidelines, we could feed 16 percent more people. Even a scenario in which 40 percent of the population consumes meat puts food in 87 percent more mouths. If we were all lacto-vegetarians, we could feed 101 percent more people.
But steering clear of all animal products didn’t have the impact some might expect. The vegan diet fed only 83 percent more people, somewhere between the gains of the 40 and 60 percent omnivore diet.
“One of the takeaways of this study is to beware of preconceived notions about the impact of certain diets,” says lead author Christian Peters. “The vegan diet did not feed the most people.”
But vegans can take solace in the fact that while their diet didn’t feed the most people, it has the tiniest footprint of all. —Catherine Elton | 29 July 2016
Source: Peters, Christian J. et al, (2016) Carrying capacity of U.S. agricultural land: Ten diet scenarios, Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene. doi: 10.12952/journal.elementa.000116
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• Igor Gamula: we have enough dark-skinned players • Rostov played in this season’s Europa League
The coach of the Russian Premier League team FC Rostov says he will not sign black players and expressed fears that Ebola could spread to the club.
Igor Gamula told local media the club had “enough dark-skinned players. We’ve got six of the things,” when asked on Friday about rumours Rostov would sign Cameroon defender Benoît Angbwa.
Gamula also said that five of his Russian players were ill and “I’m already worrying it’s Ebola”.
Rostov midfielder Moussa Doumbia is from Mali, which has seen sporadic Ebola cases, but there is no suggestion he is infected. Indeed Doumbia played for Rostov in Friday’s 1-0 win over Ural Yekaterinburg.
Gamula, 54, took over in September at Rostov, who won the Russian Cup last season and played in this season’s Europa League.Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. (R-NC) has looked at war from both sides. As he has readily shared with us, he was hoodwinked by the US intelligence community in the run-up to the Iraq war. He attended the briefings and he trusted the "professionals." As the neocon promised "cakewalk" turned out to be a slaughterhouse, he began to think hard about what he had been told about Iraq and terrorism and 9/11.
He soon realized it was all a fake. He became one of the most important conservative opponents of the wars for the US empire. How many conservatives did his passionate commitment to truth turn against the war? Scores.
Rep. Jones now is convinced that we must end the 16 year US war on Afghanistan. In a recent interview with PJ Media, he pulled no punches in outlining his opposition to the expected Trump Administration military escalation – "surge 3.0" – in Afghanistan.
Said Rep. Jones:
I’m absolutely opposed to [the planned US military escalation], because if you increase the number of American troops that means the number of Americans to be killed and wounded goes up. And again, I come back to the point, what have we accomplished? We spent over $800 billion dollars. We are very close to $1 trillion in the past 16 years.
Jones has introduced legislation, HR 1666, which would “prohibit funds for activities in Afghanistan.” This is the only way we will see an end to the idiotic and slow-motion disaster called "US intervention in Afghanistan."
Though the US Congressman stands behind his 2001 vote to go into Afghanistan to pursue those who might have been behind the 9/11 attacks, he now realizes that that era has passed and that there is no compelling US national security interest in endlessly prolonging this war.
Let us hope – and help – that the Congressman (who is a Ron Paul Institute Board Member) gains some traction with this important piece of legislation. Only the grassroots can pressure Congressmen to co-sponsor and push this legislation through. But it is eminently do-able!
Daniel McAdams is director of the The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity. Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.Now one might think that this is simple regurgitation of the same tepid words, like much of the content, which plies the inter-web. But what’s great about crowdfunding is that every couple of months new trends emerge, the industry is developing in front of us and there is genuinely new stuff to write about. So without further ado here are some of the top 3 emerging trends I have been witnessing.
Trend no 1 - the number of crowdfunding platforms is continuing to grow
The idea of consolidation within the crowdfunding world is clearly premature. According to Massolution, the renowned think tank, the global number of crowdfunding sites has grown from 308 in 2013 to over 1,250 in 2014. Whilst remembering that this estimate covers every type of crowdfunding, from investment-based to reward, this still shows stark growth. Whilst the big names might be leading the way, the smaller sites are finding their niche. They after all are often still in organic growth phases and do not have the need to spend vast sums of cash raised from VCs on marketing. As a demonstration of the growing number of sites, figures in August from Bovill, the Financial Services consultancy, show that in the UK 114 P2P lenders have applied for FCA approval since the start of April 2014. Add equity crowdfunding sites to the mix and that’s a lot of British crowdfunding sites in existence.
Trend no 2 – crowdfunding is becoming the first avenue for funding
Venture Capitalists are the prime source of funding post-seed rounds. But this is slowly changing. A range of companies are now seeking funding from the crowd at far later stages than ever before. And some are not just seeking funding. This summer E-Car Club, a company which raised money through crowdfunding, returned money to investors when the company was sold to Europcar. Whilst the figures were relatively small, the symbolism of this exit cannot be doubted. Crowdfunding is growing UP and becoming an innovative alternative for a full range of companies.
Indeed many VCs are now offering their funds as part of a crowdfunding raise. The reasons why are simple: it shows that the company has traction, they get ‘free’ marketing and if support for the product exists. Crowdfunding can become the litmus test for whether the VC should commit their money. Great examples of this are the last major fundraises by equity crowdfunding sites in the UK. Some companies are even turning down venture funding such as JustPark. And then you get companies like BrewDog, who don’t even go to the professional investors, instead uniquely crowdfund themselves and take investment on a crowdfunding site.
Trend no 3 – equity and lending are continuing to grow
Equity crowdfunding is continuing to steam ahead and dominate the news. There is no doubt that equity is becoming a powerful force. Predictions have equity crowdfunding in 2020 becoming the leading global source of start up finance. That is naturally if it stays on its current high rate of growth. But equity really is a small player in the current funding system, although it has huge potential and can scale in ways that VCs cannot. And what will happen when awareness skyrockets and the normal retail investor starts to dip their fingers in? The potential growth and impact on the funding of exciting start-ups will be incredibly powerful.
But the true star is the quiet cousin of equity crowdfunding – lending. Platforms such as Zopa, Ratesetter and smaller sites such as Saving Stream, Thin Cats and Assetz Capital are all starting to steam ahead. And lending is not being driven by the institutions, although it does play a part. Retail money is alive and strong. The crowdfunding sites are held back by a need for more businesses, as opposed to a lack of retail capital. We are starting to see retail investors who have 100s or even 1,000s of investments, spread over sometimes 10-15 crowdfunding sites. These lenders seem well aware of the risks of investing. Both equity and lending and equity crowdfunding often allow investment from £10, enabling all to take part. What’s there to hate about true financial inclusion?Of Mice & Men album 'Cold World' debuts in Top 25
[ 7,653 views ]
Cold World, the newly released album from Southern California alternative metal band Of Mice & Men, has landed at No. 24 on the Billboard 200 chart on the strength of 19,000 in first-week sales in the United States. Meanwhile, the record debuted at No. 3 and No. 1 on the Independent Albums and Hard Rock Albums charts, respectively.
The showing represents a notable decline when compared to their previous album, 2014's Restoring Force. That record sold roughly 51,000 copies in its first week and debuted at No. 4 on the Billboard 200.
Going back further, Of Mice & Men's The Flood (2011) album bowed at No. 28 on the Billboard 200 with first-week sales of 15,000.
Related News StoriesAny reasonable person must accept that Syria's rulers used chemical weapons last month in the outskirts of Damascus. All weapons are awful. The west condoned their use by Saddam Hussein in Iraq and itself has deployed napalm and white phosphorous. But sarin is specifically illegal in international law and Barack Obama told Syria not to use it. Is his word to mean nothing?
The American secretary of state, John Kerry, is in London today pleading that international law must be enforced. We can agree with him. In Cambodia, Rwanda, Liberia and the former Yugoslavia those convicted of war crimes have been brought before international courts. America has rarely been a supporter of such courts, fearing that its frequent aggression against other states might make it vulnerable to litigation. If America is now changing its tune to the relentless enforcement of international law, that is welcome.
But Washington is not talking about bringing Syria's president Assad to account. It does not talk of one day bringing him to justice. It merely wants to bomb his cities in what appears a furious retaliation for Assad having embarrassed Obama by snubbing his "red line" warning. At this point international law is confused with American pride.
Missiles are poor law enforcers. They rarely kill the right people. They cause vast destruction, wrecking the lives of civilians and increasing their dependency on their oppressors. Missile attacks are mere displays of power, usually as a spectacular alternative to a ground assault. Their military ineffectiveness makes them susceptible to mission creep.
Already Obama has shifted from threatening a "surgical punitive strike" to a massively destructive one, intended to aid the insurgency and thus assist in regime change. This happens to be against international law. More to the point, such missile attacks did not "work" in Serbia, Iraq or Afghanistan. They merely served as a prelude to chaos on the ground and pressure for ground intervention.
If Obama means to achieve regime change in Syria he should be ready to invade. Since he lacks the will and the means for this, he is merely heading for a second humiliation. He should back off and deploy diplomacy and humanitarian relief instead. It is not much, but it is better than bombing.The Champions League previews continue at a fast and furious pace due to my slacking. With Group E previewed Friday, we move on to Group F. If you haven’t already, check out the rest of my previews: Group A, Group B, Group C, and Group D.
Group F, with Chelsea, Marseille, Spartak Moscow and Žilina, has the chance to provide some interesting soccer matches. While Chelsea are the clear favorites, especially when considering their form in the early part of the EPL season (4 wins, 17 goals), the rest of the group should prove competitive.
Chelsea F.C. – Chelsea, last season’s Premier League champions, have during this decade become perennial contenders for both the EPL and Champions League titles. The runners-up (to Manchester United) in 2008, the Blues are looking to finally win the big one this season. Always the stated goal of owner, Roman Abramovich, this could be the year that Chelsea break through and take home the move coveted trophy in club soccer.
Last season, Chelsea exited the Champions League at an early stage (by their high standards), losing to eventual champions Inter in the round of 16. Each of the previous three seasons saw Chelsea make it to at least the semifinals. In an effort to get themselves back to the semifinals, Chelsea undertook an extreme team makeover. While their only major signings of the summer were Brazilian midfielder Ramires (from Benfica) and Israeli midfielder Juliano Belletti. Chelsea allowed these players to leave in an effort to get cheaper and younger.
In the EPL, Chelsea have been in top form from the beginning of the season. With consecutive 6-0 victories to start the season (against West Bromwich Albion and Wigan), Chelsea’s offense is firing on all cylinders. Prior to conceding against West Ham United in the 85 minute, Chelsea hadn’t given up a single goal. While these stats are impressive, Chelsea has had a bit of a cupcake buffet to start the season. The best team Chelsea has played thus far (Stoke City) finished 11th last season in the EPL.
Chelsea are clearly the favorites in this group. The team has been in fine form to start the season. While Marseille could trouble the Blues, especially in France, Chelsea should dominate this group.
Olympique de Marseille – Marseille, winners of Ligue 1 last season, have in each of the past three seasons made it to the group stage of the Champions League. In each of those seasons, the French side has been unable to make it to the knockout rounds, finishing third all three times. Marseille will look to improve upon that showing, in a group where they have a chance to finish second.
Marseille have enjoyed their recent resurgence and with the nearly unlimited funds from the estate of French billionaire Robert Louis-Dreyfus, they should be able to bring in talent to keep them at the top of Ligue 1. In an effort to boost what was one of the most prolific attacks in French soccer, Marseille imported French international André-Pierre Gignac (from Toulouse FC) and
Stade Vélodrome, followed by a 3-2 loss away to Valenciennes FC. It seems that they have found a way to bounce back, defeating Lorient in Marseille and drawing with Bordeaux. Marseille will have to find their form quickly, as they host Spartak on 9/15.
Marseille certainly have the firepower to compete with many teams in Europe, though to ask them to top Chelsea might be asking too much. While pipping Chelsea to the top spot might be out of the question, a second place finish and a trip to the knockout rounds is certainly within Marseille’s grasp.
Spartak Moscow – Spartak enter this season looking to win their first league title since 2001. During the early years of the Russian Premier League, Spartak dominated, winning 9 championships in the first ten seasons. Since then, their best finish was last season when they were runners-up to Rubin Kazan. Spartak are making their second recent appearance in the Champions League group stage. Their prior appearance, during the 2006-2007 season, saw Spartak finish third in their group behind Inter and Bayern Munich. The Russians will be looking to improve upon that result this season.
As with fellow Russian entrants, Rubin, Spartak was extremely active in the transfer market. With over a dozen players joining and at least that many leaving, Spartak has dramatically reshaped its team. The biggest signing was the capture of
While I do love the addition of McGeady, I ust don’t see Spartak having the fire power to finish in the top two. Playing in the Luzhniki Stadium can be intimidating for visiting clubs, but Chelsea played Manchester United there in the 2008 title game. Spartak will likely finish third in this group and ear their way into the Europa League.
MŠK Žilina – I have to admit no prior knowledge of Žilina before writing this post. The most I knew about the Slovak Superliga was that Artmedia Bratislava made it to the Champions League group stages a few seasons ago. There always seems to be one team that comes out of nowhere to qualify for the group stage, and I think Žilina are that team this year.
Champions of the Slovak Superliga, Žilina are making their first appearance in the group stage of the Champions League. Having previously qualified for the Champions League on 4 occasions, Žilina defeated Birkirkara F.C. (Maltese champions), Litex Lovech (Bulgarian champions), and AC Sparta Prague (Czech champions) along the way.
Žilina’s team consists mostly of Slovak and Czech players, and doesn’t contain any international stars of note. Žilina are the second Slovak team to make it to the Champions League group stage, following Artmedia Bratislava (who finished third in their group in the 2005-2006 season). If Žilina are able to replicate Artmedia’s success, the Slovaks would have to be happy.
Prediction: Chelsea easily top this group. The Blues are in fine form this season and open their campaign against Žilina in Slovakia. Marseille finish second.
AdvertisementsIn a bizarre chain of events, a Russian programmer "hacked" his friend with a knife after a disagreement about NVIDIA vs. AMD. The man murdered his friend with a kitchen knife by striking him twice on the head and then stabbed his friend another eleven times after he was already dead. He then burned the body in the attempt to cover the crime.
It appears that the argument was the result of drinking alcohol and there may have been something in the alcohol to result in such a violent reaction over graphics card makers.
The tragic event happened over a year ago, but the conviction was only recently handed down by the court to 31-year-old Aleksander Trofimov, responsible for murdering 37-year old Evgeny Lylin in Saransk, Russia.
He was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison for the crime he eventually admitted to committing.
It is kind of crazy he only got nine and a half years for brutally murdering his friend for such a bizarre reason.
No matter how much you disagree with each other about graphics cards or any other subject...keep your cool, people.Ireland urgently needs to separate church and State, to protect equally everyone’s right to freedom of religion or belief.
The recent census showed that one in 10 of our population identifies as having no religion, more than all minority religions combined, and the real figure is probably much higher.Yet we have grown up with religious discrimination that is so prevalent that it is almost invisible, perpetuated by a nod and wink political ethos of religious subservience.
Until relatively recently, homosexuality was illegal, divorce was unconstitutional and the Virgin Megastore was fined in court for selling a condom.
Today, we still have religious oaths that prevent a conscientious atheist from being president, a judge, attorney general, taoiseach, tánaiste or chair of the Dáil or Seanad.
The Catholic Church runs most of our State-funded schools and hospitals, with exemptions from our equality laws that allow them discriminate on the grounds of religion. We are often told that this for historic reasons, but the Government plans to gift a new €300 million National Maternity Hospital to the church.
Most State-funded schools can give preference to Catholics, and can evangelise non-Catholic children by integrating a Catholic ethos throughout the curriculum. Atheists and religious minorities cannot access the teaching or medical professions, in State-funded schools and hospitals, without religious discrimination.
The Constitution still refers to the place of women in the home, and pregnant women still have to travel abroad for abortions. Religious bodies can solemnise marriages while also promoting political causes, but secular bodies are forbidden from doing so.
Dáil prayers
Earlier this month, our parliament voted to force all TDs to stand for a Christian prayer asking “Christ Our Lord” to direct every aspect of their work. And our police have just investigated a complaint that Stephen Fry blasphemed on our national television station, which broadcasts a Catholic call to prayer at prime time every day.
We are so accustomed to this avalanche of religious discrimination that we do not realise how outrageous it is.
Atheist Ireland lobbies at the United Nations and Council of Europe for Ireland to respect the human rights treaties to which it has signed up. In recent years, 10 international human rights bodies have told Ireland that our schools breach the human rights of atheists and religious minorities.
In the Louise O’Keeffe case, the European Court told Ireland that, regardless of who runs the schools, the State remained responsible for protecting the human rights of pupils.
Nils Muiznieks, Council of Europe human rights commissioner, said he had never seen anything like the Irish school system, where patron bodies are holding the State hostage.
Waleed Sadi, United Nations economic, social and cultural rights rights chairperson, compared Ireland to a developing country, saying we are unique in Europe where separation of church and state is almost sacrosanct.
Nigel Rodley, the late United Nations Human Rights Committee chairperson, linked many of our social problems to the Catholic Church, and said our law treated pregnant women as vessels.
Blasphemy law
In contrast, Pakistan, on behalf of Islamic countries where blasphemers face the death penalty, has cited the Irish blasphemy law as best practice internationally.
We urgently need a secular Constitution, parliament, government, education system and healthcare system.We need one law for all, with no discrimination or privilege for either religious people or atheists.
The most substantive religious discrimination is in our schools, against parents, children and teachers from atheist and religious minority backgrounds.
But the current plans from Minister for Education Richard Bruton will simply fine-tune and reinforce the discrimination that already exists.
The Minister is focusing on fine-tuning the relatively small problem of access, but is not addressing the far more important problem of discrimination and evangelisation within the schools.
Even if the State provided the 400 multidenominational schools that it hopes to within 15 years, that would still be a small proportion of the more than 3,000 religious-ethos schools.
And the church is trying to negotiate a stronger Catholic ethos in the majority of schools that it would retain. That would leave most atheist and minority-faith parents in an even worse position than now.
The Irish population has moved on. We are no longer in thrall to the Catholic Church. But our politicians, laws and Constitution need to catch up with the people.
Michael Nugent is the chairperson of Atheist IrelandThis week we saw some amazing photos of from space. From dazzling night sky views to India's spectacular view of Mars, it was a week to behold in space. See our favorite space photos of the last week in this gallery, starting with the Red Planet.
On Sept. 28, India's first Mars probe, the Mangalyaan orbiter, snapped its best view yet of the Red Planet. The spacecraft captured a full-globe view of Mars from 46,292 miles (74,500 kilometers) away as it orbited the planet. Mangalyaan (the name is Sanskrit for "Mars Craft") took the photo with its Mars Color Camera, with the Indian Space Research Organisation revealing the photo on Sept. 29 via Twitter and Facebook.
Spectacular Solar Flare Photo from NASA
Last week, the sun erupted with a powerful solar flare that, while beautiful to behold, was not aimed at Earth. The solar flare erupted on Thursday, Oct. 2, and ranked as a class M7.3 solar storm. Class-M flares are moderate solar eruptions that can supercharge Earth's northern lights displays when aimed at our planet.
NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory captured this amazing image, as well as a stunning video of the M7.3 solar flare.
Amazing Comet Jets
The comet target of the European-built Rosetta spacecraft is not one to disappoint. In this photo, the icy Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko is spouting off jets of gas and dust, all of which is being captured in amazing new photos from Rosetta. This photo was captured on Sept. 26 and released by the European Space Agency last week.
Rosetta arrived at Comet 67P/C-G, as it's being called, on Aug. 6 after a 10-year trek across the solar system. The spacecraft will spend the next year following the comet to watch as 67P/C-G's activity changes as it approaches the sun. [See more amazing Rosetta comet photos]
Milky Way and Maine's Raven's Nest
This jaw-dropping photo was captured by night sky photographer Adam Woodworth during a visit to the Raven's Nest at the Acadia National Park in Maine.
Read the full story of this spectacular photo to see how Woodworth assembled eight exposures to capture this stunning view.
'Wild Duck' Star Cluster in Flight
The European Southern Observatory wowed us this week with this dazzling view of the "Wild Duck" star cluster as seen by one of its telescopes in Chile's high Atacama Desert. ESO astronomers used the La Silla Observatory to capture this view of the star cluster Messier 11, which is about 6,000 light-years away in the constellation Scutum (The Shield).
As if this photo isn't enough, you can watch a video tour of Messier 11 set to the song "The Leaves" by the band Super 400.
'Interstellar' in Pictures
This week, we saw the unveiling of the final "Interstellar" trailer, a video that is both epic and thrilling and kept us wanting more for the new film by Christopher Nolan. The film will launch in theaters nationwide on Nov. 7.
To celebrate the trailer, we put together the photos we have so far of "Interstellar" into a gallery for your enjoyment. You can see the "Interstellar" pictures here.
Maine's Magnificent Dark Skies (Gallery)
The dark night skies of Maine, devoid of light pollution, can reveal some of the best stargazing views in the continental United States, and it has been a stunning palate for astrophotographer Mike Taylor.
In this gallery of Maine night sky photos by Taylor, the veteran photographer captures stunning vistas of auroras, starry nights and the always dazzling Milky Way.
A Shining Star
The dazzling AG Carinae, also known as HD 94910, shines in this new image by Hubble Space Telescope which we featured as our Image of the Day on Thursday (Oct. 2). The star lies 20,000 light-years away, a member of the Milky Way, lying in the constellation of Carina in the southern sky.
Scientists classify AG Carinae as a Luminous Blue Variable, a massive evolved star that will one day become a Wolf-Rayet Star that will shine up to several million times as luminous as our sun. Stars like AG Carinae lose mass at an extremely rapid rate, blowing it off in powerful stellar winds of up 4.3 million mph (7 million km/hour).
Milky Way Over Cerro Paranal
In this amazing photo, our Image of the Day for Friday (Oct. 3), the Milky Way glitters over ESO's Paranal Observatory atop Cerro Paranal in Chile's high Atacama Desert. ESO photo ambassador Yuri Beletsky took this photo of two telescopes that form part of Paranal's Very Large Telescope facility.
The Large Magellanic Cloud and Small Magellenic Cloud, dwarf galaxies near our own Milky Way, can be seen between the two telescopes. The dark smudge at upper left, obscuring part of the Milky Way, is the Coalsack Nebula. To see more amazing photos from the observatory, visit: Spectacular Cosmic Visions from ESO's Paranal Observatory.
Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+.Republicans were caught with their pants down Friday when Democrats pulled a fast one on the House floor. In the lead up to a vote on their controversial budget, Republicans nearly zapped it and replaced it with an even more conservative 10-year vision for the country — the right-wing Republican Study Committee’s budget alternative.
To recap, Democrats took a flyer.
They waited until the last minute, and then voted “present” on the RSC plan. That put the question of whether to swap out Paul Ryan’s plan for the RSC’s in GOP hands. At the last moment, Republicans realized that a majority of their party had voted for the farther-reaching budget and had to whip votes backwards to prevent it from passing accidentally. It was quite a scene.
But what exactly were they voting on? What does a majority of the House Republican caucus secretly want to do that the budget they ultimately passed doesn’t accomplish?The RSC budget is like Paul Ryan’s budget on steroids. Both proceed from the assumption that the government should freeze or reduce revenue, should lower taxes on the wealthy, and should dramatically cut entitlement programs. The RSC plan just does more of it.
The biggest single difference? Unlike Ryan’s plan, the RSC budget goes after Social Security — it quickly phases in a higher retirement for everybody under 60 years old today. For those born in 1952 or later, it would raise retirement age to 66 years and 2 months immediately. After that the eligibility age would increase two months a year for several years until it hits 70 years of age for everybody born in 1975 or after.
Like the Republicans’ official budget, the RSC plan phases out Medicare and turns it into a voucher program for private insurers. It just does it faster. The GOP budget begins the transition in 10 years, leaving the program in tact for people 55 and over — current beneficiaries, and people who will be beneficiaries within a decade. The RSC plan achieves the phase out in five years, impacting Americans under 60 years old. It also increases their eligibility age from 65 to 67.
Both plans turn Medicaid into a block grant program, but the RSC caps the federal commitment at 2006 levels.
Both plans likewise turn food stamps into a block grant program, and limit eligibility. But the RSC plan caps the plan at 2007 levels. The GOP-passed plan institutes the cap in 2015.
The RSC plan ends federally subsidized student loans for graduate students, and cuts the Pell Grant program by eliminating the add-on that automatically increases the maximum grant size year by year. It sells off the Tennessee Valley Authority electric utility to the private sector. It arbitrarily eliminates 15 percent of the federal workforce, and re-indexes federal retirees’ pension payments at a lower rate of inflation. It repeals the 2009 expansion of SCHIP which benefitted millions of children — or, as the RSC puts it, drove them “from the private market to government care” — by taxing cigarette companies, and hands the money over to states with minimal requirements. And it recommends budget process reforms that would make it nearly impossible to ever raise taxes again.
All told, it amounts to $9 trillion in spending cuts over the course of 10 years. Oh yeah. And it nearly passed.Erick Erickson distorted a statement made by President Obama on the need for new energy solutions to claim he said African nations "must remain poor" to avoid the negative effects of climate change.
On June 30, President Obama discussed "youth empowerment and leaderships with young African leaders" in Johannesburg, South Africa in a town hall. During the town hall president Obama expressed the need to address climate change by exploring new energy sources as the standard of living increases on the continent of Africa:
Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will boil over -- unless we find new ways of producing energy.
In a post on Redstate.com, titled "Africa Must Remain Poor With No Power or the World Will Boil Over," Fox News contributor Erickson claimed that Obama's remarks meant that "Africa must remain in the third world poor and without power for the good of the world." Erickson called the comments "socialism pure and simple":Former World Series of Boxing fighter and amateur standout Trent Rawlins is set to return to the United States tomorrow morning to begin a run in the pro ranks with Brawlers Sports Management Group.
The 27 year-old reached an agreement with CEO Rick Mohamed months ago to embark on a new chapter, and after securing a Visa, Rawlins is now heading for a new beginning in his career in the heavyweight ranks.
Rawlins is expected to begin training with former IBF Champion Chris Byrd immediately upon touching down Stateside as the former rugby player is lined up to make his debut in the paid ranks sometime in September.
“Mr. Rawlins reached out to me over a year ago seeking good management, and after we spoke several times over the phone and emails, he decided to sign with Brawlers Sports Management Group,” Rick Mohamed explained.
“Trent came to me and said he had been approached by many, but none had stood out or sounded genuine enough for him to trust in. Trent stated he was looking for a team that was made up of a brotherhood, trust, and integrity.
“I worked with Trent’s Attorney in San Francisco, CA Mr. Donald Smith to assist in getting Trent’s P-1 Visa re-approved since his previous time in the US with the World Series Boxing (WSB) had expired and he had to go back to his home in Australia.
“We are looking forward to working with Trent as he was selected to compete in the world’s finest amateur heavyweight competition, and standing at 6″4 and weighing 230 of all muscle with only 12% of that being body fat, has all the attributes to become the next Heavyweight Champion of the World!
“We have an awesome training plan for Trent that was created by Chris Byrd and we have no doubts that Trent has the dedication and motivation to accomplish what he has set out to do.
“We will now be reaching out to various promoters with possible interest in putting Trent on some of their upcoming cards. One Promoter in particular who seems very eager to get behind Trent and help launch his career, is the brilliant Jolene Mizzone, the VP of Boxing Operations for the promotional company, Main Events and we look forward to getting Trent started right away.
“Hopefully we can strike up a good working relationship with Ms. Mizzone and would be interested to see how she can help Trent’s career flourish moving forward at this exciting time.
“We know that Trent is very anxious to get into the gym upon his arrival and has stated to me that he would probably go train in the evening time upon his arrival after a nap. This is nothing more than pure determination of wanting to become the best in your craft, this is a manager and trainer’s dream fighter and myself and Chris look forward to a very long and productive career for Team Rawlins.”
A two-time Australian President’s Cup bronze medallist, Rawlins is ready to embark on the beginnings of a promising career in the top division, with more news to come on his maiden fight in the USA soon.
For more information on Brawlers Sports Management Group visit the Facebook page here: https://www.facebook.com/BrawlersSportsManagementGroup or you can follow Trent on Facebook here: https://www.facebook.com/trent.rawlins.3?fref=tsMANCHESTER, N.H. - After striking out 13 in a losing effort on Tuesday night, Marcus Stroman was not going to be denied a win on Sunday. The Fisher Cats (42-46) bashed Binghamton Mets (53-32) pitching for five home runs en route to a 16-5 victory at Northeast Delta Dental Stadium. The rout came just a day after Binghamton beat the Fisher Cats 14-3 on Saturday, and it evened the series at two wins each heading into the finale on Monday afternoon.
Stroman set the tone early against the B-Mets, allowing just two soft singles while racking up four strikeouts over the first three innings. He struck out the side in the second, at one point retiring seven in a row during the early innings. From there, the Fisher Cats offense took over.
Clint Robinson began the slugfest in the third. With the bases loaded on walks by starter Erik Goeddel (L; 7-2) Robinson boomed a fastball off the video board in right-center for a grand slam and a 4-0 lead.
Runs of the two-out variety were the story of the fifth inning. After Stroman allowed a homer in the top half, Ryan Schimpf, Brian Van Kirk, and Jon Talley put together three straight run-scoring hits with two outs to grow the lead to 8-1.
In the seventh, leading 8-2, the Fisher Cats started to have some real run. Andy Burns led off the inning with his first Double-A home run. A hit batter and a walk followed, which set up Talley for a three-run homer to center field to make it 12-2.
With two outs and a man aboard, Clint Robinson extended the inning with his fourth hit of the game. That allowed Brad Glenn to send his eleventh home run rattling off the façade of the Samuel Adams Bar & Grill. Burns followed again, smacking his second homer of the |
Reserve from Alan Greenspan and to serve as its chairman.Chairman Bernanke serves at the pleasure of the U.S. President and in 2010 gained the nomination for a second term from President Barack Obama. Bernanke has weathered one of the worst financial crisis in the history of the United States and the world during his tenure. Beside a housing crisis and large institutional failure, Bernanke has shepherded the Reserve to become a stop gap between economic depression and exponential inflation by a steady confidence and quarterly summations of the state of the U.S. and world economy.
Bottom Line: By controlling his lifestyle and spending less than he makes, Ben earns $76,500,000 per year after lifestyle, taxes and other expenses.
Ben Bernanke's Wealth How rich is Ben Bernanke? $2,612,001,246 How much does Ben Bernanke earn? $76,500,000 How does Ben Bernanke make money? Politics How old is Ben Bernanke 66 Is Ben Bernanke married? 1 time(s) Does Ben Bernanke have kids? 2 children Facebook Fans 12,460 Financial Advice This wealth is on autopilot and should never run out. Interesting Facts About Ben Bernanke Nicknames Ben Shalom Bernanke What is Ben Bernanke's Birthday? Sunday, December 13, 1953 What is Ben Bernanke's Sign? Sagittarius Is Ben Bernanke gay? Straight Ben Bernanke's Nationality American
What people are sayingThe Philippine Supreme Court has cleared their pal fellow judge Associate Justice Mariano del Castillo from plagiarising because, allegedly, he didn’t intend to plagiarise in the first place. Instead, it was Microsoft Word’s fault for not detecting the plagiarised material that he inserted into his document:
The court also said it was not Del Castillo’s or his researcher’s fault that Miscrosoft Word, the program used in writing the decision, cannot detect “copied” research material without the proper attributions. “Microsoft Word program does not have a function that raises an alarm when original materials are cut up or pruned. The portions that remain simply blend in with the rest of the manuscript, adjusting the footnote number and removing any clue that what should stick together had just been severed,” the Supreme Court said.
The newest member of the Supreme Court, Associate Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno, criticized her colleagues for the ruling, claiming it would set a bad precedent. Just like Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.
/via PinoychanOkay, so maybe that title is a bit dramatic, but hear me out.
Back on November 27, Andre Burakovsky was fairly well-entrenched as the Caps' second-line center. He'd started nine-straight games there, and, despite a bit of a drop in production for the trio after a hot start to the season, things (for he and his linemates) were going pretty well. Here's how those nine games looked in terms of usage:
But following an ugly loss to the Islanders, Burakovsky was demoted to the fourth line for the second game of the Thanksgiving-sandwiching home-and-home. Then this happened:
Soon thereafter, Barry Trotz talked about the situation, and The Post's Alex Prewitt recounted it:
On Wednesday against the Islanders, Burakovsky didn’t appear for the final 10 minutes of a tie game because Trotz wanted more experience up the middle. Earlier that night, however, Trotz also threw Burakovsky into a tough situation to show confidence. The Capitals had just taken a 2-0 lead and Burakovsky’s line had performed well, so Trotz deployed those players against the Islanders’ top line, anchored by captain John Tavares. Seconds later, Tavares scored because Burakovsky missed his assignment off the draw. Burakovsky’s shifts grew further apart, then nonexistent by the end. The shift also served as a barometer. "If they wouldn’t have scored, I would’ve given them more and more," Trotz said. "But they scored, so you have to pull it back. Was he over his head on that one? Is he not quite there yet? There’s always a risk. If you try to force-feed it too much, the players look at you like, ‘Trotzie, what are you thinking?’ But it’s a feel. I gave them a shot, and they scored. We ended up coming back. We fought through that. That’s the whole process with young guys."
It was actually a bit of a curious deployment for Burakovsky, but one that showed his coach's confidence in him:
"We just scored our second goal and I said you know what, I’ve got a defense pairing we want, these guys have been playing pretty good, I’m going to give Burakovsky a shift against Tavares," Trotz said. "I was showing confidence. I know he could do it. And what happened? They scored."
That confidence seems to have disappeared since then.
Burakovsky spent the next three games on the fourth line before getting another one-game shot at the second-line center spot and then healthy scratches in five of the next six games, only getting back into the lineup as the fourth-line left wing when Jason Chimera needed to sit out a game and think about his on-ice discipline. Burakovsky's ice time dwindled from to 13 minutes of five-on-five minutes per game during that nine-game stretch to 7.2 minutes since.
And now Burakovsky is in Hershey.
That, in and of itself, isn't such a bad thing - he's a super-talented 19-year-old who needs to play. And apparently he'll be back in D.C. after a couple of games. But we talk a lot about "the big mistake," and Burakovsky seems to have made one here (though if getting beat by John Tavares is grounds for demotion, the AHL is going to be flooded with talent). It's one that clearly made an impact on Barry Trotz and he's done what he's done in response. And that response has made the Caps a worse team.The fiery sambar that spices up a plate of fluffy idlis and dosas or the humble thali has in recent times gone missing from restaurant menus in the lake city. This comes after the price of pulses has hit the roof.Even though the price of tur dal is said to be stabilising from a recent all-time high of Rs 200 per kg, it is yet to make a decent comeback on the menu. Many restaurants have been substituting sambar with tomato curry, channa dal or kadhi.But there are some eateries that continue to sell sambar but have increased the cost of it. ``We serve sambar but we are left with no option but to raise the prices of all dishes that are served with it. The price of all lentils has increased drastically, so a simple dal tadka, dal fry, dal khichadi and dal makhani will cost anywhere between Rs 150 to Rs 180. There has been a hike of almost Rs 10 to Rs 15. We have to maintain our standard and cannot comprise on the quality of food we serve as we do not want to disappoint our customers. So, we decided to hike up the rates and maintain the quality,'' said a Naupada-based eatery owner.“The hike is only for a temporary period till the prices comes down. Once the rates slash, we too will roll back the prices,“ he added. At some Poli-Bhaji Kendras, they have started preparing gravies with a blend of pulses. This, they feel, is the easiest way to cut down on soaring pri ces.Jivan Mantri, a mess owner, said, “It is difficult to maintain the current prices on the menu with the rates going so high. But one cannot compromise on the customer's demand.So, we offer them a varieties of dals everyday made from various pulses. Customers, too, enjoy it.“Mantri also added that they are also replacing dals with vegetable gravies. The rise in prices has come as a major setback for Udupi restaurants as sambar is one of their basic and most important dish on their menu.A Naupada-based restaurant owner said that they are forced to reduce the amount of sambar being served to a customer. "Sambar is served with most of the dishes. Be it idli, dosa, vada or anything, the piping hot sambar goes well with all. Many times, customers used to ask for more sambar. But now we are left with no option but to reduce the quantity as we do not wish to hike up the rates as it will affect our customers. The prices of onions also fluctuates most of the time. We can't keep changing rates every time.“Note: This is a translation of an article about the experience of a French guy following RedHat hands-on labs and taking the RHCE exam (source in French here).
This document was published on October the 12th 2016 and is under CC-BY-SA license.
I came across a LOT of technical and logistical/administrative problems when following the online RHCE training (RH299) and when taking the RHCE Exam (EX300F) in “individual exam” mode (in fact, I did not even take it).
Bugs in the RH299 training labs
(https://www.redhat.com/fr/services/training/rh299-rhce-certification-lab)
I chose to take this course “online”: I had access to the training materials for 3 months and to dedicated virtual machines for hands-on labs (with automated verification). The concept was really good and gave a lot of organizational flexibility. However, it was almost the same price as a “traditional” training in a classroom with an instructor.
The content of the training material was of good quality: clear explanations, appropriate practical work (apart from the videos that are not translated into French).
However, I came across a lot of bugs in the training labs.
I contacted the RedHat support about these problems (mid-March 2016). Someone quite competent replied point by point. I below summarizes these issues (the most important ones are at the beginning):
Unable to use the AltGr key to enter special characters which are essential to hands-on labs: ‘{‘, ‘@’, ‘#’, etc. This problem was fortunately fixed in late March or early April.
to enter special characters which are essential to hands-on labs: ‘{‘, ‘@’, ‘#’, etc. This problem was fortunately in late March or early April. Error checking : the script that controls the outcome of the exercise is mistaken with respect to statement (for example: it searches for a connection named “review” when the statement says to create one named “exam”). So with a correct result in line with the statement, the tool still answers that this is wrong. I had the case on at least 3 assignments. RedHat confirms that it is definitely due to some translation “bugs”.
: the script that controls the outcome of the exercise is mistaken with respect to statement (for example: it searches for a connection named “review” when the statement says to create one named “exam”). So with a correct result in line with the statement, the tool still answers that this is wrong. I had the case on at least 3 assignments. confirms that it is definitely due to some translation “bugs”. Bad user interface : for example, if you quickly click twice on the button to stop a VM, it will unfortunately reset it without asking for any confirmation. You will lose all the work in progress.
: for example, if you quickly click twice on the button to stop a VM, it will unfortunately reset it without asking for any confirmation. You will lose all the work in progress. A lot of time wasted due to the use of VMs:
For most hands-on labs, they ask to reset the VM before anything else. Except that it takes a few minutes to reset, and then 4 to 5 minutes to start, and then we must also configure the keyboard in French (it takes a long time, especially on first start). These are points that RedHat knows and attributes to their hosting infrastructure. They consider the possibility of reviewing their hands-on labs to avoid asking the reset.
Each VM automatically stops after a timeout (the user can adjust it, but with a maximum). Except that the user is not informed when this timeout will be achieved. And when it is reached, the machine is abruptly stopped. RedHat told me that they are considering a pop-up to warn the user.
And other technical problems were experienced such as the loss of network connectivity between the two VMs that serve the hands-on labs: they blamed the hosting infrastructure.
For most hands-on labs, they ask to reset the VM before anything else. Except that it takes a few minutes to reset, and then, and then we must also configure the keyboard in French (it takes a long time, especially on first start). These are points that knows and attributes to their hosting infrastructure. They consider the possibility of reviewing their hands-on labs to avoid asking the reset. Each VM automatically stops after a timeout (the user can adjust it, but with a maximum). Except that. And when it is reached, the machine is abruptly stopped. told me that they are considering a pop-up to warn the user. And other technical problems were experienced such as the loss of network connectivity between the two VMs that serve the hands-on labs: they blamed the hosting infrastructure. Unable to copy/paste text into or from a VM. Again, they know it, but explain that the software they use does not allow this feature.
into or from a VM. Again, they know it, but explain that the software they use does not allow this feature. After 4 hours of connection to the RedHat training site, the authentication cookie expires. Instead of asking the user to authenticate again, no feedback is given and all actions on the VMs are without effect anymore (and without error).
training site, the authentication cookie expires. Instead of asking the user to authenticate again, no feedback is given and all actions on the VMs are without effect anymore (and without error). Crashes in the nmtui tool (for configuring network connections), which prevent some hands-on labs to be carry out with this tool (it is still possible to do them with nmcli, but it is much less intuitive). This is probably a bug in nmtui, but I had never came across them outside of these VMs.
Suffice to say that this training was not for me as effective as it should have been.
A student shouldn’t have to debug the platform on which he is supposed to learn.
Many of these problems should have already been detected upstream by RedHat: it should have been enough to do some tests on the hands-on labs in a French configuration (keyboard, language, etc), before putting it online. They would have necessarily found that they could not type the necessary special characters and there were various bugs.
Note that the RedHat website at the end of May 2016 indicated that an update of this platform was underway: it is possible that some of these problems are now resolved (but I have no way to check it myself).
Finally, after ranting about RedHat about all these problems, I got they let me take the exam for free, as a gesture of goodwill (they also extended my access to the online training).
The EX300F exam
(https://www.redhat.com/en/services/training/ex300-red-hat-certified-engineer-rhce-exam)
Expected skills “Slightly out of date”
I noted several inconsistencies between the list of skills tested in the examination and the content of the RH299 training. In particular, the following topics were not covered in the training, and were yet displayed as required for the examination:
Use /proc/sys and sysctl to modify and set kernel runtime parameters
Produce and deliver reports on system utilization (processor, memory, disk, and network)
(Network Services) Configure host-based and user-based security for the Service
(HTTP) Configure private directories
(HTTP) Configure group-managed pleased
After asking several people and called RedHat again on this subject, one of them finally told me specifically (mid-May 2016):
It appears that the information on the web page is slightly out of date.
The web page in question being the link above the “Objectives” tab.
In more detail, the RedHat‘s response was:
Unfortunately it appears that the information on the web page is slightly out of date. I will bring this to the attention of our web team. As a general answer to your question there are many factors that influence how well a given candidate will perform on the exam. Training alone is not usually sufficient to guarantee success but if you have relevant experience then training can make a difference. The other thing to consider is that RH299 is a rapid track course that is intended for experienced candidates.
The course covers material that we also cover in longer format in three separate four day courses. Going from twelve days of content to four days of content means that there are some topics that may not be covered or may not be covered in great depth. Please see in-line for answers to some of the specific points you mention.
– Use /proc/sys and sysctl to modify and set kernel runtime parameters
This is not an exam competency. – Produce and deliver reports on system utilization (processor,memory, disk, and network) This is not an exam competency per-se but this is the sort of information you might require in the course of performing other exam items and we expect candidates to be self-sufficient in this regard. – (Network services) Configure host-based and user-based security for the service
This is a general competency. Some network services may support host-base or user-based security and we may ask you to implement access using these mechanisms. – (HTTP) Configure private directories
– (HTTP) Configure group-managed content
Private directories are not an exam competency. We may request that you create directories that only allow certain users or user groups to manage content. I do not know if this is covered in RH299 but it is covered in RH254 (System Administration III).
Apparently the web page in question was amended in early June: no more objective on the sysctl topic and “Configure private directories” was renamed to “Configure access restrictions on directories” but the other objectives did not change.
Problems due to the “individual exam” mode
Small registration problems
I chose the “individual exam” mode (ex-kiosk) as exam dates in Lyon were all canceled (too few registrations). This method is much more flexible since you can select the date and time freely, which is very convenient. It is remotely monitored by a webcam.
RedHat goes through the same company as the Linux Foundation: ExamsLocal (Innovative Exams). However, unlike the Linux Foundation that allows to take the exam from home, it must be conducted in one of the RedHat examination centers (only Paris in France). I guess they consider it more secure, but it’s much less convenient (and more expensive) for those who don’t live in the Paris area.
During registration, available dates were changing all the time: at the beginning of my browsing on the registration site (managed by ExamsLocal), the date that interested me was available and then after a few minutes all schedules with that date became unavailable, then available again after a few minutes. Bug? I don’t know: I booked my date as soon as possible, as a precaution.
I received an immediate confirmation by email, but it gave the time in another timezone (UTC-1): not very convenient. Fortunately, the following emails were well in the French timezone.
Keyboard problem
On the day, after blocking 3 days of study, I went to Paris (no chance, railway strike, but ultimately not much trouble).
The exam went on a dedicated PC, where everything is locked so you can’t cheat. You have to log on to ExamsLocal (as expected) to take the exam.
Problem: we were faced with a AZERTY keyboard, but the OS was configured for QWERTY and no access to system settings to change it. In short, you had to type your password, translating positions from AZERTY to QWERTY. As a security aware sysadmin, I had special characters in my password, I had a hard time and typed my password in the login field before copying/pasting in the password field (I couldn’t find a better way).
Note: RedHat assured me later that this problem has now been fixed, which seems confirmed by the “Azerty keyboard” mention when seeking a session of this type.
SSO login problem that prevents the exam from being taken
And here it is: unable to log if you have a login from the ExamsLocal Linux Foundation.
Indeed, during the RHCE registration, I mentioned the ExamsLocal account, previously used when passing the Linux Foundation exams: as I was already identified with it, I didn’t need to create a new account. There were no warnings on this in RedHat or ExamsLocal websites. The ExamsLocal website correctly added the exam to my account and sent me reminders by email before the exam, etc: everything seemed in order.
Except that the PC used to take the exam in “individual exam” mode was locked with forbidden access to the Internet. ExamsLocal website uses a Single-Sign-On procedure provided by the Linux Foundation website: in this case, connection was redirected to a page on the Linux Foundation website… that was blocked by the system.
At StartX (the company that manages the RedHat exams in Paris), they told me that it had happened once, and they had reported it to RedHat. But RedHat did not correct the problem they already knew neither changed its website (to inform people about this problem), modified the filter rules in their PC or warned people about this issue (in my case, nobody let me know).
StartX team told me that I had to create another account on the ExamsLocal website (without SSO) and my exam would be transferred. Yes, except that they can’t do it themselves: this must go through ExamsLocal, which are in the United States, and there should be a period of “a few days” (wait later you will laugh). Joy, happiness. I could not take the exam because of this and went home very angry.
Obviously, I could log on the examslocal website with my personal PC (I carried it with me at StartX), and I could have taken the exam with it. But no, RedHat’s refusal: only the RedHat dedicated PC is allowed for the exam. On the other hand, StartX people have no access to the PC used for the examination.
Icing on the cake that evening, I received an email from RedHat who told me I failed my exam, because I only had 46 points, while it was 210 in order to pass it: how could I have 46 points without taking the exam? I asked several people from RedHat, but none replied.
Over 4 months to take into account some of my complaints
I immediately demanded compensation and the opportunity to retake the exam. Through the only means of communication that I had: a claim form from the RedHat website. It was the beginning of an obstacle race.
No news after 2 weeks (except for a “Please allow me to Investigate the box and will get back to you soon”), I asked again. Still no response after 3 weeks, so I sent a letter with recorded delivery. Then I got a call from a person from RedHat London who apologized for all these failures, assured me that the issue was taken very seriously by the “top management” and I would be quickly informed. He gave me his direct phone number. I was somewhat reassured (I was wrong).
A few days later, I received an email from another person from RedHat, who apologized for forgetting to reply to my request (!). This email said that, as compensation, RedHat would offer me a free retake of the EX300 exam and another of my choice. 2 exams to be taken before the beginning of December, 2016 (we were early July) …
After discussions with my interlocutor from London and another one (I’ll spare you the wasted time and ping pong games between these interlocutors), the final position of RedHat was:
Reimbursement of transportation related to the exam that I could not take (only on proof)
Ability to retake the exam for free in the next 12 months
And, as compensation, the possibility of taking another exam of my choice in the next 12 months
RedHat seems to think that a free exam is a nice gift as it is worth several hundred euros. This may be true for a person who needs additional certifications. In my case, I would probably do nothing of this. Especially since, after all these problems, it is not the first thing I want … If I do not actually make use of it, I will try to offer it to someone else (but I have nobody around me currently interested in).
I had rather sought financial compensation for days spent preparing for the exam (I’ll have to prepare again, given the time), and to take it. The answer was clearly no.
A month later, I still had nothing. So I sent a 2nd letter with recorded delivery, call my interlocutor from London and got an email confirming that I will receive very soon what had been promised.
It took a total of over 3 months, 2 letters with recorded delivery, much time and energy lost, to get the codes to take the exam again.
To date, more than 4 months after the initial exam, I still have not been reimbursed for transportation costs (I’ll spare you the many reminders and “internal procedures” to be followed for a simple transfer).
Initially, I wanted to wait to be reimbursed before publishing this article (not to influence the procedure in progress, whether in one direction or another). But never mind, it seems to me that the exam candidates need to be aware of the SSO login problem, not to suffer the same setbacks as me.
In the end, I intend to take the RHCE exam, I will not give up. But, given the time elapsed, I must restart my study from scratch. And I think I need a break after all that: it will be for later 😉
RedHat portal and its invisible conditions
(https://www.redhat.com/wapps/ugc/protected/account.html)
Besides the above problems, this one is much less serious, but equally symptomatic.
From this portal, once authenticated, you can access the list of the various certifications.
Problem: when you click on “Certifications”, RedHat asks you to read and validate “Logos and Guidelines – Terms and Conditions” with a link to read these conditions … this doesn’t redirect to the right place. In short, RedHat asks you to validate conditions that you can’t read.
I first reported this problem in mid-December 2015. At the time, the link showed a downright “Proxy Error”.
The “Proxy Error” has been fixed mid-January 2016, but the link now returns to https://www.redhat.com/rhtapps/certification/… I still don’t see the “terms and conditions” to read.
Late February 2016, RedHat sent me an email with a draft of these conditions:
We’re in the process of rewriting these, but here is what we currently have. Please see attachment.
To date (mid-October 2016), despite my numerous reminders, the bug is still present, and I don’t know how to read the final conditions RedHat asks me to confirm.
What to think about this?
I haven’t any doubt about the RedHat employees’ skills nor the architectural complexity of RedHat websites, or the difficulty of implementing secure online exams, but it’s quite ironic that all these technical problems occur with an editor certifying system administrators …
I mainly see the result of administrative burdens, lack of communication between services, complexities of outsourcing and a dilution of responsibility. This kind of symptom unfortunately occurs in many large companies. But, at such a level, I admit that I would not have imagined that.
I also think that the methods that I have chosen (online training and individual examination) are not frequently used and may not have received the same attention as the more “classical” modes. That doesn’t excuse anything, of course …
In the end, as you could imagine, I’m not fully pleased with this experience …Hate crimes and legal discrimination against the transgender community
According to the Human Rights Commission, in 2017 at least 27 deaths of transgender people in the United States were due to fatal violence.
"While the details of these cases differ, it is clear that fatal violence disproportionately affects transgender women of color, and that the intersections of racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia conspire to deprive them of employment, housing, healthcare and other necessities, barriers that make them vulnerable," the HRC wrote.
Additionally, a survey conducted in 2015 by the National Center for Transgender Equality in Iowa found that 25 percent of respondents who had a job in the past year reported being fired, denied a promotion or experiencing mistreatment because of their "gender identity of expression during that year."
Of the respondents, too, 56 percent said they "avoided using a public restroom in the past year because they were afraid of confrontations" they might experience.
For those possibly facing legal discrimination or hate crimes at Iowa State because of their gender identity or expression, they are encouraged yo reach out to the Office of Equal Opportunity or The Center for resources.Looking for news you can trust?
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A 6-year-old boy’s mother, grandmother, and aunt have all been arrested after they orchestrated an elaborate kidnapping scheme, one that lasted for four hours and involved a very real handgun, to teach the boy a lesson about why it’s dangerous to talk to strangers.
Lincoln County police say the fake abduction was put into action on Monday after the Missouri family became gravely concerned that the boy was just “too nice” for his own good. The family also convinced a 23-year-old male friend of the aunt’s, Nathan Firoved, to get in on the action as their lead kidnapper. From NBC:
On Monday, Firoved allegedly kidnapped the child after he got off a school bus and said he would never “see his mommy again,” authorities said. Firoved also showed a handgun to the now-sobbing boy, then drove around in his truck, and finally tied him up and covered his face with a jacket when the child wouldn’t stop crying.
Firoved proceeded to blindfold the boy and place his feet into plastic bags, before driving back to the boy’s home. There, the aunt allegedly pulled down the boy’s pants and threatened to put him into “sex slavery.” Moments later, surprise! The boy became privy to the fact the whole terrifying ordeal was just a crafty hoax and that his own family was in fact far more dangerous than a true kidnapper.
The family has been charged with a host of charges, including felony kidnapping and abuse. They deny any wrongdoing.theScore’s multi-part team previews includes a look at something that separates each team from the pack. From specific breakouts to powerplay formations and beyond, Justin Bourne and Thomas Drance hope to highlight something you haven’t noticed in the past.
What we noticed
Detroit uses the front of their own net as a relief valve when they’re pressured on breakouts
The Red Wings, unlike so many other teams, have been blatantly disregarding traditional thinking that forbids D-men from passing the puck in front of their own net.
It makes sense for kids playing minor hockey. You don’t want them handling the puck too often in the danger zone.
It makes sense in junior hockey. Some kids learn hard lessons while trying to get cute and end up digging pucks out of mesh.
But in the NHL? The players are more than good enough to utilize an open area of the ice with good puck movement. Unfortunately after enduring years of on-bench floggings coming up through the ranks, most don’t even consider keying the breakout with a pass through the slot.
In a standard forecheck, most teams bring a winger from the middle of the ice who angles the d-man up the wall - where he’s almost always been instructed to go anyway - into F2, where they hope things start to go awry.
F3 is usually so high in the middle (or wide, depending) that it leaves a soft spot that Mike Babcock has permitted his team to exploit in an effort to get out of the zone without banging the puck into shinpads along the walls.
For Detroit, the rewards have been worth the risk.
Coach’s commentary
I chatted with Mike Babcock about the concept, where he confirmed Detroit considers using their net front in the D-zone a solid option.
Yeah, for sure, when you think of forechecking in today’s game in the National Hockey League, or any other league, you’re looking to take away the walls. They’re coming hard with one, they’re taking the wall with two, and probably the other side with three, there’s a space that you can execute in front of your net. Obviously the problem is when you turn the puck over in front of your net sometimes it ends up in your net. But I’m a big believer in getting back and executing fast so you don’t have to play in D-zone coverage at all. You turn pucks over by keeping it along the wall and you end up in the D-zone, and we’d like to be in the offensive zone by making that good first pass.
Babcock acknowledges that it’s not necessarily option 1A for his club - you always take what’s given to you, and you’d choose the boards over the middle every time - but if the walls are closed off, they trust their players to put the puck somewhere risky to advance zones.
The breakdown
A few examples of how they relieve pressure by using the middle:
First, Detroit wins the faceoff back to their corner, where two Bruins sit close to the near wall.
As the puck gets moved up to the wing, Boston gets into its forecheck.
It's a little discombobulated off the draw, the general forecheck idea is there - they’re looking to close the guy off at the wall. The soon-to-be puck carrier (Joakim Andersson) is going to be receiving pressure, and Jarome Iginla (the high Bruin) is reading, trying to take away the boards.
So, what’s open? That D-man in front.
It’s a bit of a clumsy play, but the puck gets to the middle, which allows Detroit’s defender to take a stride, and move the puck to the other side, relieving the pressure from Boston’s overload.
And it’s not just defenseman who look to get passes in their own slot - the forwards provide options there too. Here’s Jakub Kindl heading back on a puck.
His partner buys him some time, and he has a look around.
What would a rim do for the Wings in the above frame? Well, nothing but jam the puck into Alex Steen, who’s on the far wall and likely expecting the guy he’s with to stay there too.
Only, he doesn’t. Pavel Datsyuk heads to the front of the net.
And right there in the scary part of the zone, the Red Wings look to start their breakout with three Blues forecheckers all caught deep.
Hell, in that same game the Wings had their goalie moving the puck there.
The walls get cut off...
...And two Blues are trapped.
That particular play is a little more ill-advised, but the point remains the same - when the walls get shut down, the Wings aren’t content to just smash it into shinpads, they’re looking to make tape-to-tape plays to get them out of their D-zone as quickly as possible, and into the offensive end.
Tap here to read about 5 Red Wings players you'll want to target in fantasy hockey!
Tap here for an extended look at 3 Red Wings storylines worth following this upcoming season.
Tap here to read an extended roundup of the Red Wings' not-so-busy offseason.WATERBURY, Vt.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Keurig Green Mountain, Inc. (“Keurig Green Mountain”) (NASDAQ:GMCR), a personal beverage system company that has revolutionized the way consumers create and enjoy beverages, and JAB Holding Company (“JAB”) today announced that the companies have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which a JAB-led investor group will acquire Keurig Green Mountain for $92.00 per share in cash, or a total equity value of approximately $13.9 billion. The agreement, which has been unanimously approved by Keurig Green Mountain’s Board of Directors, represents a premium of approximately 77.9% over Keurig Green Mountain’s closing stock price on December 4, 2015.
JAB is acquiring Keurig Green Mountain in partnership with strategic minority investors who are already shareholders in Jacobs Douwe Egberts B.V., (“JDE”), including Mondelēz International and entities affiliated with BDT Capital Partners. At the close of the transaction, Keurig Green Mountain will be privately owned and will continue to be operated independently by the company’s management team and employees. Keurig Green Mountain will remain headquartered in Waterbury, VT.
Bart Becht, Chairman at JAB commented, “Keurig Green Mountain represents a major step forward in the creation of our global coffee platform. It is a fantastic company that uniquely brings together premium coffee brands and new beverage dispensing technologies like the famous Keurig single serve machine. Keurig Green Mountain will operate as an independent entity to ensure it will further build on its coffee & technology strength and continue to serve all its partners to the best of its abilities.”
Brian Kelley, President and CEO of Keurig Green Mountain commented, “This transaction will deliver significant cash value for our shareholders and offers an exciting new chapter for our customers, partners and employees by combining Keurig Green Mountain with JAB’s global coffee platform. JAB fully supports Keurig Green Mountain’s culture and values as we continue to pursue our commitment to deliver innovative beverage solutions for consumers at the touch of a button.”
“The Coca-Cola Company is fully supportive of this transaction,” said Muhtar Kent, Chairman and CEO, The Coca-Cola Company. “We have enjoyed a strong partnership with Keurig Green Mountain, and will continue our collaboration with JAB in order to capitalize on the growth opportunities in the single-serve, pod-based segment of the cold beverage industry. We look forward to working with JAB, an experienced operator with a successful track record of investing in and growing consumer companies.”
Irene Rosenfeld, Chairman and CEO of Mondelēz International, commented, “Keurig Green Mountain is a strategic asset that provides immediate access to the U.S., the largest coffee market in the world, and to on-demand, the fastest growing segment of the market. By leveraging our existing investment in JDE and not contributing incremental capital, we have the opportunity to diversify our participation in the global coffee category, while continuing to invest in our core snacking business to deliver significant value for our shareholders over the long term.”
Transaction Details
The transaction is not subject to a financing condition and is expected to close during the first calendar |
the hospital, he imagined showing his kids Aunt Brooklynn's little scar from that crazy time she took a bullet.
But after his trot into the hospital turned into a run and he rounded the corner to see his father, he backed against a wall and sunk to the floor. The last time Levi had seen his dad cry like this was after they put down their German shepherd, Baron.
Back home, he remembers their mother holing up in her bedroom as people streamed in and out to see her. He retreated to his own room, where the thought of food or drink made him sick.
When he emerged, he says he felt like he had to be strong for his mom and Madi. Sometimes he'd just hold his mom as she wept, fighting to hold back his own tears.
"I tried to be strong for her," he says, now crying. "It was really hard."
With his father, he says, he was able to "go out back and kind of hug it out."
Jacob Mohler says he'd be lying if he said he was the best father he could be in the first six months or even year after Brooklynn died.
He had walked into the house where Brooklynn was shot minutes after it happened. He held her as she struggled to breathe.
"It was a blessing and a curse," he says. "I got to be with my baby in her darkest hour, but the things I see when I close my eyes -- I wouldn't wish on anybody."
Today, he likes to say, "Deal with your grief or your grief will deal with you."
It's a philosophy shared by his wife, Darchel, who knows too well what it's like to lose a sibling. Her younger sister Tessa died in a car wreck at 17. But Darchel not only lost her, she also lost her mother to grief.
"I thought at the time that would be the worst thing I'd ever have to go through," says Darchel, who was 26 and pregnant with Madi at the time. "I can empathize with my children.... And I understand my mother more now."
She was determined to be present for her kids, even if emotionally she had checked out, and to make this house a safe space to cry and feel.
Madi goes to a grief group with other kids her age. The first day they met, they wrote down what made them mad and then set those words on fire -- before making s'mores. They do crafts "dedicated to our lost one," she explains. She's made a Valentine's card for Brooklynn, decorated candy canes and made a new dream catcher.
Down the hall, in her mother's office, there's a painting by Madi. It features two girls, side-by-side, with tears running down their cheeks. Atop one are the words, "I miss you Sissy." The other girl, almost identical, wears angel's wings.
Sometimes relatives will say things like, "You'll grow up to be just like Brooklynn," Madi says. And while she'd like to be like her sister, she says, "I'm not like her. I want to be my own self."
Levi balked at the idea of counseling in the beginning. He was sure he could handle it on his own. He played on the football and lacrosse teams and channeled his feelings onto the field.
He'd look for big hits, he says. He got concussions but never told anyone. He played a whole football season with a broken wrist. Even on his violin, an instrument Brooklynn took up so she could be like him, he poured his heart into his music, using that same broken wrist.
I always felt it was my job to keep her safe.... I just felt destroyed. I could've prevented it. Levi Mohler
Today, he's not ashamed to see a counselor. He's even thinking he might become one himself. When he needs a good cry, he often turns to music. Cole Swindell's, "You Should Be Here," helps bring up lots of stuff, he says. Sometimes he'll even listen to Brooklynn's playlist, including her "stupid little boy band artists" -- the very music that used to make him scream, "Turn that off!" when he heard it through the wall between their bedrooms.
About a year after her death, the family established the Brooklynn Mae Mohler Foundation. Its mission is to push for responsible gun ownership and encourage parents to ask other parents if they have unsecured firearms in their homes. In Brooklynn's name, they host runs and set up tables at community events to raise awareness. It's a mission, Levi says, that helped bring the family together, offered them purpose and allowed them to really talk about Brooklynn
"It was probably the best thing that we could've done," he says.
The scars, however, still run deep.
Darchel, who was already plenty overprotective before Brooklynn died, is an even more nervous mother. Just ask Madi.
"I don't have as much freedom as I would like," she says. "I can't really go over to other friends' houses because of my mother's anxiety. But it's cool because my friends get to come over here, and personally I think it's more fun over here. I feel safe in my own house."
And Levi, who never suffered from anxiety before, says he now suffers from it "like crazy." A glass half-full guy before, he's now prone to fixating on worst-case scenarios.
His worrying, he thinks, helped drive a girlfriend away. He needed to know where she was all the time and that she was safe.
"She didn't quite understand it and I didn't expect her to," he says, as he wipes away new tears. "I did love her, and it would kill me if something happened to her.... It would kill me to lose someone again."
He understands his mother's overprotectiveness. When other friends were getting their driver's licenses, he held off until he was 18. His mother couldn't handle the thought of him driving off.
"I'll take the bus. It's OK. Don't worry," he remembers saying. "I'll get my license when you're ready for me to."
Such milestones make him think of Brooklynn. Moments that should be joyous carry a sting.
"She never fell in love. She never got her driver's license. She didn't graduate high school," he says. "She never got to go play a varsity sport, never got to go to prom."
When his thoughts turn to Madi, though, his words carry a different weight. Levi says he and his younger sister grew distant after Brooklynn was gone.
"I don't know if that's normal," he says, "but this is what happened."
Madi has no illusions about this either.
"There's such a big age difference. We don't really talk a whole lot," Madi says. "But I kind of want that to change because I don't like not talking to my brother."
With Brooklynn, they had a bridge that bound them. She was the consummate middle child. She was, as her parents describe, the hub to their family wheel.
Now, three years after a bullet took her away, her two surviving siblings must find their own connection.
-- Jessica Ravitz, CNN
JUST WATCHED 'It just never felt the same' Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH 'It just never felt the same' 03:19
'He was my role model'
A gang prank and a brother gone, 2006
Tre Bosley holds a blue candle and walks in silence with more than 100 others protesting the violence that plagues Chicago's South Side.
Tre is an impressive young man, a high school basketball star with a stellar GPA who leads an anti-violence youth group.
Beneath his bright smile and optimistic outlook is a teen who knows the despair of the city's mounting death toll. Tre was just 8 when his older brother, Terrell was killed in a gang prank a decade ago.
Terrell was 18, a motivated young man who shunned the gang life for church choir.
Pinned to Tre's chest is a button bearing his brother's image. A reminder of why he keeps fighting.
"He was my role model -- truly a role model," Tre says.
Saving lives has become Tre's mission. He has known about a dozen people who've been killed, from his brother to a cousin to a special needs teacher.
Tre takes his message -- and his button -- everywhere he travels. Earlier this year, he was far from his South Side neighborhood, standing face-to-face with President Barack Obama during a town hall on gun control.
"My question to you is: What is your advice to those growing up surrounded by poverty and gun violence?" Tre asked at the end of the event
Obama looked at him. "When I see you, I think about my own youth because I wasn't that different from you -- probably not as articulate and maybe more of a goof-off, but the main difference was I lived in a more forgiving environment."
The President told Tre not to give up hope, to keep being a role model, to work hard, to strive for great things through education. "But what I also want to say to you is that you're really important to the future of this country."
The President's words touched Tre in unexpected ways. "He kinda told me that I'm the future -- not only me, but the youth are the future of this country," he says. "It really inspired me."
Terrell Bosley with brothers Terrez, left, and Tre. "He was my role model," Tre says of Terrell.
Before his brother was killed, Tre used to dream big. Like of becoming the president of the country or heading up a major company. But in the years after, he says, "I kind of diminished my goals."
It was more about surviving day to day. There were few African-American role models in his neighborhood.
His mother became more protective. He wasn't allowed to leave his block. She drove him to school. A nearby basketball court was off limits. "She doesn't let us walk there or go play or nothing," he says. "We really stay on that one portion of the block all the time." Even there, playing basketball in an alley, he can hear gunshots.
Tre remembers everything "very clearly, actually" from April 4, 2006. How could he ever forget that day?
He was studying math with his father in the front room of their home. His mother took a phone call, then screamed: "Terrell's been shot!"
His books fell to the floor and everyone ran from the home. They hopped in the car and rushed to Terrell's side.
Terrell sang in a community choir and played the bass at various churches around Chicago. He was helping a friend take drums into a church when shots rang out. He was hit once in the shoulder. A friend was hit multiple times, but survived.
The family was later told that one gang member had played a prank on another, saying Terrell was a member of a rival gang. "When he shot them, the other guy said, 'I was just kidding,'" mother Pam Bosley says. "You mean to tell me my son is gone because of some joke?!"
Tre watched his brother get loaded into an ambulance and rushed to the hospital, sirens blaring. His mom was crying, so were he and his other brother, Terrez, then 13. "My mom was telling us to pray -- just keep praying, make sure that you keep praying."
At the hospital, he and Terrez watched from a waiting area as a doctor told their parents Terrell had died. The room filled with wails and tears. Their dad "came and told us, and we started crying."
Tre thought about the time Terrell beat him in checkers. He had promised he'd beat his older brother one day. "Just knowing I'd never be able to do that -- at first, it hurt.
"At that moment in the hospital, I didn't truly know what was going on. It just felt like a dream."
Terrell had been his idol. He kept the talkative, overconfident young Tre grounded. Told him not to be so boisterous with his smack-talk.
One of Tre's favorite memories was sitting with Terrell in his car listening to music. Tre didn't have much rhythm, so Terrell tried to demonstrate: "He was like, 'Look you should bob your head like this. Not like that! It's got to be on the beat."
Tre laughs. All these years later, that memory brings a smile. "I'll never forget the moment he taught me how to bob my head."
Other memories race back, like when they'd drive together to school. "We used to pray in the car on my way to school. We'd pray that no one else would get harmed. We prayed every day to keep our family safe and that no one gets shot and killed in our family.
"That was before he got killed. Then, I started to pray by myself."
Terrell was killed just before Easter. For years after, the family stopped celebrating holidays. They'd stay in a hotel for Christmas because the grief at home was too overbearing. Terrell had loved Christmas; he'd go over the top with decorating the house, inside and out.
Only in the last couple of years has the family been able to celebrate Christmas at home. Tre had begged his mother to allow them. "We just started putting a tree back up," he says.
For now, it's the only decoration.
"On Christmas, when you're getting your gifts, you just know that there's supposed to be somebody else getting their gifts," he says. "I always feel like something is missing. You never feel like the holidays are complete."
His mom has filled some of the void of Terrell's absence -- thrusting him into activism and making sure he kept up with his studies. Now 18, Tre graduated with a 4.2 GPA and will attend college on scholarship.
Tre also credits his pastor, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, the fiery priest of Saint Sabina who has been a community activist for decades.
Pfleger says all too often parents turn to alcohol or drugs after losing a child -- and surviving siblings get lost amid the grief. He praises Tre's parents for keeping him on the right path, and he says Tre's perseverance and positive attitude played a major part in shaping who he is today.
"He's got a great blend of a strength and a sensitivity that I've always admired," Pfleger says.
I need to go out and make a change so that other people won't go through what I went through. Tre Bosley
It would have been "easy for him to become either angry or bitter after losing his brother, or to turn to the streets or live in fear after that. Instead, he made a decision to join with his parents... and put his emotional pain, hurt and trauma into trying to be a voice for other young people."
Tre serves as the president of The BRAVE Youth Leaders, an anti-violence organization that goes into the community, delivering a message of peace. They also help with mentoring and voter registration. BRAVE stands for Bold Resistance Against Violence Everywhere.
He likes the Black Lives Matter movement and appreciates its efforts, but he wishes it would "address black on black crime as much as they do police brutality."
"I mean: How can they expect to give us justice for those killings when we don't even expect justice for our own killings?"
His brother's killer has not been caught.
Still, meeting Obama has inspired Tre to fight even harder for change and for equality for all.
"Knowing that your role model is gone and I'm still trying to follow his footsteps," Tre says, "I know (my brother) would be proud of me for what I did and what I said."
He pauses. "I think that's my response to everything that happened to me after my brother. My response was I need to go out and make a change so that other people won't go through what I went through."
Terrell would be proud in other ways, too. On what would've been Terrell's 28th birthday, Tre played in a high school basketball game. Under his jersey, he wore a T-shirt commemorating his brother's life.
On the court, Tre couldn't be stopped. He caught fire, hitting five 3-pointers. "I know I played well because he was looking down, and he helped me out that game."
Again, Tre lights up.
-- Wayne Drash, CNNBen Muth, a former Stanford left tackle, is concerned about D.J. Fluker.
More so, it's Fluker's feet -- size 22 -- that worry Muth. In Muth's view, the Chargers rookie lacks the nimbleness to pass-block well enough as an NFL tackle.
"At the end of the day, I think his feet are just too heavy," Muth writes, via Football Outsiders. "The need for super-fluid feet can be overrated for tackles; for instance, Sebastian Vollmer is a guy with clunky feet at times who gets around it with angles and technique. But you need to be at a certain threshold, and I don’t think Fluker is above it."
At Chargers Park on May 13, I saw Fluker discover how sneaky and fast NFL edge rushers can be. His potential at guard is intriguing, as noted predraft. My view remains that Fluker, 22, needs to be given a chance to play right tackle, where he started for three years at Alabama. He reputedly is a hard worker, and he's learning from a coach, Joe D'Alessandris, who's in his fourth decade of teaching blockers. Former Bills safety Mark Kelso told me D'Alessandris did wonders with Buffalo's linemen. Fluker should be a terrific run blocker. Drafting him 11th, the Chargers had to believe he can become at least a pretty good pass blocker.
Elsewhere, an ESPN analyst notes that Manti Te'o wasn't the only Notre Dame defender who whiffed against Alabama in January. Irish free safety Zeke Motta missed several open-field cracks at Bama backs such as Eddie Lacy. The Falcons chose Motta in the seventh round. Te'o's autographed football card, meantime, could be a hit with memorabilia lovers.SEATTLE -- As December attempts to set the record for warmest one in at least the 69 years at Sea-Tac and perhaps the warmest even counting the Federal Building back to 1890, the news as we turn the page to official winter is not good for skiers.
The 90-day long range seasonal models for January through March have come out from NOAA and the news is more of the same, if not even a little worse than before: A very high confidence that the winter season will end up warmer than normal in the Pacific Northwest.
Already we've been measuring snow in the mountains in single digits across many locations for much of December. A storm Thursday night brought a bit more snow to push Snoqualmie Pass to about 13 inches on the ground as of Friday morning with Stevens Pass around 16 inches and Mt. Baker up to 22 inches.
But another warm, Pineapple Express type storm this weekend threatens to melt and wash away a significant chunk of it. And that could be the recurring theme of the winter as well.
Here is the temperature forecast for January through March, showing a very high confidence -- over 60 percent, which is quite high by seasonal forecast standards -- for warmer than normal conditions to continue in the Pacific Northwest, particularly western Washington and northern Oregon. The rest of the West Coast isn't much better, and neither is Alaska.
The rainfall map also shows drier than normal conditions likely in Washington while very wet conditions across California and the South -- very typical of an El Nino winter.
What's Up With El Nino Anyway?
El Nino continues to cause some head scratching in that the sea temperatures have warmed in the Central Pacific to El Nino-type levels, but the atmosphere has yet to take notice. But climate models continue to indicate we're going to get there, even if it might be a weak event.
But while El Nino has yet to really take the wheel of driving the global weather patterns, locally we're still dealing with warmer waters in the Northern Pacific Ocean which has been a major factor in our months-long warm spell and are forecast to remain that way for a while.
Thus, the forecast going forward seems to indicate the West Coast will continue to deal with warmer than normal temperatures for a while. Here are the rolling 90-day forecast maps going forward:
Now, as we've seen even this autumn -- being in a generally warm pattern doesn't mean it can't get cold on occasion -- we've already seen two fairly decent cold snaps with even a bit of lowland snow at the end of November. And the forecast is trending for a cooler pattern for a while as we head toward the end of the year.
But overall, it seems like days in the 50s could outnumber the days in the 40s in the lowlands, and snow events in the mountains could be fleeting.Doesn’t news like this make you want to go out and buy a Baconator?
Campus Reform reports:
Students, labor activists demand UNC boot Wendy’s from campus
University of North Carolina students marched through campus Friday demanding the removal of a Wendy’s restaurant from the student union.
According to The Daily Tar Heel, UNC students partnered with the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) to organize the “Boot the Braids” demonstration, during which they called on Carolina Dining Services to cut its contract with the fast food provider, which has not joined the “Fair Food Program” initiative started by CIW in 2014.
Wendy’s does have a code of conduct that lays out expectations regarding the treatment of workers, but the protesters complain that the complaint process is not transparent, alleging that “systemic human rights violations” occur at Mexican farms that supply produce to Wendy’s.
Fair Food Program participants, on the other hand, must agree to purchase only from suppliers that maintain a “worker-driven Code of Conduct.”
“I think the only way to ensure that that’s not happening, and we’re having food with dignity and just food, is to get corporations to sign on to the fair food program,” said Sarah Benecky, a UNC student who interns at the Alliance for Fair Food, asserting that the program “guarantees the protection of workers, prevents violence, and provides an outlet for workers to contact if they feel unsafe and protect against sexual abuse.”Chicago’s mayor said the Windy City will sue the Trump administration next week over its policy of withholding funds from so-called sanctuary cities shielding illegal immigrants from federal authorities.
“We’re not going to actually auction off our values as a city, so Monday morning the city of Chicago is going to court, we’re going to take the Justice Department to court based on this,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said during a interview slated to air Sunday on WLS radio 890, set to air Sunday, The Chicago Tribune reported Friday.
“We find it unlawful and unconstitutional to be, as a city, coerced on a policy,” added Mr. Emanuel, a second-term Democrat who served in the administrations of Presidents Clinton and Obama before being elected mayor in 2011.
Specifically Mr. Emanuel said the city will sue in federal court to stop Attorney General Jeff Sessions from restricting the use of Byrne Justice Assistance Grants which are federal funds awarded annually to state, local and tribal jurisdictions to assist with law enforcement personnel, training and equipment.
Chicago has planned to use $3.2 million in Byrne grants this year to buy vehicles for the city’s police department, but the Justice Department said last month that the city and more than 200 others risk losing funds for protecting illegal immigrants.
“From now on, the Department will only provide Byrne JAG grants to cities and states that comply with federal law, allow federal immigration access to detention facilities, and provide 48 hours notice before they release an illegal alien wanted by federal authorities,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said last month.
Four cities — Albuquerque, N.M.; Baltimore, Md.; San Bernardino, Calif.; and Stockton, Calif. — received warnings Thursday indicating they’ll be ineligible for Byrne grants unless they begin cooperating with federal immigration officials, Mr. Sessions said Thursday.
“”We are not going to be put in a position of choosing who we are as a welcoming city and strengthening our police department,” Mr. Emanuel said in the radio interview.
Mr. Emanuel said in December that Chicago would allocate $1 million leftover from a tax rebate program to defend immigrants from any deportation efforts undertaken by the Trump administration.
“Chicago has a proud history of diversity and inclusion, and my administration will do everything in our power to ensure that immigrants remain safe, secure and supported,” he said at the time.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC. Click here for reprint permission.It doesn’t matter if it’s a tiny bacterium, a growing tree or a gigantic mammal – it seems most groups of organisms favour the same optimum metabolic rate.
Previous studies had shown that, within many groups of organisms, smaller species generally produce more energy within each cell than larger species. But according to Anastassia Makarieva from Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute in St Petersburg, Russia, no studies had compared resting metabolic rates across the whole range of life on Earth.
Makarieva’s team trawled through a database of 3,006 different species, ranging from bacteria to elephants. They found that the average resting metabolic rate per unit mass varied by a factor of 10,000 – despite the fact that body mass varied by a gigantic factor, 1020.
For most species, the metabolic range was even narrower, with the majority lying between 1 and 10 Watts per kilogram – a factor of 10 difference. There was no consistent relationship between metabolic rate and body mass.
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Elephantine metabolism
“The largest organism we studied is the elephant, which has a metabolic rate of 1 Watt per kilogram, and the smallest is a bacterium with a metabolic rate of 4 Watts/kg,” says Makarieva.
Using the formulae that had previously been used to calculate the metabolic rate within separate classes of animals, you would have expected a multimillion-fold difference, she says.
Since such a large number of species falls within this narrow range, she hypothesises there may be an optimum metabolic rate for all organisms. “Organisms that lie close to this value may be the fittest to survive,” she says.
Although the team don’t yet know what evolutionary advantage it may offer, they believe the need to stay close to this value may help explain certain aspects of evolution, such as the size at which invertebrates needed to evolve a breathing mechanism, or the shape and size of tree leaves.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0802148105
Evolution – Learn more about the struggle to survive in our comprehensive special report.Pit Viper Timber rattlesnake, Crotalus horridus Scientific classification Kingdom: Animalia Phylum: Chordata Class: Reptilia Order: Squamata Suborder: Serpentes Family: Viperidae Subfamily: Crotalinae
Oppel, 1811 Synonyms Crotalini Oppel, 1811
Crotales Cuvier, 1817
Crotalidae Gay, 1825
Crotaloidae Fitzinger, 1826
Cophiadae Boie, 1827
Crotaloidei Eichwald, 1831
Crotalina Bonaparte, 1831
Bothrophes Fitzinger, 1843
Crotalinae Cope, 1860
Teleuraspides Cope, 1871
Crotalida Strauch, 1873
Bothrophera Garman, 1884
Cophiinae Cope, 1895
Lachesinae Cope, 1900
Lachesinii Smith, Smith & Sawin, 1977
Agkistrodontinii Hoge & Romano-Hoge, 1981
Agkistrodontini Hoge & Romano-Hoge, 1983 [1]
The Crotalinae, commonly known as pit vipers,[2][3] crotaline snakes (named for the Ancient Greek: κρόταλον krotalon[4] castanet/rattle of a rattlesnake's tail), or pit adders, are a subfamily of venomous vipers found in Eurasia and the Americas. They are distinguished by the presence of a heat-sensing pit organ located between the eye and the nostril on both sides of the head. Currently, 18 genera and 151 species are recognized:[5] seven genera and 54 species in the Old World, against a greater diversity of 11 genera and 97 species in the New World. These are also the only viperids found in the Americas. The groups of snakes represented here include rattlesnakes, lanceheads, and Asian pit vipers. The type genus for this subfamily is Crotalus, of which the type species is the timber rattlesnake, C. horridus.[citation needed]
These snakes range in size from the diminutive hump-nosed viper, Hypnale hypnale, that grows to an average total length (including tail) of only 30–45 cm (12–18 in), to the bushmaster, Lachesis muta, a species known to reach a maximum total length of 3.65 m (12.0 ft) in length.
What makes this subfamily unique is that all member species share a common characteristic: a deep pit, or fossa, in the loreal area between the eye and the nostril on either side of the head. These loreal pits are the external openings to a pair of extremely sensitive infrared-detecting organs, which in effect give the snakes a sixth sense to help them find and perhaps even judge the size of the small, warm-blooded prey on which they feed.[6] Osine triphosphate, monoamine oxidase, generalized esterases and acetylcholine esterase have also been found in it.[6] When prey comes into range, infrared radiation falling onto the membrane allows the snake to determine its direction.[2] Experiments have shown, when deprived of their senses of sight and smell, these snakes can strike accurately at moving objects less than 0.2 °C (0.36 °F) warmer than the background.[7] The paired pit organs provide the snake with thermal rangefinder capabilities.[8] These organs are of great value to a predator that hunts at night, as well as for avoiding the snake’s own predators.[9]
Among vipers, these snakes are also unique in that they have a specialized muscle, called the muscularis pterigoidius glandulae, between the venom gland and the head of the ectopterygoid. Contraction of this muscle, together with that of the m. compressor glandulae, forces venom out of the gland.[6]
Geographic range [ edit ]
The subfamily Crotalinae is found in the Old World from eastern Europe eastward through Asia to Japan, China, Indonesia, peninsular India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. In the Americas, they range from southern Canada southward to Central America to southern South America.[1]
Habitat [ edit ]
The loreal pit is clearly visible below and anterior to the eye (below and posterior to the nostril).
Crotalines are a versatile subfamily, with members found in habitats ranging from parched desert (e.g., the sidewinder, Crotalus cerastes) to rainforests (e.g., the bushmaster, Lachesis muta). They may be either arboreal or terrestrial, and one species is even semiaquatic: the cottonmouth, Agkistrodon piscivorus. The altitude record is held jointly by Crotalus triseriatus in Mexico and Gloydius strauchi in China, both of which have been found above the treeline at over 4,000 m elevation.[6]
Behavior [ edit ]
Although a few species of crotalines are highly active by day, such as Trimeresurus trigonocephalus, a bright green pit viper endemic to Sri Lanka, most are nocturnal, preferring to avoid high daytime temperatures and to hunt when their favored prey are also active. The snakes' heat-sensitive pits are also thought to aid in locating cooler areas in which to rest.[citation needed]
As ambush predators, crotalines typically wait patiently somewhere for unsuspecting prey to wander by. At least one species, the arboreal Gloydius shedaoensis of China, is known to select a specific ambush site and return to it every year in time for the spring migration of birds. Studies have indicated these snakes learn to improve their strike accuracy over time.[10]
Many temperate species of pit vipers (e.g. most rattlesnakes) congregate in sheltered areas or "dens" to overwinter (see hibernation), the snakes benefiting from the combined heat. In cool temperatures and while pregnant, pit vipers also bask on sunny ledges. Some species do not mass together in this way, for example the copperhead, Agkistrodon contortrix, or the Mojave rattlesnake, Crotalus scutulatus.[citation needed]
Like most snakes, crotalines keep to themselves and strike only if cornered or threatened. Smaller snakes are less likely to stand their ground than larger specimens. Pollution and the destruction of rainforests have caused many pit viper populations to decline. Humans also threaten pit vipers, as many are hunted for their skins or killed by cars when they wander onto roads.[citation needed]
Reproduction [ edit ]
With few exceptions, crotalines are ovoviviparous, that is, females give birth to live young. Among the oviparous (egg-laying) pit vipers are Lachesis, Calloselasma, and some Trimeresurus species. All egg-laying crotalines are believed to guard their eggs.[citation needed]
Brood sizes range from two for very small species, to as many as 86 for the fer-de-lance, Bothrops atrox, a species among the most prolific of all live-bearing snakes. Many young crotalines have brightly coloured tails that contrast dramatically with the rest of their bodies. Used in a behavior known as caudal luring, the young snakes make worm-like movements with their tails to lure unsuspecting prey within striking distance.[citation needed]
Taxonomy [ edit ]
In the past, the pit vipers were usually classed as a separate family: the Crotalidae. Today, however, the monophyly of the viperines and the crotalines as a whole is undisputed, which is why they are treated here as a subfamily of the Viperidae.[citation needed]
Genera [ edit ]
*) Not including the nominate subspecies.[citation needed]
T ) Type genus.[ref 2]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
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www.oasystss.co.ukGiven how many bloggers have already weighed in on the story of an Italian court convicting geologists of manslaughter for failing to issue adequate earthquake warnings before an earthquake that devastated the town of L'Aquila, including Steve Novella, Daniela at Skepchicks, Sharon Hill at Skeptic, and even Instapundit, you'd think that even Orac wouldn't have anything to say about it. You would, of course, be wrong. Orac always has something to say about such things. The question is simply whether he decides he's interested enough in the story to take the time and effort to compose and let loose one of his typical logorrheic streams of pontification about it. In this case he is |
come to when something hard happens. It's not just meetings; it's relationships, that are forever," Noble said.
Rotary is an international service organization based on the mottos "Service Above Self" and "One Profits Most Who Serves Best." Founded in 1905, there are more than 33,000 Rotary Clubs in 200 countries.
Royal Crest Dairy is donating approximately 300 quarts of whipping cream. The Times-Call is also an in-kind sponsor.
"I just encourage people to come down and register and throw a few pies, and then stick around for the music and Amazing Race and rest of festivities around downtown," Argys said.
"It was my idea. I've wanted to do this my whole life. I grew up watching too many 'Three Stooges' movies, but I always thought it would be a great idea to have a pie fight," Schenker said.
"Pie on!" he said.
Schenker and Noble do not envision the pie fight becoming an annual event.
"But we're so damn creative, we'll think of something else next year," Schenker said.Abstract
A 1960 experiment is examined in which sound from three underwater explosions near Perth, Australia, was detected near Bermuda. A recent attempt [Munk et al., J. Phys. Ocean. 18, 1876 (1988)] to calculate propagation paths for this event included rotational flattening of the Earth and horizontal refraction determined from the vertical sound speed minimum. That calculation left Bermuda in a shadow zone. The current work invokes adiabatic mode theory to include refraction due to horizontal variations in the vertical mode structure. These results include separate horizontal rays for each of the first few vertical modes, using an archival data set of 230 ocean sound profiles to generate the modes numerically. Where appropriate, interaction with bathymetry is included. This solution possesses two eigenray groups: Group A passes just south of the Cape of Good Hope, at which point group B is almost 1000 km to the south. Intermediate rays are blocked by islands. Group A proceeds unimpeded to Bermuda for a total time of flight of 13 354±5 s, while group B interacts slightly with bathymetry off Brazil, arriving at 13 403±9 s, and suffering roughly 7–12 dB more bottom attenuation. The spread in these arrivals overlaps satisfactorily with experimental data (main arrival at 13 364±5 s; pulse train half‐width 15 s; second arrival 30±5 s later roughly 10 dB below the first arrival).WordPress is Website Development, Blogging and Web Hosting Company, which is very Convenient for those who are intrested in Website related stuff like creating website, Web hosting just because of it’s highly customizable features, easily available plugins and options like media embedding ( Video and Audio file embedding ), Onpage Seo Checker tools and so on.
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The main Advantages for those people whose passion is blogging but don’t have technical knowledge like Website Designing, hosting etc….Just because of WordPress today they able to do the same. Here we are going to install wordpress with LAMP Stack.
Follow the below steps to install WordPress in Ubuntu 16.04
To Setup WordPress below tasks to be perform :
Update the System with all Packages and Repositories
Install Apache Webserver, PHP, PhpMyAdmin and My SQL Server ( LAMP Stack )
Then install WordPress Package
After install all required packages create database in MySQL Server by using PhpMyAdmin and cofigure the database with wordpress.
Then create credential to login WordPress admin page.
So let’s perform the tasks…..
STEP 1 : Update the Packages & Repositories
Before Install above packages Let’s install/update newer version of packages and their dependencies.
So update the packages by below command.
~$ sudo apt-get update # Update Packages and Dependencies [sudo] password for elinuxbook: Hit:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial InRelease Get:2 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security InRelease [94.5 kB] Get:3 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates InRelease [95.7 kB] Get:4 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports InRelease [92.2 kB] Get:5 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/main i386 Packages [159 kB] Get:6 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main i386 Packages [418 kB] Get:7 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main Translation-en [163 kB] Get:8 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main i386 DEP-11 Metadata [337 kB] Get:9 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/main Translation-en [67.8 kB] Get:10 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/main i386 DEP-11 Metadata [79.2 kB] Get:11 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/main DEP-11 64x64 Icons [200 kB] Get:12 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/main DEP-11 64x64 Icons [62.9 kB] Get:13 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/restricted i386 Packages [6,528 B] Get:14 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/restricted Translation-en [2,016 B] Get:15 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/restricted i386 DEP-11 Metadata [199 B] Get:16 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/universe i386 Packages [56.9 kB] Get:17 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/restricted i386 Packages [6,528 B] Get:18 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/restricted Translation-en [2,016 B] Get:19 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/universe i386 Packages [357 kB] Get:20 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/universe Translation-en [33.4 kB] Get:21 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/universe i386 DEP-11 Metadata [7,418 B] Get:22 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/universe DEP-11 64x64 Icons [16.4 kB] Get:23 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/multiverse i386 Packages [2,928 B] Get:24 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/universe Translation-en [131 kB] Get:25 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/multiverse Translation-en [1,124 B] Get:26 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/universe i386 DEP-11 Metadata [106 kB] Get:27 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/multiverse i386 DEP-11 Metadata [199 B] Get:28 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/universe DEP-11 64x64 Icons [126 kB] Get:29 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/multiverse i386 Packages [6,172 B] Get:30 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/multiverse Translation-en [2,988 B] Get:31 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/multiverse i386 DEP-11 Metadata [2,529 B] Get:32 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/multiverse DEP-11 64x64 Icons [9,227 B] Get:33 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports/main i386 Packages [4,400 B] Get:34 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports/main Translation-en [3,104 B] Get:35 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports/main i386 DEP-11 Metadata [195 B] Get:36 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports/universe i386 Packages [2,412 B] Get:37 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports/universe Translation-en [1,216 B] Get:38 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-backports/universe i386 DEP-11 Metadata [198 B] Fetched 2,503 kB in 22s (111 kB/s) AppStream cache update completed, but some metadata was ignored due to errors. Reading package lists... Done
As shown on above output all packages are now up to date, Now use below command to Install Apache Web Server.
STEP 2 : Install Apache Web Server Package
~$ sudo apt-get install apache2 # Install Apache2 Package Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following additional packages will be installed: apache2-bin apache2-data apache2-utils libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap liblua5.1-0 Suggested packages: apache2-doc apache2-suexec-pristine | apache2-suexec-custom The following NEW packages will be installed: apache2 apache2-bin apache2-data apache2-utils libapr1 libaprutil1 libaprutil1-dbd-sqlite3 libaprutil1-ldap liblua5.1-0 0 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 395 not upgraded. Need to get 1,628 kB of archives. After this operation, 6,253 kB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Now it’s asking to Enter “Y” to proceed for further installation, So press “Y”
Enabling conf localized-error-pages. Enabling conf other-vhosts-access-log. Enabling conf security. Enabling conf serve-cgi-bin. Enabling site 000-default. Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.23-0ubuntu3)... Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-19)... Processing triggers for systemd (229-4ubuntu4)... Processing triggers for ufw (0.35-0ubuntu2)...
As we can see above the apache2 Package installed successfully, We can verify if apache2 package is installed or not by below command.
~$ sudo dpkg -l apache2 # Confirm if Apache2 Package is installed [sudo] password for elinuxbook: Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad) ||/ Name Version Architecture Description +++-==============-============-============-================================= ii apache2 2.4.18-2ubun i386 Apache HTTP Server
As per output above the apache2 package is installed.
Now open the Web-Browser and enter “localhost” to check apache2 default page is showing or not.
So apache web service is working fine as shown on the snapshot above.
STEP 3 : Install PHP Package
Let’s go ahead and install php by below command.
~$ sudo apt-get install php7.0 libapache2-mod-php7.0 php7.0-mysql php7.0-curl php7.0-json php7.0-cli php7.0-cgi php7.0-gd # Install PHP7.0 Package Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following additional packages will be installed: php-common php7.0-common php7.0-opcache php7.0-readline Suggested packages: php-pear The following NEW packages will be installed: libapache2-mod-php7.0 php-common php7.0 php7.0-cgi php7.0-cli php7.0-common php7.0-curl php7.0-gd php7.0-json php7.0-mysql php7.0-opcache php7.0-readline 0 upgraded, 12 newly installed, 0 to remove and 403 not upgraded. Need to get 5,054 kB of archives. After this operation, 21.9 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
Now it’s asking to Enter “Y” to proceed for further installation, So press “Y”
Creating config file /etc/php/7.0/cgi/php.ini with new version Setting up php7.0 (7.0.8-0ubuntu0.16.04.3)... Setting up php7.0-curl (7.0.8-0ubuntu0.16.04.3)... Creating config file /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/curl.ini with new version Setting up php7.0-gd (7.0.8-0ubuntu0.16.04.3)... Creating config file /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/gd.ini with new version Setting up php7.0-mysql (7.0.8-0ubuntu0.16.04.3)... Creating config file /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/mysqlnd.ini with new version Creating config file /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/mysqli.ini with new version Creating config file /etc/php/7.0/mods-available/pdo_mysql.ini with new version Processing triggers for libapache2-mod-php7.0 (7.0.8-0ubuntu0.16.04.3)...
As we can see above the php package installation process has been completed, We can verify if php package is installed or not by below command.
~$ sudo dpkg -l php7.0 # Confirm if PHP7.0 Package is installed Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad) ||/ Name Version Architecture Description +++-==============-============-============-================================= ii php7.0 7.0.8-0ubunt all server-side, HTML-embedded script ~$
As we can see above php is installed, now restart the apache2 service to take effect by below command.
~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart # Restart Apache2 Service [ ok ] Restarting apache2 (via systemctl): apache2.service.
Now let’s go ahead and test if php is working properly or not, for that create a file under Document Root of apache i.e. “/var/www/html” and then enter “<?php phpinfo();?>” to check php information.
Follow the below steps to do the same :-
Enter the below code in file to check if php is working fine and then save. <?php phpinfo();?> # to check the PHP Information Note: I prefer “nano” as a text editor, you can use “vi” or any other text editor.
~$ sudo nano /var/www/html/file.php # Create a file
Restart the apache2 service then open the web browser and then enter “http://localhost/file.php”
PHP is working fine as shown on the above snapshot.
STEP 4 : Install MySQL Database Server Package
Now it’s time to install mysql-server, follow the below command to install the same.
~$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server # Install mysql-server Package Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following additional packages will be installed: libaio1 libevent-core-2.0-5 libhtml-template-perl mysql-client-5.7 mysql-client-core-5.7 mysql-common mysql-server-5.7 mysql-server-core-5.7 Suggested packages: libipc-sharedcache-perl mailx tinyca The following NEW packages will be installed: libaio1 libevent-core-2.0-5 libhtml-template-perl mysql-client-5.7 mysql-client-core-5.7 mysql-common mysql-server mysql-server-5.7 mysql-server-core-5.7 0 upgraded, 9 newly installed, 0 to remove and 395 not upgraded. Need to get 18.7 MB of archives. After this operation, 157 MB of additional disk space will be used. Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
As shown above on the output its asking to enter “Y” to proceed the installation process, So enter “Y“.
Now its asking to set the password for mysql-server login for the user “root“.
Confirm the password by Re-Entering the same password.
Setting up libaio1:i386 (0.3.110-2)... Setting up mysql-client-core-5.7 (5.7.16-0ubuntu0.16.04.1)... Setting up mysql-client-5.7 (5.7.16-0ubuntu0.16.04.1)... Setting up mysql-server-core-5.7 (5.7.16-0ubuntu0.16.04.1)... Setting up mysql-server-5.7 (5.7.16-0ubuntu0.16.04.1)... update-alternatives: using /etc/mysql/mysql.cnf to provide /etc/mysql/my.cnf (my.cnf) in auto mode Renaming removed key_buffer and myisam-recover options (if present) Setting up libhtml-template-perl (2.95-2)... Setting up mysql-server (5.7.16-0ubuntu0.16.04.1)... Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.23-0ubuntu3)... Processing triggers for ureadahead (0.100.0-19)... Processing triggers for systemd (229-4ubuntu4)...
mysql-server installation process has been completed, we can verify if mysql-server package is installed or not by below command.
~$ sudo dpkg -l mysql-server # Confirm if mysql-server Package is installed [sudo] password for elinuxbook: Desired=Unknown/Install/Remove/Purge/Hold | Status=Not/Inst/Conf-files/Unpacked/halF-conf/Half-inst/trig-aWait/Trig-pend |/ Err?=(none)/Reinst-required (Status,Err: uppercase=bad) ||/ Name Version Architecture Description +++-=============================-===================-===================-================================================================ ii mysql-server 5.7.16-0ubuntu0.16. all MySQL database server (metapackage depending on the latest versi
STEP 5 : Install WordPress Package
Now Let’s go ahead and install WordPress Package :
Before Installation we have to download wordpress package as shown below.
~$ sudo wget https://www.wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz # Download WordPress Package [sudo] password for elinuxbook: --2016-11-21 08:57:26-- https://www.wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz Resolving www.wordpress.org (www.wordpress.org)... 66.155.40.250, 66.155.40.249 Connecting to www.wordpress.org (www.wordpress.org)|66.155.40.250|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 301 Moved Permanently Location: https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz [following] --2016-11-21 08:57:32-- https://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz Resolving wordpress.org (wordpress.org)... 66.155.40.250, 66.155.40.249 Connecting to wordpress.org (wordpress.org)|66.155.40.250|:443... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 7961036 (7.6M) [application/octet-stream] Saving to: ‘latest.tar.gz’ latest.tar.gz 100%[==================================================================>] 7.59M 124KB/s in 65s 2016-11-21 08:58:38 (120 KB/s) - ‘latest.tar.gz’ saved [7961036/7961036]
So we successfully downloaded the WordPress Package, as we can see above on output we have downloaded the package on elinuxbook user home directory as a latest.tar.gz as shown below.
but we need it on Apache Webserver Document Directory i.e. “/var/www/html“.
so let’s extract the latest.tar.gz file on /var/www/html as shown below.
~$ cd /var/www/html/ $ sudo tar -xzvf /home/elinuxbook/latest.tar.gz # Extract WordPress Compressed Package
After extract the latest.tar.gz we got a wordpress (Hilighted in Yellow Color) directory on “/var/www.html” as shown below on the output.
But as we can see the Owner of the WordPress Directory is nobody:nogroup (Highlighted in Blue Color), So we need to change the Ownership to www-data by chown command, So follow the below step.
$ ls -l total 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11321 Nov 21 08:05 index.html drwxr-xr-x 5 nobody nogroup 4096 Sep 7 07:59 wordpress $ sudo chown www-data:www-data -R wordpress/ elinuxbook@ubuntu:/var/www/html$ ls -l total 16 -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 11321 Nov 21 08:05 index.html drwxr-xr-x 5 www-data www-data 4096 Sep 7 07:59 wordpress
As we can see above on output the Ownership has been changed to www-data:www-data (Hilighted in Orange Color), So our installation part is over, now it’s time of configuration and WordPress web access.
STEP 6 : Create Database and User in MySQL Server
we need to logging in MySQL Database server to create WordPress database, So follow the below steps to do the same.
Login to MySQL server by user root and use the password which we had set during MySQL Database Server package installation.
~$ mysql -u root -p # Login as a root with it's password Enter password: Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with ; or g. Your MySQL connection id is 4 Server version: 5.7.16-0ubuntu0.16.04.1 (Ubuntu) Copyright (c) 2000, 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the current input statement. mysql> create database mywpdb; # Create a Database for WordPress Query OK, 1 row affected (0.06 sec) mysql> create user 'wplocal'@'localhost' identified by 'pass@123'; # Create a User & It's Password for Authentication Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.21 sec) mysql> grant all privileges on mywpdb.* to 'wplocal'@'localhost'; # Grant Previleges to above created user (wplocal) to access the Database (mywpdb) Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec) mysql> flush privileges; # Now Flush the Privileges Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.16 sec) mysql> exit # Logout from SQL Server Bye
~$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart #Restart the Apache2 Service [ ok ] Restarting apache2 (via systemctl): apache2.service.
STEP 7 : WordPress Configuration with Database (wp-config.php)
Before open the WordPress webaccess we need to do some configuration in WordPress Website Documents, Please follow the below steps :-
Change the Directory to “/var/www/html/wordpress” as shown below…
~$ cd /var/www/html/wordpress
As we can see above on the snapshot “wp-config-sample.php” is the sample configuration file of the WordPress, So Let’s copy the wp-config-sample.php as wp-config.php as shown below.
Now edit “wp-config.php” as shown below and go to MySQL settings section :
Now Enter the Required details i.e. Database Name, Database Username, Database Password & Host.
After changes the configuration should look like shown above on snapshot.
All above details (Database Name, Username, Password) are we had created on Step : 5
Note : Above mentioned database details are given as per my Scenario You have to mention all details as per yours.
Now restart the apache2 Service to take effect.
STEP 8 : Access WordPress Web Access
Access the WordPress Web-access by URL http://localhost/wordpress
As shown on the Snapshot above select the Language and Click on Continue
As per above snapshot it’s asking for MySQL Database and Login details which we have already mentioned on wp-config.php file, So click on Let’s go! Button.
Now on our next step it’s asking to enter your WordPress Account details Like Username, Password, Email ID…etc… for wordpress web login
So you can enter as per your choice and then click on Install WordPress.
Note : On Step:5 we had created username and password for MySQL WordPress database authentication and here on above snapshot we are going to create username password for WordPress Web Login, So Please don’s get confused.
Now click on Login.
Here Enter Username and Password to login WordPress Webaccess.
Note: Here enter the Username and Password we have created on Step : 7
Atlast we are able to successfully logged in the WordPress Portal as shown on the snapshot above.
So we successfully installed and Configured the WordPress Version 4.6.1 with LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 16.04, For any Query please feel free to comment us on below comment box.PALM BEACH, Fla. — President-elect Donald Trump declared Wednesday that the deadly truck attack on a Christmas market in Germany was “an attack on humanity and it’s got to be stopped.” He also suggested he might go forward with his campaign pledge to temporarily ban Muslim immigrants from coming to the United States.
“You know my plans. All along, I’ve been proven to be right, 100 percent correct,” Trump said when asked if the attack in Berlin had caused him to re-evaluate the proposal. “What’s happening is disgraceful.”
see also Police ID Tunisian refugee as suspect in Berlin market attack German police are hunting for a Tunisian refugee in connection...
Trump proposed the Muslim ban during the Republican primary campaign, prompting criticism from both parties. He shifted his rhetoric during the general election to focus on temporarily halting immigration from an unspecified list of countries with ties to terrorism, though he did not disavow the Muslim ban. A transition spokesman said later Wednesday that Trump’s plans “might upset those with their heads stuck in the politically correct sand.”
“President-elect Trump has been clear that we will suspend admission of those from countries with high terrorism rates and apply a strict vetting procedure for those seeking entry in order to protect American lives,” said spokesman Jason Miller.
But transition officials did not comment on whether Trump could also push for the overarching ban on Muslims. The proposal remains on his campaign website.
The Islamic State group has claimed responsibility for Monday’s attack in Berlin that left 12 people dead and 48 injured. On Wednesday, German officials launched a Europe-wide manhunt for a “violent and armed” Tunisian man suspected in the killings.
Trump was spending the final days of 2016 huddling with advisers at his palatial private estate in South Florida. He also met Wednesday with the heads of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, companies with high-dollar government contracts that Trump has criticized. Boeing has a contract to build two new Air Force One planes and Lockheed Martin builds the F-35 fighter jet.
Trump, who briefly spoke to reporters outside Mar-a-Lago, said of his meeting with Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson, “It’s a little bit of a dance. We’re trying to get costs down.”
Dennis Muilenburg, CEO of Boeing, said his company was committed to working with Trump to lower costs on the Air Force One project.
The president-elect was also finalizing his senior White House team, wrapping up a decision-making process that has been dogged by infighting among rival factions within Trump’s organization. Some of Trump’s original campaign aides have expressed concern to the president-elect himself that they are getting boxed out in favor of those more closely aligned with incoming chief of staff Reince Priebus, former chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Among the early advisers who will not be joining Trump at the White House is Corey Lewandowski, his combative first campaign manager. But the operative won’t be far away — Lewandowski announced plans to start a political consulting firm with offices just a block away from the White House.
Lewandowski oversaw Trump’s campaign through the Republican primaries, but he clashed with the candidate’s family and was fired. Still, he remained close to Trump, talking with him frequently and showing up occasionally at the president-elect’s offices during the transition.
Lewandowski said he was offered “multiple opportunities” to join the administration, though people with knowledge of the process said those opportunities did not include senior positions in the West Wing.
The president-elect announced plans to hire economist Peter Navarro to run a new National Trade Council that will be housed in the White House. Navarro, author of “Death By China,” has endorsed a hard-line approach toward relations with Beijing.
In a statement, the Trump transition team said the creation of the council “demonstrates the president-elect’s determination to make American manufacturing great again.”
Trump also named billionaire investor Carl Icahn as an adviser on regulatory reform, though the transition team said Icahn would not be serving as a federal government employee.
Transition officials said additional announcements on White House jobs were expected this week.
Trump opened his day by boasting anew about his Nov. 8 election victory, tweeting that his win in the Electoral College was more difficult to pull off than winning the popular vote would have been if he had tried. Democrat Hillary Clinton won at least 2.6 million more votes than Trump, an apparent sore point for the president-elect.
“I would have done even better in the election, if that is possible, if the winner was based on popular vote – but would campaign differently,” he tweeted.A THIEF could be on the runs after picking up more than they bargained for whilst ransacking allotments in County Durham.
The careless criminal probably thought they had struck it lucky when they chanced upon a bottle of rum in a greenhouse at The Pollards Allotments, in Bishop Auckland.
But gardeners hope the smell of revenge will be far from sweet as the rum was mixed with quarter of a litre of lactulose - a laxative which if consumed could cause diarrhoea and stomach cramping.
Bob Latcham, a committee member at the site, said: “It was made up for someone who is poorly, if the person who stole it drank it I hope they’ve been stuck on the toilet ever since.
“Maybe they’ve left a trail behind them for police to follow so they can find out who is to blame.”
Fellow committee member Danny Simpson added: “I hope they’ve ran out of toilet roll.”
The bottle was taken when one or more people managed to get through a perimeter fence to trespass onto the Etherley Lane site overnight on Tuesday, July 12 into Wednesday, July 13.
They then smashed their way into 14 sheds and greenhouses, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake and taking items including a red Stihl chainsaw with an 18inch blade, petrol and small garden tools.
Tuesday night’s raid was the latest in a series of thefts and acts of vandalism at the site which has become soul destroying to allotment holders.
Mr Latcham said: “The state of the place was unbelievable, these midnight crawlers come in here and bash the place up without any thought for us.
“It has happened so many times now people are fed up.
“We have a lovely site here, The Pollards Allotments are known for being a friendly place.
“We have people from all walks of life including pensioners, doctors, solicitors and nurses who all get on well and put in a lot of hours looking after the gardens.
“But it is upsetting and disheartening when we turn up to discover broken glass, smashed locks and tools taken.
“The place means so much to a lot of people, it is not just about gardening but friendship and somewhere nice to go.
“But we’ve lost members because they’ve just got sick of this happening, they cannot keep replacing stolen items and fixing it up.
“The police have done an excellent job, getting finger prints, so we hope they get a result.
“We hope to improve security at the site too.”
Police have appealed for information about the incident and urged offenders not to consume the rum, if they have not already done so or disposed of it.
Anyone who witnessed suspicious activity in the Etherley Lane area around the time of the break-in or who has been offered the chainsaw for sale is asked to contact Durham police on 101. They should quote reference DHM-13072016-0078.Are the best laid plans sometimes actually “laid?”
This Saturday is Sarnia’s annual Easter In The Park, a family event scheduled every year for the holiday weekend. The popular “egg hunt” activity will bring about something new this year…
After a year of rising tensions and heated rhetoric surrounding a number of controversial local issues and unpopular decisions, city council decided they would stop making their own decisions and would instead place various proposals and solutions in plastic eggs that are to be hidden in the park. Whichever ideas are found and collected will be tallied and rolled into decisions made on several pressing and future issues.
“Why bother anymore?” asks Coun. Bev Macdougall. “No matter what we decide, we get it wrong and it’s probably time we let some of our young people decide for us.”
“We still want to ultimately make all the decisions but I want to be in control,” Coun. Terry Burrell said. “I’ve personally made sure I like all the possible outcomes that have been hidden in the eggs and placed my favourite ones in plain sight.”
Bradley Davis, 6, says “It will be fun to find all the answers the old people are looking for.”
The egg hunt will begin around 10 am on Saturday in Canatara Park.
Share this story: TweetA $10 billion settlement to resolve claims of foreclosure abuses by 14 major lenders was expected to be announced as early as Monday, several people with knowledge of the discussions said on Sunday.
The settlement would come after weeks of negotiations between federal regulators and the banks, and covers abuses like flawed paperwork and botched loan modifications, said these people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the deal had not been made public.
An estimated $3.75 billion of the $10 billion would be distributed in cash relief to Americans who went through foreclosure in 2009 and 2010, these people said. An additional $6 billion would be directed toward homeowners in danger of losing their homes after falling behind on their monthly payments.
All 14 banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Citigroup, were expected to sign on.
The agreement would come almost a year after a sweeping deal in February between state attorneys general and five large mortgage lenders.DENVER -- A couple described by one of their relatives as "young, stupid and selfish" have been accused of killing the man's grandparents so he could get his inheritance: an inexpensive house and $20,000, according to court records.
Police say Brendan Lee Johnson, 19, and his girlfriend, Cassandra Ann Rieb, 18, sneaked into his grandparents' home last month in Sterling, a small city on Colorado's rural northeastern plains, and strangled Charles and Shirley Severance, both 70.
The couple then tried to cover their tracks, scattering the grandmother's burned remains in two states and later calling 911 to report finding the grandfather's body, which was too heavy for them to dispose of as planned, authorities said. They appeared in court Wednesday, a day after being arrested.
The teens told authorities they had planned since early May to smother the Severances with pillows as they slept, but the effort became complicated when the couple put up a struggle.
"They're young stupid and selfish," said Shirley Severance's half-sister, Norma Curl. In an interview with The Associated Press, Curl said Johnson recently graduated from high school and had been living with his grandparents, but she didn't know why.
Police said the teens told them the killings happened May 20. When authorities discovered Charles Severance's body nine days later after receiving a medical call from Johnson, his wife was missing. Investigators on Monday discovered some of her remains near Sterling and others about 30 miles away in Lorenzo, Nebraska.
"Together we went and we did it together," Rieb told investigators, according to the court documents. "We had agreed to do it together, obviously.... Like one get one and one get the other."
Rieb said the plan was to hasten Johnson's inheritance, which included the grandparents' low-slung home, valued at just $47,000.
The teens crept into the home early in the morning, but Charles Severance was awake and fought Johnson, according to the documents. Johnson told authorities he tried to choke his grandfather, who he believed then died of a heart attack.
Shirley Severance asked, "Why are you doing this to me?" and offered the combination to her safe as Johnson and Rieb strangled her, the records said. As she attempted to open the safe, Johnson grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed his grandmother, authorities said.
In the days that followed, the couple told police that they cleaned the home, gathered up evidence and drove to Nebraska, the documents say. They said they had planned to cut up and burn both bodies, but left Charles Severance's behind because it was too heavy, the records say.
They burned Shirley Severance's body in a fire pit near Sterling but later dug it up and took some remains to Nebraska, police said.
Johnson's attorney, Rachel Lanzen, did not return calls seeking comment Wednesday, and it was unclear who would be representing Rieb. Jill Johnson, Brendan's mother and Shirley Severance's daughter, declined to comment to The Associated Press on Wednesday and asked for privacy. Calls to possible listed phone numbers for Rieb went unanswered or messages were left that weren't immediately returned.
A judge on Wednesday advised the teens of possible charges, which could include first-degree murder, aggravated robbery, forgery and theft. Both were held without bond.
Curl, Shirley Severance's half-sister, said the case surprised her -- except for one detail.
"The one thing I knew was my sister would put up a fight," Curl said.The Notorious B.I.G., the greatest rapper who ever lived. Photo illustration by Lisa Larson-Walker. Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images.
A lot of great art ends with suicide—Anna Karenina, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Thelma & Louise |
light by Newton. “Now of course Bartholin, Grimaldi, Hooke, and Newton were not mindless empiricists without an ‘idea’ in their heads. They saw what they saw because they were curious, inquisitive, reflective people. They were attempting to form theories. But in all these cases it is clear that the observations preceded any formulation of theory” (Hacking 1983, p. 156). In all of these cases we may say that these were observations waiting for, or perhaps even calling for, a theory. The discovery of any unexpected phenomenon calls for a theoretical explanation.
Nevertheless several of the important roles of experiment involve its relation to theory. Experiment may confirm a theory, refute a theory, or give hints to the mathematical structure of a theory.
Let us consider first an episode in which the relation between theory and experiment was clear and straightforward. This was a “crucial” experiment, one that decided unequivocally between two competing theories, or classes of theory. The episode was that of the discovery that parity, mirror-reflection symmetry or left-right symmetry, is not conserved in the weak interactions. (For details of this episode see Franklin (1986, Ch. 1) and Appendix 1). Experiments showed that in the beta decay of nuclei the number of electrons emitted in the same direction as the nuclear spin was different from the number emitted opposite to the spin direction. This was a clear demonstration of parity violation in the weak interactions.
After the discovery of parity and charge conjugation nonconservation, and following a suggestion by Landau, physicists considered CP (combined parity and particle-antiparticle symmetry), which was still conserved in the experiments, as the appropriate symmetry. One consequence of this scheme, if CP were conserved, was that the \(\ce{K1^0}\) meson could decay into two pions, whereas the \(\ce{K2^0}\) meson could not.[10] Thus, observation of the decay of \(\ce{K2^0}\) into two pions would indicate CP violation. The decay was observed by a group at Princeton University. Although several alternative explanations were offered, experiments eliminated each of the alternatives leaving only CP violation as an explanation of the experimental result. (For details of this episode see Franklin (1986, Ch. 3) and Appendix 2.)
In both of the episodes discussed previously, those of parity nonconservation and of CP violation, we saw a decision between two competing classes of theories. This episode, the discovery of Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC), illustrates the confirmation of a specific theoretical prediction 70 years after the theoretical prediction was first made. Bose (1924) and Einstein (1924; 1925) predicted that a gas of noninteracting bosonic atoms will, below a certain temperature, suddenly develop a macroscopic population in the lowest energy quantum state.[11] (For details of this episode see Appendix 3.)
In the three episodes discussed in the previous section, the relation between experiment and theory was clear. The experiments gave unequivocal results and there was no ambiguity about what theory was predicting. None of the conclusions reached has since been questioned. Parity and CP symmetry are violated in the weak interactions and Bose-Einstein condensation is an accepted phenomenon. In the practice of science things are often more complex. Experimental results may be in conflict, or may even be incorrect. Theoretical calculations may also be in error or a correct theory may be incorrectly applied. There are even cases in which both experiment and theory are wrong. As noted earlier, science is fallible. In this section I will discuss several episodes which illustrate these complexities.
The episode of the fifth force is the case of a refutation of an hypothesis, but only after a disagreement between experimental results was resolved. The “Fifth Force” was a proposed modification of Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation. The initial experiments gave conflicting results: one supported the existence of the Fifth Force whereas the other argued against it. After numerous repetitions of the experiment, the discord was resolved and a consensus reached that the Fifth Force did not exist. (For details of this episode see Appendix 4.)
The Stern-Gerlach experiment was regarded as crucial at the time it was performed, but, in fact, wasn’t. In the view of the physics community it decided the issue between two theories, refuting one and supporting the other. In the light of later work, however, the refutation stood, but the confirmation was questionable. In fact, the experimental result posed problems for the theory it had seemingly confirmed. A new theory was proposed and although the Stern-Gerlach result initially also posed problems for the new theory, after a modification of that new theory, the result confirmed it. In a sense, it was crucial after all. It just took some time.
The Stern-Gerlach experiment provides evidence for the existence of electron spin. These experimental results were first published in 1922, although the idea of electron spin wasn’t proposed by Goudsmit and Uhlenbeck until 1925 (1925; 1926). One might say that electron spin was discovered before it was invented. (For details of this episode see Appendix 5).
In the last section we saw some of the difficulty inherent in experiment-theory comparison. One is sometimes faced with the question of whether the experimental apparatus satisfies the conditions required by theory, or conversely, whether the appropriate theory is being compared to the experimental result. A case in point is the history of experiments on the double-scattering of electrons by heavy nuclei (Mott scattering) during the 1930s and the relation of these results to Dirac’s theory of the electron, an episode in which the question of whether or not the experiment satisfied the conditions of the theoretical calculation was central. Initially, experiments disagreed with Mott’s calculation, casting doubt on the underlying Dirac theory. After more than a decade of work, both experimental and theoretical, it was realized that there was a background effect in the experiments that masked the predicted effect. When the background was eliminated experiment and theory agreed. (Appendix 6)
Ever vaster amounts of data have been produced by particle colliders as they have grown from room-size apparata, to tens of kilometers long mega-labs. Vast numbers of background interactions that are well understood and theoretically uninteresting occur in the detector. These have to be combed in order to identify interactions of potential interest. This is especially true of hadron (proton -proton) colliders like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where the Higgs boson was discovered. Protons that collide in the LHC and similar hadron colliders are composed of more elementary particles, collectively labeled partons. Partons mutually interact, exponentially increasing the number of background interactions. In fact, a minuscule number of interactions are selected from the overwhelming number that occur in the detector. (In contrast, lepton collisions, such as collisions of electrons and positrons, produce much lower backgrounds, since leptons are not composed of more elementary particles.)
Thus, a successful search for new elementary particles critically depends on successfully crafting selection criteria and techniques at the stage of data collection and at the stage of data analysis. But gradual development and changes in data selection procedures in the colliders raises an important epistemological concern. The main reason for this concern is nicely anticipated by the following question, which was posed by one of the most prominent experimentalists in particle physics: “What is the extent to which we are negating the discovery potential of very-high-energy proton machines by the necessity of rejecting, a priori, the events we cannot afford to record?” (Panofsky 1994, 133). In other words, how does one decide which interactions to detect and analyze in a multitude, in order to minimize the possibility of throwing out novel and unexplored ones?
One way of searching through vast amounts of data that are already in, i.e. those that the detector has already delivered, is to look for occurrences that remain robust under varying conditions of detection. Physicists employ the technique of data cuts in such analysis. They cut out data that may be unreliable—when, for instance, a data set may be an artefact rather than a genuine particle interaction the experimenters expect. E.g. a colliding beam may interact with the walls of the detector and not with the other colliding beam, while producing a signal identical to the signal the experimenters expected the beam-beam interaction to produce. Thus, if under various data cuts a result remains stable, then it is increasingly likely to be correct and to represent the genuine phenomenon the physicists think it represents. The robustness of the result under various data cuts minimizes the possibility that the detected phenomenon only mimics the genuine one (Franklin 2013, 224–5).
At the data-acquisition stage, however, this strategy does not seem applicable. As Panofsky suggests, one does not know with certainty which of the vast number of the events in the detector may be of interest.
Yet, Karaca (2011)[13] argues that a form of robustness is in play even at the acquisition stage. This experimental approach amalgamates theoretical expectations and empirical results, as the example of the hypothesis of specific heavy particles is supposed to illustrate.
Along with the Standard Model of particle physics, a number of alternative models have been proposed. Their predictions of how elementary particles should behave often differ substantially. Yet in contrast to the Standard Model, they all share the hypothesis that there exist heavy particles that decay into particles with high transverse momentum.
Physicists apply a robustness analysis in testing this hypothesis, the argument goes. First, they check whether the apparatus can detect known particles similar to those predicted. Second, guided by the hypothesis, they establish various trigger algorithms. (The trigger algorithms, or “the triggers”, determine at what exact point in time and under which conditions a detector should record interactions. They are necessary because the frequency and the number of interactions far exceed the limited recording capacity.) And, finally, they observe whether any results remain stable across the triggers.
Yet even in this theoretical-empirical form of robustness, as Franklin (2013, 225) points out, “there is an underlying assumption that any new physics will resemble known physics”—usually a theory of the day. And one way around this problem is for physicists to produce as many alternative models as possible, including those that may even seem implausible at the time.
Perovic (2011) suggests that such a potential failure, namely to spot potentially relevant events occurring in the detector, may be also a consequence of the gradual automation of the detection process.
The early days of experimentation in particle physics, around WWII, saw the direct involvement of the experimenters in the process. Experimental particle physics was a decentralized discipline where experimenters running individual labs had full control over the triggers and analysis. The experimenters could also control the goals and the design of experiments. Fixed target accelerators, where the beam hits the detector instead of another beam, produced a number of particle interactions that was manageable for such labs. The chance of missing an anomalous event not predicted by the current theory was not a major concern in such an environment.
Yet such labs could process a comparatively small amount of data. This has gradually become an obstacle, with the advent of hadron colliders. They work at ever-higher energies and produce an ever-vaster number of background interactions. That is why the experimental process has become increasingly automated and much more indirect. Trained technicians instead of experimenters themselves at some point started to scan the recordings. Eventually, these human scanners were replaced by computers, and a full automation of detection in hadron colliders has enabled the processing of vast number of interactions. This was the first significant change in the transition from small individual labs to mega-labs.
The second significant change concerned the organization and goals of the labs. The mega-detectors and the amounts of data they produced required exponentially more staff and scientists. This in turn led to even more centralized and hierarchical labs and even longer periods of design and performance of the experiments. As a result, focusing on confirming existing dominant hypotheses rather than on exploratory particle searches was the least risky way of achieving results that would justify unprecedented investments.
Now, an indirect detection process combined with mostly confirmatory goals is conducive to overlooking of unexpected interactions. As such, it may impede potentially crucial theoretical advances stemming from missed interactions.
This possibility that physicists such as Panofsky have acknowledged is not a mere speculation. In fact, the use of semi-automated, rather than fully-automated regimes of detection turned out to be essential for a number of surprising discoveries that led to theoretical breakthroughs.
Perovic analyzes several such cases, most notably the discovery of the J/psi particle that provided the first substantial piece of evidence for the existence of the charmed quark. In the experiments, physicists were able to perform exploratory detection and visual analysis of practically individual interactions due to low number of background interactions in the linear electron-positron collider. And they could afford to do this in an energy range that the existing theory did not recognize as significant, which led to them making the discovery. None of this could have been done in the fully automated detecting regime of hadron colliders that are indispensable when dealing with an environment that contains huge numbers of backgrounds interactions.
And in some cases, such as the Fermilab experiments that aimed to discover weak neutral currents, an automated and confirmatory regime of data analysis contributed to the failure to detect particles that were readily produced in the apparatus.
The complexity of the discovery process in particle physics does not end with concerns about what exact data should be chosen out of the sea of interactions. The so-called look-elsewhere effect results in a tantalizing dilemma at the stage of data analysis.
Suppose that our theory tells us that we will find a particle in an energy range. And suppose we find a significant signal in a section of that very range. Perhaps we should keep looking elsewhere within the range to make sure it is not another particle altogether we have discovered. It may be a particle that left other undetected traces in the range that our theory does not predict, along with the trace we found. The question is to what extent we should look elsewhere before we reach a satisfying level of certainty that it is the predicted particle we have discovered.
Physicists faced such a dilemma during the search for the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (Dawid 2015).
The Higgs boson is a particle responsible for the mass of other particles. It is a scalar field that “pulls back” moving and interacting particles. This pull, which we call mass, is different for different particles. It is predicted by the Standard Model, whereas alternative models predict somewhat similar Higgs-like particles.
A prediction based on the Standard Model tells us with high probability that we will find the Higgs particle in a particular range. Yet a simple and an inevitable fact of finding it in a particular section of that range may prompt us to doubt whether we have truly found the exact particle our theory predicted. Our initial excitement may vanish when we realize that we are much more likely to find a particle of any sort—not just the predicted particle—within the entire range than in a particular section of that range. Thus, the probability of finding the Higgs anywhere within a given energy range (consisting of eighty energy ‘bins’) is much higher than the probability of finding it at a particular energy scale within that range (i.e. in any individual bin). In fact, the likelihood of us finding it in a particular bin of the range is about hundred times lower.
In other words, the fact that we will inevitably find the particle in a particular bin, not only in a particular range, decreases the certainty that it was the Higgs we found. Given this fact alone we should keep looking elsewhere for other possible traces in the range once we find a significant signal in a bin. We should not proclaim the discovery of a particle predicted by the Standard Model (or any model for that matter) too soon. But for how long should we keep looking elsewhere? And what level of certainty do we need to achieve before we proclaim discovery?
The answer boils down to the weight one gives the theory and its predictions. This is the reason the experimentalists and theoreticians had divergent views on the criterion for determining the precise point at which they could justifiably state ‘Our data indicate that we have discovered the Higgs boson’. Theoreticians were confident that a finding within the range (any of eighty bins) that was of standard reliability (of three or four sigma), coupled with the theoretical expectations that Higgs would be found, would be sufficient. In contrast, experimentalists argued that at no point of data analysis should the pertinence of the look-elsewhere effect be reduced, and the search proclaimed successful, with the help of the theoretical expectations concerning Higgs. One needs to be as careful in combing the range as one practically may. As a result, the experimentalists’ preferred value of sigmas for announcing the discovery was five. This is a standard under which very few findings have turned out to be a fluctuation in the past.
Dawid argues that a question of an appropriate statistical analysis of data is at the heart of the dispute. The reasoning of the experimentalists relied on a frequentist approach that does not specify the probability of the tested hypothesis. It actually isolates statistical analysis of data from the prior probabilities. The theoreticians, however, relied on Bayesian analysis. It starts with prior probabilities of initial assumptions and ends with the assessment of the probability of tested hypothesis based on the collected evidence. The question remains whether the experimentalists’ reasoning was fully justified. The prior expectations that the theoreticians had included in their analysis had already been empirically corroborated by previous experiments after all.
Experiment can also provide us with evidence for the existence of the entities involved in our theories. J.J. Thomson’s experiments on cathode rays provided grounds for belief in the existence of electrons. (For details of this episode see Appendix 7).
Experiment can also help to articulate a theory. Experiments on beta decay during from the 1930s to the 1950s determined the precise mathematical form of Fermi’s theory of beta decay. (For details of this episode see Appendix 8.)
One comment that has been made concerning the philosophy of experiment is that all of the examples are taken from physics and are therefore limited. In this section arguments will be presented that these discussions also apply to biology.
Although all of the illustrations of the epistemology of experiment come from physics, David Rudge (1998; 2001) has shown that they are also used in biology. His example is Kettlewell’s (1955; 1956; 1958) evolutionary biology experiments on the Peppered Moth, Biston betularia. The typical form of the moth has a pale speckled appearance and there are two darker forms, f. carbonaria, which is nearly black, and f. insularia, which is intermediate in color. The typical form of the moth was most prevalent in the British Isles and Europe until the middle of the nineteenth century. At that time things began to change. Increasing industrial pollution had both darkened the surfaces of trees and rocks and had also killed the lichen cover of the forests downwind of pollution sources. Coincident with these changes, naturalists had found that rare, darker forms of several moth species, in particular the Peppered Moth, had become common in areas downwind of pollution sources.
Kettlewell attempted to test a selectionist explanation of this phenomenon. E.B. Ford (1937; 1940) had suggested a two-part explanation of this effect: 1) darker moths had a superior physiology and 2) the spread of the melanic gene was confined to industrial areas because the darker color made carbonaria more conspicuous to avian predators in rural areas and less conspicuous in polluted areas. Kettlewell believed that Ford had established the superior viability of darker moths and he wanted to test the hypothesis that the darker form of the moth was less conspicuous to predators in industrial areas.
Kettlewell’s investigations consisted of three parts. In the first part he used human observers to investigate whether his proposed scoring method would be accurate in assessing the relative conspicuousness of different types of moths against different backgrounds. The tests showed that moths on “correct” backgrounds, typical on lichen covered backgrounds and dark moths on soot-blackened backgrounds were almost always judged inconspicuous, whereas moths on “incorrect” backgrounds were judged conspicuous.
The second step involved releasing birds into a cage containing all three types of moth and both soot-blackened and lichen covered pieces of bark as resting places. After some difficulties (see Rudge 1998 for details), Kettlewell found that birds prey on moths in an order of conspicuousness similar to that gauged by human observers.
The third step was to investigate whether birds preferentially prey on conspicuous moths in the wild. Kettlewell used a mark-release-recapture experiment in both a polluted environment (Birmingham) and later in an unpolluted wood. He released 630 marked male moths of all three types in an area near Birmingham, which contained predators and natural boundaries. He then recaptured the moths using two different types of trap, each containing virgin females of all three types to guard against the possibility of pheromone differences.
Kettlewell found that carbonaria was twice as likely to survive in soot-darkened environments (27.5 percent) as was typical (12.7 percent). He worried, however, that his results might be an artifact of his experimental procedures. Perhaps the traps used were more attractive to one type of moth, that one form of moth was more likely to migrate, or that one type of moth just lived longer. He eliminated the first alternative by showing that the recapture rates were the same for both types of trap. The use of natural boundaries and traps placed beyond those boundaries eliminated the second, and previous experiments had shown no differences in longevity. Further experiments in polluted environments confirmed that carbonaria was twice as likely to survive as typical. An experiment in an unpolluted environment showed that typical was three times as likely to survive as carbonaria. Kettlewell concluded that such selection was the cause of the prevalence of carbonaria in polluted environments.
Rudge also demonstrates that the strategies used by Kettlewell are those described above in the epistemology of experiment. His examples are given in Table 1. (For more details see Rudge 1998).
Epistemological strategies Examples from Kettlewell 1. Experimental checks and calibration in which the apparatus reproduces known phenomena. Use of the scoring experiment to verify that the proposed scoring methods would be feasible and objective. 2. Reproducing artifacts that are known in advance to be present. Analysis of recapture figures for endemic betularia populations. 3. Elimination of plausible sources of background and alternative explanations of the result. Use of natural barriers to minimize migration. 4. Using the results themselves to argue for their validity. Filming the birds preying on the moths. 5. Using an independently well-corroborated theory of the phenomenon to explain the results. Use of Ford’s theory of the spread of industrial melanism. 6. Using an apparatus based on a well- corroborated theory. Use of Fisher, Ford, and Shepard techniques. [The mark-release-capture method had been used in several earlier experiments] 7. Using statistical arguments. Use and analysis of large numbers of moths. 8. Blind analysis Not used. 9. Intervention, in which the experimenter manipulates the object under observation Not present 10. Independent confirmation using different experiments. Use of two different types of traps to recapture the moths. Table 1. Examples of epistemological strategies used by experimentalists in evolutionary biology, from H.B.D. Kettlewell’s (1955, 1956, 1958) investigations of industrial melanism. (See Rudge 1998).
The roles that experiment plays in physics are also those it plays in biology. In the previous section we have seen that Kettlewell’s experiments both test and confirm a theory. I discussed earlier a set of crucial experiments that decided between two competing classes of theories, those that conserved parity and those that did not. In this section I will discuss an experiment that decided among three competing mechanisms for the replication of DNA, the molecule now believed to be responsible for heredity. This is another crucial experiment. It strongly supported one proposed mechanism and argued against the other two. (For details of this episode see (Holmes 2001)).
In 1953 Francis Crick and James Watson proposed a three-dimensional structure for deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) (Watson and Crick 1953a). Their proposed structure consisted of two polynucleotide chains helically wound about a common axis. This was the famous “Double Helix”. The chains were bound together by combinations of four nitrogen bases — adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine. Because of structural requirements only the base pairs adenine-thymine and cytosine-guanine are allowed. Each chain is thus complementary to the other. If there is an adenine base at a location in one chain there is a thymine base at the same location on the other chain, and vice versa. The same applies to cytosine and guanine. The order of the bases along a chain is not, however, restricted in any way, and it is the precise sequence of bases that carries the genetic information.
The significance of the proposed structure was not lost on Watson and Crick when they made their suggestion. They remarked, “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.”
If DNA was to play this crucial role in genetics, then there must be a mechanism for the replication of the molecule. Within a short period of time following the Watson-Crick suggestion, three different mechanisms for the replication of the DNA molecule were proposed (Delbruck and Stent 1957). These are illustrated in Figure A. The first, proposed by Gunther Stent and known as conservative replication, suggested that each of the two strands of the parent DNA molecule is replicated in new material. This yields a first generation which consists of the original parent DNA molecule and one newly-synthesized DNA molecule. The second generation will consist of the parental DNA and three new DNAs.
Figure A: Possible mechanisms for DNA replication. (Left) Conservative replication. Each of the two strands of the parent DNA is replicated to yield the unchanged parent DNA and one newly synthesized DNA. The second generation consists of one parent DNA and three new DNAs. (Center) Semiconservative replication. Each first generation DNA molecule contains one strand of the parent DNA and one newly synthesized strand. The second generation consists of two hybrid DNAs and two new DNAs. (Right) Dispersive replication. The parent chains break at intervals, and the parental segments combine with new segments to form the daughter chains. The darker segments are parental DNA and the lighter segments are newly synthesized DNA. From Lehninger (1975).
The second proposed mechanism, known as semiconservative replication is when each strand of the parental DNA acts as a template for a second newly-synthesized complementary strand, which then combines with the original strand to form a DNA molecule. This was proposed by Watson and Crick (1953b). The first generation consists of two hybrid molecules, each of which contains one strand of parental DNA and one newly synthesized strand. The second generation consists of two hybrid molecules and two totally new DNAs. The third mechanism, proposed by Max Delbruck, was dispersive replication, in which the parental DNA chains break at intervals and the parental segments combine with new segments to form the daughter strands.
In this section the experiment performed by Matthew Meselson and Franklin Stahl, which has been called “the most beautiful experiment in biology”, and which was designed to answer the question of the correct DNA replication mechanism will be discussed (Meselson and Stahl 1958). Meselson and Stahl described their proposed method. “We anticipated that a label which imparts to the DNA molecule an increased density might permit an analysis of this distribution by sedimentation techniques. To this end a method was developed for the detection of small density differences among macromolecules. By use of this method, we have observed the distribution of the heavy nitrogen isotope \(\ce{^{15}N}\) among molecules of DNA following the transfer of a uniformly \(\ce{^{15}N}\)-labeled, exponentially growing bacterial population to a growth medium containing the ordinary nitrogen isotope \(\ce{^{14}N}\)” (Meselson and Stahl 1958, pp. 671–672).
Figure B: Schematic representation of the Meselson-Stahl experiment. From Watson (1965).
The experiment is described schematically in Figure B. Meselson and Stahl placed a sample of DNA in a solution of cesium chloride. As the sample is rotated at high speed the denser material travels further away from the axis of rotation than does the less dense material. This results in a solution of cesium chloride that has increasing density as one goes further away from the axis of rotation. The DNA reaches equilibrium at the position where its density equals that of the solution. Meselson and Stahl grew E. coli bacteria in a medium that contained ammonium chloride \((\ce{NH4Cl})\) as the sole source of nitrogen. They did this for media that contained either \(\ce{^{14}N}\), ordinary nitrogen, or \(\ce{^{15}N}\), a heavier isotope. By destroying the cell membranes they could obtain samplThere’s an errand that needs to be run. An email to go out to a client. A project for school. Maybe an unpleasant conversation to have.
What do most of us do? We do it…later. Or more simply, we just don’t do it right now—because we can do it later.
That’s not to say we’re procrastinators—which is more generally the bad habit of putting things off until the last moment. That’s a nasty habit too. But this is something more easy to rationalize, this is the “Oh I’m definitely going to do it, but not right this second.” I’ve got time later in the week, we tell ourselves. Or, that we’ll do it when we’re down there doing [some other thing].
As Steven Pressfield writes, “We don’t tell ourselves, ‘I’m never going to write my symphony.’ Instead we say, ‘I am going to write my symphony; I’m just going to start tomorrow.” We might even think that it’s better this way because we’ll be better rested, or more prepared.
“The productivity guru David Allen has a good rule: “Don’t touch paper twice.” That is, if you’re looking at an email or get a memo, punting on it is actually more work—because you’ve already spent some time on it, however small. That’s what we do, needlessly touch stuff twice. Not physically, but mentally. Thinking about it is the first touch.”
And of course, often we don’t start tomorrow—not because we’re lazy or liars or anything deliberate like that. We don’t start tomorrow because something intervenes. Life, fate, busy schedules, whatever.
We even have an annual ritual dedicated to this idea: I’ll start losing weight, stop biting my fingernails, being kinder on January 1st. We know we could start these improvements at anytime, but it’s safer to put an arbitrary date on them.
Safer, why? Because we know me might not actually have to ever do it.
For this very reason, I’ve tried to adhere to a philosophy in my work—and whatever success I’ve had can be attributed to that—of: “Let’s just do it now.” I apply it to my writing, my company, my reading and every obligation. The reason for doing this way is explained in my philosophy: “You never know what’s going to happen later.”
In other words, because I believe the world is inherently unpredictable and outside my control, when I have the opportunity to do something, I do it now, and I do not believe in putting things off until later. Because there might not be a later, first and foremost, and if there is, it probably won’t confirm to our expectations.
So if I think, I need to go for a run, I go for a run. If I have an article to write, I write it. If I need to pick up something for the house, it goes on my list for today, not “the next time I’m near the store.” Even if that means a little more work now as opposed to later.
Why?
Because I have time right now, but I might not have time for a twice-as-long run tomorrow or it might be raining. Because those article ideas I wrote down on a whiteboard for later, well someone accidentally erased it and now they’re lost forever. And next time I’m at the store, who knows if I’ll remember or not. Because the power could go out, the opportunity could go away, the person you needed to reach could leave the country, the offer ended, or you might just plain forget.
I’ve been burned too many times to believe that putting stuff off ever works in our favor. Which is why I think it’s better to act having taken, as the stoics do, “full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases.” Which is to say, usually not in your favor. In fact, this very article was started on Monday…and then I got very sick the next two days. If I’d finished, like I’d intended, it’d be done already.
Things usually get more complicated, more busy, not less so in the future. Things go wrong, you know. Entropy reigns. So if it’s right in front of you, do it. Don’t think about it, decide not to do it, and then make a plan to actually do it later.
The productivity guru David Allen has a good rule: “Don’t touch paper twice.” That is, if you’re looking at an email or get a memo, punting on it is actually more work—because you’ve already spent some time on it, however small. That’s what we do, needlessly touch stuff twice. Not physically, but mentally. Thinking about it is the first touch.
But if you focus on this present moment and do what you can in it—even if it’s not ideal—you’ll find that you ultimately outpace other people. I almost always beat deadlines. I always get what I need done. I rarely need to use excuses—“Sorry, I got sick.”, “Sorry, there was traffic.”, “Sorry, the website was down.” “Sorry, I have to reschedule.”—because excuses and the unforeseen circumstances can only intervene if you give them the space to. And when I do, I know whose fault it was. Mine. I should have taken the chance when I had it.
Nothing is more frustrating as an employer than to assign something to someone and then hear a week later that they’ve run into problems–problems at the beginning of the task. Because you know this roadblock could have been encountered and solved already. Or to hear the clock on some waiting period only just began. Why did we artificially and unnecessarily lengthen it? Right, because you put it off. In my experience, great employees learn this lesson and maybe need it pointed out only once or twice. The ones who bump into it over and over again? They are the Peter principle embodied.
“If a task has once begun. Never leave it till it’s done. Be the labor great or small. Do it well or not at all,” goes the proverb (one favored by everyone from President James Garfield to LL Cool J). But it needs an addition:
Begin it now. No, not later. Now.About
Yes, I want to make bubbles, and you will get the 'Making Bubbles' book.
A portrait book that puts back the fun into life and brings a smile on your face. I will cross country by country on my bicycle and make portrait photographs of people making bubbles.
The first stage of this portrait project will take place in January 2016 in Myanmar (Burma). Why Myanmar? Because this is a country on the move, with people who have the dream of a free and open society. It will be a joy to portrait people from all walks of life during this interessting time.
The first edition of the book 'Making Bubbles' will focus on Myanmar, but the journey to get there and some possible side trips will be included too.
Later editions will include more countries, but this is the project start. The first edition will be the original 'Making Bubbles' book and therefore always be something special.
The preparation
During the last weeks I tested my bicycle, camera gear and all kinds of different soap bubble mixtures and bubble tools. So far I've got always the same results, smiling, happy faces :-)
Testing my bubble gear. These nepalese students, Nirmala and Urmila, loved to jump in to be my bubble assistants.
Grown men become children again, Ansgar and Volker from Ruhrort, Germany.
Four friends at the Lehmbruck Museum Duisburg. After enjoying the art at the museum, they made some bubble art themselves.
Previous book projects.
In a previous book project I traveled by bus, train and motorcycle to rural areas in Myanmar to make portrait photographs of local people. I gave away nearly 1000 free portraits, mainly to poor people. It was so much fun watching the children looking at my magic travel printer. This project was selffinanced and gives me still the great feeling of having done something right.
Printing on the spot is the best thing ever. 'Customer' happiness guaranteed.
My main photographic work in over 10 years in Asia and in general is the documentation and portraiture of the'real people'. I love to get my hands dirty and go to the places, where you can hear, smell and feel the hardships of ordinary life. That's where I meet the finest people, who inspire me to give always my best with the camera. I feel so privileged to be with them and to share their stories.
You feel the heat and you know you are alive.
What to expect
Book Details
Text: Essay by Erik Neu / Thomas Schubert. All photographs by Erik Neu, approx. 70 in color Size: approx. 10 x 8 inches Regular retail price: approx. $65-120 (depends on the book version/size) Publication date: May 2016
The book will feature the names of all the 'bubble fans' who help make the book possible by supporting this Kickstarter campaign.
Rewards
· Single postcard 4 x 6 inch
· Set of 3 postcards 4 x 6 inch
· Making Bubbles the book
· Making Bubbles the special edition book
· Making Bubbles the limited special edition book (maxi size)
· Single Fine Art Print 8.5 x 11 inch limited signed edition
· Set of 3 Fine Art Prints 8.5 x 11 inch limited signed edition
Please have a look at the reward section for possible combinations and top rewards.
It only needs a few bubbles for happiness! Three Fine |
the natural log of college/noncollege relative supply. See text and supplementary material for further details. After 1982, however, the rate of intercohort increase fell by almost half—from 0.87 percentage points to 0.47 percentage points per year—and did not begin to rebound until 2004, nearly two decades later. As shown in fig. S2, this deceleration in the supply of college graduates is particularly stark when one focuses on young adults with fewer than 10 years of experience—that is, the cohorts of recent labor market entrants at each point in time. Although the supply of young college-educated males relative to young high school–educated males increased rapidly in the 1960s and early 1970s (and indeed throughout the postwar period), this rising tide reached an apex in 1974 from which it barely budged for the better part of the next 30 years. Among young females, the deceleration in supply was also unmistakable, although not as abrupt or as complete as for males. The counterpart to this deceleration in the growth of supply of college-educated workers is the steep rise in the college premium commencing in the early 1980s and continuing for 25 years. Concretely, when the influx of new college graduates slowed, the premium that a college education commanded in the labor market increased. The critical role played by the fluctuating supply of college education in the rise of U.S. inequality is documented in Fig. 3B, which plots the college wage premium from 1963 through 2012 (blue line). This premium fluctuated in a comparatively narrow band during the 1960s and 1970s, as rising demand for educated workers was met with rapidly rising year-over-year increases in supply. In 1981, the average college graduate earned 48% more per week than the average high school graduate—a significant earnings gap but not an earnings gulf. When the supply deceleration began in 1982, however, the college premium hit an inflection point. This premium notched remarkably rapid year-over-year gains from 1982 forward, reaching 72% in 1990, 90% in 2000, and 97% in 2005 (21, 22). Thus, the average earnings of college graduates were 1.5 times those of high school graduates in 1982 but were double those of high school graduates by 2005. Why is this deceleration in supply relevant to the college premium? After all, although the growth of supply slowed in 1982, it was still rising. A likely answer is that the demand for college workers rose in the interim. Throughout much of the 20th century, successive waves of innovation—electrification, mass production, motorized transportation, telecommunications—have reduced the demand for physical labor and raised the centrality of cognitive labor in practically every walk of life. The past three decades of computerization, in particular, have extended the reach of this process by displacing workers from performing routine, codifiable cognitive tasks (e.g., bookkeeping, clerical work, and repetitive production tasks) that are now readily scripted with computer software and performed by inexpensive digital machines. This ongoing process of machine substitution for routine human labor complements educated workers who excel in abstract tasks that harness problem-solving ability, intuition, creativity, and persuasion—tasks that are at present difficult to automate but essential to perform. Simultaneously, it devalues the skills of workers, typically those without postsecondary education, who compete most directly with machinery in performing routine-intensive activities. The net effect of these forces is to further raise the demand for formal education, technical expertise, and cognitive ability (23–27). Bringing the Supply-Demand Framework to the Data The persistently rising demand for educated labor in advanced economies was first noted by the Nobel Prize–winning economist Jan Tinbergen (28) and is often referred to as the “education race” model (19). Its primary implication is that if the supply of educated labor does not keep pace with persistent outward shifts in demand for skills, the skill premium will rise. In the words of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, “…it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Thus, when the rising supply of educated labor began to slacken in the early 1980s, a logical economic consequence was an increase in the college skill premium. To more formally account for the impact of the fluctuating growth rate of supply of college-educated workers on the college wage differential, Fig. 3B depicts the fit of a simple regression model that predicts the college wage premium in each year as a function of two factors: (i) the contemporaneous supply of college graduates, and (ii) a time trend, which serves as a proxy for the secularly rising demand for college-educated workers (29). Comparing the fitted values (red series) from this simple supply-demand model alongside the actual data (blue series) reveals an extremely tight correspondence over the course of five decades and three distinct eras: a declining skill premium in the 1970s; an explosive rise in the premium during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s; and, most recently, a plateau commencing after 2005. A key implication of this figure is that a central causal factor behind rising inequality in the United States has been the slowdown in the accumulation of skills by young adults almost 30 years ago. Had the supply of college graduates risen as rapidly in the decades after 1980 as it did in the decades immediately before, it is quite plausible that there would have been no sustained rise in the skill premium in the U.S. labor market. Of course, this set of facts raises another puzzle: If slackening college supply sparked rising inequality, what caused rising U.S. postsecondary achievement to grind to a sudden halt in 1982? Work by Card and Lemieux (30) highlights that one critically important factor was the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. Because draft-eligible males in the Vietnam era were often able to defer their military service by enrolling in postsecondary schooling, the war artificially boosted college attendance. This created something of a glut of college enrollments in the late 1960s and early 1970s, which in turn depressed the college earnings premium in the 1970s (see Fig. 3) and likely reduced the attractiveness of college-going absent the military draft. Thus, when the war ended in the early 1970s, college enrollment rates dropped sharply, particularly among males. The fall in enrollment produced a corresponding decline in college completions half a decade later, and a surge of inequality followed. This supply-demand explanation for the rise of U.S. inequality may appear almost too simple to be credible. After all, we are comparing just two economic variables: the college wage premium and the supply of college graduates in the U.S. workforce. But a host of rigorous studies commencing with Katz and Murphy (31) confirm the remarkable explanatory power of this simple supply-demand framework for explaining trends in the college versus high school earnings gap over the course of nine decades of U.S. history, as well as across other industrialized economies (most notably, the United Kingdom and Canada) and among age and education groups within countries (19, 31–36). The United States was far from the only Western country to experience this surge. One should not, of course, take this model as irrefutable. A puzzling pattern evident in the data is that the rising demand for skilled workers appears to have slowed in the early 1990s, a phenomenon that is not anticipated by the “education race” model (37). This discrepancy underscores that the supply-demand model is necessarily incomplete—in part for the sake of expositional clarity and, in larger part, because our understanding of macroeconomic phenomena is typically imperfect. Nevertheless, the data speak sufficiently clearly to warrant two economic inferences. The first is that although popular accounts frequently assert that the United States is in the midst of a “college bubble”—too many students going to college at too high a cost—abundant economic evidence strongly suggests otherwise. Yes, college tuitions have risen far faster than inflation, and indeed, student debt has risen rapidly, with more than $100 billion in federal student aid dollars loaned in 2012–2013 alone (38). But the doubling of the college weekly wage differential over the past 30 years also implies that there have been sizable increases in the lifetime earnings of college graduates relative to high school graduates. How large are these gains? Figure 4, reproduced from (39), reports the estimated lifetime college earnings differential net of tuition for cohorts of students entering the labor market between 1965 and 2008. For both males and females, the expected net present value of a college degree relative to a high school diploma roughly tripled in this period, with the fastest gains accruing during the 1980s and 1990s. Note that this growing college/high school gap reflects the rising payoff to the 4-year college degree, the even steeper rise in the premium associated with graduate and professional degrees (see below), and the growing fraction of college graduates who obtain higher degrees; thus, an additional payoff to the college degree is that it opens the door to further specialization. This lifetime earnings differential would, of course, have risen further still if college tuitions had held steady rather than rising. But the inevitable sticker shock that households feel when confronting the cost of college should not obscure the fact that the real lifetime earnings premium to college education has likely never been higher (40). Fig. 4 Present discounted value of college relative to high school degree net of tuition, 1965–2008. Reproduced from Avery and Turner with permission of the American Economic Association (39). Expected earnings are calculated from the March Current Population Survey files for full-time, full-year workers using sample weights. The estimates equal what a man or woman would expect to earn working full-time, full-year over a career of 42 years, with a discount rate of 3%, assuming that college graduates delay the start of earnings for 4 years while in school. Earnings expectations are formed in each year by assuming that future high school and college graduates will have future earnings at each age equal to the average earnings of high school and college graduates (respectively) currently observed at each age; for example, expected earnings in 1980 are based on data across ages for 1980. Results for college-educated workers are net of 4 years of tuition and fees associated with appropriate year-specific values for public universities. Plotted points show the difference between expected earnings for college graduates and for high school graduates. The second positive economic news implied by Fig. 3 above is that the ongoing rise of skill differentials is not inevitable. Prior cohorts of U.S. students, particularly males, were slow to react to the rising return to education during the 1980s and 1990s, but the message appears to have finally gotten through. During the first decade of the 21st century, the U.S. high school graduation rate rose sharply after having been essentially stagnant since the late 1960s (41). This unanticipated rise was followed just a few years later by a surge in college completions. Between 2004 and 2012, the supply of new college graduates to the U.S. labor market rose at a rate not seen in several decades (Fig. 3A). As this influx of supply took hold, the college wage premium halted its enduring rise (Fig. 3B). What these observations and our simple supply-demand model suggest is that the flattening of the college premium after 2005 is in large part a consequence of the quickening pace of educational attainment.
Inequality: Causes for Concern? A market economy needs some inequality to create incentives. If, for example, students were not ultimately rewarded for spending their early adulthoods pursuing undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees, or if the hardest-working and most productive workers were paid the same as the median worker, then citizens would have little incentive to develop expertise, to exert effort, or to excel in their work (42). Having acknowledged that some inequality is necessary, however, how can we gauge whether there is too much of it? I offer two analytical perspectives on this question. Earnings Mobility One metric by which to evaluate the consequences of inequality is via its relationship with economic mobility—that is, the degree to which individual economic fortunes change over time. Of particular interest is the degree of intergenerational mobility, meaning the likelihood that children born to low-income families become high-income adults and vice versa. High levels of economic inequality at a given point in time are not intrinsically inimical to economic mobility; a society with high inequality may be dynamic, with lots of movement up and down the economic ladder, and one with low inequality may be dynastic. But a natural concern is that high inequality at a point in time may serve to reduce mobility over time. If, for example, adults who became wealthy through hard work are able to “buy” success for their children through outsized investments and personal connections, while adults who are unproductive or unlucky in their careers are unable to muster the resources to foster their children’s potential, then inequality of incomes could become self-perpetuating even if it originally emanates from high market returns to skill (43). To understand the importance of high and rising U.S. inequality, it is therefore useful to ask how U.S. economic mobility compares to that of other developed countries, and whether U.S. mobility has fallen as inequality has risen. The answers to both questions will surprise many. Contrary to conventional civic mythology, U.S. intergenerational mobility is relatively low. The left panel of Fig. 5, reproduced from (44), which plots the relationship between cross-sectional inequality (x axis) and earnings mobility (y axis) among a set of 13 OECD member countries for which consistent data are available, documents that the United States has both the lowest mobility and highest inequality among all wealthy democratic countries. The right panel of Fig. 5, also sourced from (44), suggests one proximate explanation for this pattern: Countries with high returns to education tend to have relatively low mobility. Why, if education is “the great equalizer” in the words of Horace Mann, do high educational returns predict low mobility? A key reason is that educational attainment is highly persistent within families. Indeed, two of the strongest predictors of children’s ultimate educational attainment are parental education and parental earnings (45, 46). Hence, when the return to education is high, children of better-educated parents are doubly advantaged—by their parents’ higher education and higher earnings—in attaining greater education while young and greater earnings in adulthood. Figure 5 therefore lends credence to the concern that rising inequality may erode economic mobility. Fig. 5 Earnings inequality and economic mobility: Cross-national relationships. Reproduced from Corak [(44), figs. 1 and 4] with permission of the American Economic Association. In both panels, the mobility measure is equal to the intergenerational earnings “elasticity,” meaning the average proportional increase in a son’s adult earnings predicted by his father’s adult earnings measured approximately three decades earlier. A higher intergenerational earnings elasticity therefore implies lower intergenerational mobility. In the left panel, cross-sectional income inequality is measured using a “Gini” index that ranges from 0 to 100, where 0 indicates complete equality of household incomes and 100 indicates maximal inequality (all income to one household). In the right panel, the college earnings premium refers to the ratio of average earnings of men 25 to 34 years of age with a college degree to the average earnings of those with a high school diploma, computed by the OECD using 2009 data. See (44) for further details. Has this erosion occurred? Surprisingly, the best evidence to date suggests that it has not. Evidence from Chetty et al. (46), documented in the supplementary material, underscores the message from Fig. 5 that there is substantial economic immobility in the United States. Children born three deciles apart in the household income distribution are on average one decile apart in the earnings distribution at age 29 or 30. Similarly, children born three deciles apart in the household income distribution differ by 20 percentage points in their probability of attending college at age 19 (relative to a mean of approximately 55%). Yet these data offer no evidence that mobility has appreciably changed among children born prior to the historic rise of U.S. inequality (1971–1974) and those born afterward (1991–1993). As far as we can measure, rising U.S. income inequality has not reduced intergenerational mobility so far. These findings, which also appear to hold over a longer historical time frame (47), suggest that U.S. mobility has not trended downward as many social scientists would have anticipated, and as many policymakers and popular accounts frequently assume. It is important to interpret these results in context. The most recent birth cohorts whose adult outcomes can be observed at present were born no later than the early 1990s, which is still relatively early in the rise of U.S. inequality. Another 10 years of data, focusing on children born since 2000, may suggest a different conclusion. Moreover, the fact that mobility has stayed constant while inequality has risen means that the lifetime relative disadvantage of children born to low- versus high-income families has increased substantially; concretely, the rungs of the economic ladder have pulled farther apart but the chance of ascending the ladder has not improved. Finally, it is possible to interpret the fact that mobility has remained unchanged as evidence that U.S. mobility would have declined had it not been for the other compensatory steps taken by the federal government during this period, including, for example, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit for low-income workers in the 1980s, enlarging the early childhood education Head Start program in the 1990s, and increasing federal student grant and loan programs to support college-going (48). Declines in racial and gender discrimination during this period likely also complemented these policies (49). A cautious read of the evidence is that although the United States is not a “land of opportunity” by conventional economic mobility metrics, it has not become less so in recent decades. Real Earnings A second gauge of economic health is the trajectory of earnings and employment. Here, the data present substantial cause for concern. Although the substantial college wage premium conveys the positive economic news that educational investments offer large returns, this wage premium also masks a discouraging truth: The rising relative earnings of workers with postsecondary education is not simply due to rising real earnings among college-educated workers but is also due to falling real earnings among non–college-educated workers. Between 1980 and 2012, real hourly earnings of full-time college-educated U.S. males rose anywhere from 20% to 56%, with the greatest gains among those with a postbaccalaureate degree (Fig. 6A). During the same period, real earnings of males with high school or lower educational levels declined substantially, falling by 22% among high school dropouts and 11% among high school graduates. Although the picture is generally brighter for females (Fig. 6B), real earnings growth among females without at least some college education over this three-decade interval was extremely modest. Fig. 6 Change in real wage levels of full-time workers by education, 1963–2012. (A) Male workers, (B) female workers. Data and sample construction are as in Fig. 3. Accompanying the fall in real wages among less educated workers has been a pronounced drop in their labor force participation rates, particularly among less educated males. Between 1979 and 2007, prior to the onset of the Great Recession, the fraction of working-age males in paid employment fell by 12 percentage points among high school dropouts and 10 percentage points among those with exactly a high school diploma. Conversely, employment rates were generally stable for males with postsecondary education and rose for females of all education levels except for high school dropouts. The causes for the sharp falls in real earnings among non–college-educated workers are multiple. One likely force, as noted above, is the ongoing substitution of computer-intensive machinery for workers performing routine task-intensive jobs. This has depressed demand for workers in both blue-collar production and white-collar office, clerical, and administrative support positions, and has reduced the set of middle-skill career jobs available to non–college-educated workers more generally (25). A second factor is the globalization of labor markets, seen particularly in the greatly increased U.S. trade integration with developing countries. Globalization has become particularly important for U.S. labor markets since the early 1990s, when China began its extremely rapid integration into the world trading system. The influx of Chinese goods lowered consumer prices but also fomented a substantial decline in U.S. manufacturing employment, contributing directly to the decline in production worker employment (50). A third factor impinging on the earnings of non–college-educated males is the decline in the penetration and bargaining power of labor unions in the United States, which have historically obtained relatively generous wage and benefit packages for blue-collar workers. Over the past three decades, however, U.S. private-sector union density—that is, the fraction of private-sector workers who belong to labor unions—has fallen by approximately 70%, from 24% in 1973 to 7% in 2011 (51, 52). Notably, these three forces—technological change, deunionization, and globalization—work in tandem. Advances in information and communications technologies have directly changed job demands in U.S. workplaces while simultaneously facilitating the globalization of production by making it increasingly feasible and cost-effective for firms to source, monitor, and coordinate complex production processes at disparate locations worldwide. In turn, the globalization of production has increased competitive conditions for U.S. manufacturers and U.S. workers, eroding employment at unionized establishments and decreasing the capability of unions to negotiate favorable contracts, attract new members, and penetrate new establishments. In all cases, the foremost concern raised by these multiple forces impinging on the earnings of workers at different skill levels is not their impact on inequality per se, but rather their adverse effect on the real earnings and employment of less educated workers. These declines in both earnings and employment bode ill for the welfare of non–college-educated U.S. adults and are likely to have broader detrimental social consequences that frequently accompany non-employment: greater criminality, increased social dependency, and (more mundanely) reduced tax receipts.
Do Supply and Demand Make Policy Irrelevant? One potential interpretation of the evidence above is that, because rising inequality is substantially a consequence of the impersonal forces of supply and demand, public policy has no role to play in shaping the trajectory of inequality or its social impact. This conclusion is incorrect for two reasons. First, there are multiple channels by which policy has contributed to the rise of U.S. inequality, many of which are not fully evident in the education earnings premium. These include the fall over several decades in the real value of the U.S. minimum wage (7); the declining prevalence and bargaining power of U.S. labor unions; mounting international competition that places particular pressure on the wages and employment of less educated workers; and sharp reductions in top federal marginal tax rates that have raised after-tax inequality and increased the incentive of highly paid workers to seek still higher compensation. As discussed in the companion paper by Piketty and Saez, there is also disagreement among economists about whether the rising share of household incomes accruing to the top few percentiles of households in numerous developed countries over the past several decades is also primarily a market phenomenon, or instead reflects changing social norms, growing corporate misgovernance, slackening regulatory oversight, or increasing political capture of the policymaking process by elites (3–6). It would therefore be a vast overstatement to conclude that the rise of U.S. inequality is exclusively due to conventional market forces, or that public policy has not played a role. But let us assume for the sake of argument that the rise of income inequality is entirely a market phenomenon. Would this imply that there is no role for public policy? A moment’s reflection suggests otherwise. As the economist Arthur Goldberger once famously observed, the fact that nearsightedness is substantially a genetic disorder has no bearing on whether doctors should prescribe eyeglasses (53). What is relevant is whether the benefits of addressing myopia exceed the costs. In the case of myopia, the availability of eyeglasses make this an easy call. Although there is no “remedy” for inequality that is as swift or cheap as eyeglasses, prosperous democratic countries have numerous effective policy levers for shaping inequality’s trajectory and socioeconomic consequences. Policies that appear most effective over the long haul in raising prosperity and reducing inequality are those that cultivate the skills of successive generations: excellent preschool through high school education; broad access to postsecondary education; and good nutrition, good public health, and high-quality home environments. Such policies address inequality from two directions: (i) enabling a larger fraction of adults to attain high productivity, rewarding jobs, and a reasonable standard of living; and (ii) raising the total supply of skills available to the economy, which in turn moderates the skill premium and reduces inequality (54). Of course, building skills is a multigenerational process and thus has little impact on inequality in the short term. There are, however, numerous nearer-term levers that moderate inequality directly without imposing substantial economic costs: applying progressive tax and transfer policies that fund public investments and foster opportunities for children of all socioeconomic backgrounds; applying well-crafted labor regulations that ensure safe and nonexploitive working conditions; providing wage subsidies such as the Earned Income Tax Credit that increase the payoff to employment for those with limited skills; setting modest but nonzero minimum wage rules; and offering numerous social insurance policies (health and disability insurance, flood insurance, disaster assistance, food assistance) that buffer misfortune for the unfortunate. Although it is outside the scope of this article to evaluate these policies, it is critical to underscore that policy and governance has played and should continue to play a central role in shaping inequality—even when a central cause of rising inequality is the changing supply and demand for skills.IT WAS a tableau to sum up an age. Leaders of the world’s 20 main industrial powers, plus a dusting of international institutions and secondary powers, posed for a photo at the Hamburg Congress Centre. In the middle, among the testosteroid ranks of Putins and Trumps, Erdogans and Xis, was Angela Merkel; calm and composed, her fingers bridged in their distinctive rhombus. Look back over the past years of global turmoil—terror, wars, financial crises, political upheavals—and that rhombus is one of the few constants. A sturdy pinnacle in an uncertain age; a bridge in more senses than one.
The photo taken, the G20 leaders spilled into the conference room. Mrs Merkel bustled through the throng, talking first with Vladimir Putin, then with Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump, then with Jean-Claude Juncker and Donald Tusk. She called the company to order and opened the discussion, stressing that Hamburg (where she was born) is a maritime city, a symbol of the “networked world” at stake in the coming talks. She explained the symbolic value of the summit’s icon, the reef knot: “The more strain on its ends, the tighter it becomes.”
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Surveying the scene it was tempting to conclude that a unilateralist America, a withdrawing Britain, a still-recovering France, a revisionist Russia and a not-yet-dominant China make Mrs Merkel not just the chair of this particular summit, but something more: the new leader of the free world. Recent pieces in the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, the Independent, USA Today and Politico have all floated or even endorsed the designation. When Barack Obama paid a final presidential visit to Berlin in November, it was said that he was unofficially anointing Mrs Merkel his successor as guardian of the global order.
My piece in this week’s issue of The Economist challenges the label, for which Berlin has neither the appetite nor the means. For one thing, even booming Germany lacks America’s economic weight. That its welcome “Marshall Plan for Africa” is so modest compared with both the scale of the task and the original Marshall Plan makes that much clear. Moreover, the country is still hamstrung by its history. As Jan Techau of the American Academy in Berlin puts it to me: the Nazi past still causes Germans to “lack faith in their own good intentions”. Partly for this reason, the country remains relatively allergic to military force; it spends just 1.2% of it GDP on defence (as Mr Trump likes to complain) and so cannot undergird its diplomatic positions with hard power.
The G20 summit dramatises these realities. The final statement is likely to be vague. It may carry asterisks exempting America from environmental passages. There is even a chance that Mr Trump will not sign it at all. Whether other rich countries will commit meaningfully to Mrs Merkel’s plan for Africa is still uncertain. Unlike the chancellor, most still see turbulence on that continent primarily as a security rather than a development issue.
Most significant will be the bilateral meetings. Will Narendra Modi and Xi Jinping find common ground on their border disputes and China’s contentious “One Belt One Road” trade plan? Will Turkey and Saudi Arabia make any progress on Syria? Will Theresa May reach new understandings with her EU counterparts on Brexit? Will Mr Trump’s first meeting with Mr Putin prompt a deal on Ukraine? Progress on such questions—unlikely to feature among the concluding annoucements here in Hamburg tomorrow—matters so much because we are in what the political scientist Ian Bremmer calls a “G-Zero” world; one in which no country or bloc can shape or direct global events. The era of the cacophony is upon us.
This, not some overblown and oversimplified notion of nascent dominance, explains why Germany is now so relevant. As a top exporter embedded in the Eurasian continent and thus without the geographic buffers of Britain, America or Australia, it is perhaps uniquely invested in the architecture of globalisation. Environmental, trade and regulatory disruptions hurt it more than most. Its historically-rooted scepticism about hard power (slowly waning, as the country’s deployments in Mali, Afghanistan and Lithuania and rising defence spending show) prompt it to build other sorts of defences: geopolitical alliances, diplomatic compromises, long-term development investments. The result is a country whose power flows not from dominance but from a dense, finally balanced and endlessly recalculated web of economic, cultural and diplomatic links. It convenes.
All of which is on show in Hamburg, if you know where to look. Mrs Merkel is the leader who led Western defiance to Mr Putin, yet also the one who can engage him in frank conversation (whether they were talking Russian or German earlier is not clear). She has moved closer to China in response to America’s recent political turn, but has kept her options open. She is constructively ambiguous. Even her now-famous comments in a Munich beer tent in May, rebuking Mr Trump, were cryptic: “the times in which we can rely entirely on others are somewhat over.” She speaks the emphemeral language of a G-Zero world. But she can move fast and surgically when international events demand it; flipping positions on nuclear power in 2011, on refugees in 2015 and last month rewriting her position on EU treaty-change in support of Mr Macron (albeit without making any firm commitments).
To Mrs Merkel’s critics this can look like so much game-playing: the values-free manoeuvring of a country doing nicely out of a lopsided European order facilitating the sale of cars and machinery to imperfect democracies in the developing world. But to take in the international landscape is also to witness the merits of this approach. Germany makes no pretence of self-sufficiency. It accepts its own vulnerability, its own lack of a reliable protector, its own inextricability from mutually compromising alliances and sub-alliances. It is what Ulrich Speck, a leading expert on German foreign policy, calls a “postmodern” power.
Who knows what the next years will bring? Perhaps China will start taking the lead. Perhaps America will suddenly abandon Trumpism in favour of old-school, Rooseveltian internationalism. Perhaps Europe will get its act together and start acting as one on the world stage. Perhaps some new coalition of Asian dragons will emerge as a new locus of power. But in the absence of such developments, G-Zero is here to stay. Journalists looking for a new superpower will still cast around for examples, including Germany, which will continue to fall short of the excitable billing. But for better or worse, others may increasingly emulate Berlin’s distinctive blend of idealistic multilateralism and case-by-case pragmatism. Germany is less a leader than a foretaste.Mad Men
1960s America saw its share of emerging social and political movements—the civil rights movement, second wave feminism and anti-Vietnam activism, just to name a few. And in June 1969, the modern gay liberation movement was born. The Stonewall riots resulted in gay people rushing out of the closets and into the streets in the hopes of gaining equal rights. For the first time, gay men and lesbians were able to express their attractions openly, build communities and mobilize activist efforts. None of the recent advances in LGBT equality would have happened over the last four decades were it not for the bravery and chutzpah of the Stonewall Inn’s patrons on that fateful summer evening in 1969.
Unfortunately, in the world of AMC’s Mad Men, it is still the first half of the decade. There was no gay liberation movement between 1960 and 1965, the years during which the first four seasons of the series take place. On the contrary, homosexuality was still considered a deviance by mainstream society and an illness by the medical community. There was certainly no such thing as gay pride—the great majority of closet doors were locked tightly. This makes it harder for Mad Men to address the experiences of gay people than to address those of women and people of color, as it’s a challenge for such a dialogue-driven character drama to address a topic that was rarely discussed openly. But that doesn’t mean that the effort isn’t made.
Despite the complete lack of visibility of gay people in the early 1960s, there is a surprisingly high amount of explicitly queer characters on Mad Men. Only one—Salvatore Romano, Sterling Cooper’s Art Director—is substantially developed, but a half dozen gay characters have passed through the Mad Men universe over the course of four seasons. All of the characters are unique, with distinct personalities and significantly different approaches to navigating same-sex desire in a hostile climate. And while Mad Men steers clear of making profound statements about the nature of gay identity in the 1960s, the characterizations it does present do have a few interesting things to say about gender identity and the ability to out oneself.
To discuss the depiction of homosexuality on Mad Men, one first needs to look at Salvatore. To the 21st century viewer, Sal reads undeniably as gay, yet no one at Sterling Cooper seems to notice this. Certainly, he isn’t out, nor does he intend to be. In season 1, he is a bachelor; in seasons 2 and 3, he is married to Kitty, a sweet and completely naïve woman who is either unaware or in denial of her husband’s internal struggles. Though Sal is an outwardly confident, charismatic and good-looking man, one who attracts the attention of men and women alike, he constantly lives in fear of his identity and the possibility that someone might discover it.
Salvatore and the bellboy
For the most part, the only people who catch on to Sal’s secret are other gay men. He is sexually propositioned by men on three separate occasions: by Elliott, a representative from Sterling Cooper client Belle Jolie Cosmetics; by an unnamed hotel bellboy in Baltimore; and by Lee Garner Jr., the owner of Lucky Strike, Sterling Cooper’s most lucrative account. Only in the case of the unnamed bellboy does Sal decide to give in to his desires. In that instance, he is with a man who he doesn’t know in a professional context, in a city he is only visiting for one night. The stakes are minimal, and his arousal is palpable, so when the bellboy leans in for a kiss in the privacy of Sal’s hotel room, he gives in. The scene is short—Sal is only granted a steamy make-out session and a crotch grab before the hotel fire alarm goes off— but it serves an important purpose. It is the only moment in the series when the audience is able to see Sal authentically satisfied. As the bellboy removes Sal’s clothing, a leak from an exploded pen is visible on Sal’s shirt—as blatant a symbol of unabashed excitement and premature ejaculation as one is likely to get past network censors. As the bellboy kisses and caresses his body, Sal emits heavy, hiccuped breaths and repeated moans of “Oh, God” and “Oh, Jesus.” The intense degree of passion he exhibits makes it clear to the viewer that this is his first sexual experience with a man. Though we never see Sal in an intimate situation with a man again, this scene represents a clear turning point in Sal’s comfort with his own identity.
A layer of complexity is added to Sal’s tryst when Don Draper, evacuating the hotel after the alarm blasts, runs down the fire escape, makes eye contact with Sal and notices the bellboy putting his clothes back on. Sal quickly looks away, ashamed and perhaps even scared of losing his job. Don doesn’t fire Sal on the spot, nor does he even directly broach the topic with him. Instead, he proposes a new campaign for London Fog raincoats that uses the slogan, “Limit Your Exposure.” When Don says this to Sal, his message is clear. And, ultimately, it becomes his undoing.
Lee Garner, Jr. propositions Sal
Sal’s interactions with Elliott and Lee are less fruitful than his night in Baltimore. In both instances, as soon as Sal realizes that he is being propositioned, his body tenses, a look of terror and sadness crosses his face and he declines the gesture. With Elliott, there are no consequences—Sal merely excuses himself from the bar where they had been sitting together. With Lee, though, the rejection costs Sal his job at Sterling Cooper. Lee’s proposition to Sal is abrupt, almost threatening; when Sal bristles at being grabbed around his chest, Lee just smiles and says, “I know what I know.” Still, Sal rejects the overture; embarrassed by the rejection, Lee sees to it that Sal is fired. He meets with Don to try to win back his job, appealing to the fact that Don knows his secret. But it doesn’t work because, in Don’s mind, Sal has violated the only piece of wisdom he was able to give him.
After Don fires Sal, we see him talking to Kitty from a phone booth, telling her not to wait up for him. We are to infer that Sal is going to go off on a night of cruising in the park, and this ultimately reads as more troubling than liberating. We |
you with minerals on this map, it gives you an additional attack path. However, the gold base is extremely exposed, making the choice to take it a tactical one. Cross positions will also give a slightly different set of tactical choices and attack paths compared to spawning horizontally making this map almost like a two in one map without relying on top/bottom vs left/right asymmetry.The most macro oriented map in the pool of finalists, Deadwing provides players with a fairly straightforward progression of bases starting with the natural up to the fifth base. Its a large, open map that can punish attacks that are poorly thought out, or well scouted especially in cross positions. In horizontal and vertical positions, dedicated attacks are more likely to succeed due to the narrower attack paths but at the cost of counter attacks becoming more powerful. The central architecture is also varied enough that once you have a large army you can account for flanks and counter attacks when moving across the map regardless of spawn position. The destructible rocks leading into the natural from both sides also provide a strategic depth and variety we are excited to see play out on this map.Biome is a an extremely unique map as it is the only five player map we have ever seen. With forced cross positions, you will always have two bases to scout in order to find your opponent. Rotational symmetry often leads to concerns regarding the third and fourth bases favouring one spawn over another. Surprisingly, Biome seems to break this curse by making everyone's third and fourth bases relatively easy to take and forcing cross spawns.Well, with easy third and fourth bases you might assume that the games are boring with a lot of turtle play however the air space in this map ensures that this cannot happen. You cannot simply contain your opponent to 4 bases and take the rest of the map. The 360 degree air space you need to defend poses a challenge to turtle play we haven't quite yet seen in StarCraft 2 to date. Warp prisms, dropships, and mutalisks will always be in the back of your mind while playing on this map. The large center also provides a lot of options to outmaneuver any attempt at a contain. Playing this map is all about controlling the center area while staying protected against the gigantic airspace around your four bases.Catellena is the only three player map in the final round of voting and has spawn positions located at 1, 5 and 9. Three player maps naturally give one player a spawn advantage over his opponent and often result in aggressive strategies being used. The rotational symmetry naturally gives players the spawn advantage going in a counter-clockwise direction; meaning easy access to both the forward 3rd directly below the main and an easy access ridge toward the other 3rd. Given that the initial main to main rush distances are quite long, but third base distances being quite near, we at TLStrat foresee a lot of strategies on this map revolving around denying third bases. Protoss players will have a slightly more difficult time taking their third on this map but it is by no means impossible. Zerg players will find that as the game goes longer, their bases become increasingly difficult to defend as they get closer to the center of the map.Plus the octopus looks fantasticKamala Park, like waystation, is a two in one map. Players will always spawn in cross positions, but top left/bottom right (industrial) spawns will provide a different architecture than top right/bottom left (grassy) spawns on the map. The two different starting positions on Kamala Park play similarly to one another but the slight differences provide just enough variation without creating positional imbalances that greatly favour any single race. A good mix of open space and ramps in the centre of the map will emphasize strong positioning when entering into any engagement.The high ground third base is an interesting aspect of the map. The "industrial" spawn position will find the high ground third more difficult to take, as the destructible debris needs to be destroyed in order to make it more easily defensible when taken early. In the "grassy" spawn positions, the third base is easier to take, with the dcestructible debris making it easier to hold against aggression. The high ground third also provides strong defensive options thanks to the ramp. Losing control of this high ground gives your opponent a very powerful forward position to attack you from making its defence absolutely critical in a macro game. Free airspace on the edges of the map is also limited making drop play more difficult to hide from your opponent, weakening harass oriented play on this map considerably.
TLMC 4 Finalists (Team)
Lava Storm (2v2)
by lefix
Features:
- Shared mains, 2 spawn locations
- Map is split in half, connected by small paths
- Teams can choose to defend both halves or focus on controlling one side
- Islands have gold bases if teams are confident they can control the mainland
AEM Solar Flare (2v2)
by NewSunshine
Features:
- Shared mains, 4 spawn locations
- Naturals are disconnected from each other
- This disconnect can make them more difficult to defend from combined attacks
- Long term the game will revolve around controlling the high ground
Korhal Carnage (2v2)
by Sidianthebard
Features:
- Shared mains, forced cross position
- Most aggressive map to make the final list
- Naturals are difficult to take which creates an emphasis on one base play
- There are many destructible rocks which can be used to close or open passages
AEM Preservation (2v2)
by Timetwister22
Features:
- Shared mains, 2 spawn locations
- Modern take on the classic 2v2 map formula
- Each team has an in-base natural that one of the team members can take
- Teams will naturally expand through their half of the map resulting in longer macro oriented games
- The four most central expansions are gold bases and are more difficult to secure
AEM Lunar Curtain (3v3)
by NewSunshine
Features:
- Separate mains, 2 spawn positions
- Spawn positions are 1, 2, 11 vs 5, 7, 8
- Spawn positions will have a big influence on how you choose to play the map
- The 5 and 11 positions are more isolated from the rest of the maps and will often play more macro oriented
- The 1 and 7 positions are the most exposed, and will need to secure an important choke point to expand
- The 2 and 8 positions have an easy to take natural, but will need to break through destructible rocks to reliably assist the team
Sacred Path
by IeZaeL
- Separate mains, teams spawn on the same side of the divide
- Inspired by the famous 2v2 map 'Iron Curtain' by 송기범 (skb9728_CyGnus)
- Massive wall of destructible rocks makes the center as open or as closed as teams wish
- Gold bases are highly risky to take, but become vital to control in the late game
- Currently featured in TotalBiscuit's Features:- Separate mains, teams spawn on the same side of the divide- Inspired by the famous 2v2 map 'Iron Curtain' by 송기범 (skb9728_CyGnus)- Massive wall of destructible rocks makes the center as open or as closed as teams wish- Gold bases are highly risky to take, but become vital to control in the late game- Currently featured in TotalBiscuit's SHOUTcraft clan wars
Have your say!
Now that you've had a chance to see the finalists, it's time for the public to have their say on what maps they think are the best. Remember, high placing maps will be considered for use in the ladder by Blizzard so a vote for your favorite map may mean that you'll see that map in a future ladder season!
Thank you for voting! Results will be available as soon as possible. [/countdown]
Now that you've had a chance to see the finalists, it's time for the public to have their say on what maps they think are the best. Remember, high placing maps will be considered for use in the ladder by Blizzard so a vote for your favorite map may mean that you'll see that map in a future ladder season![/countdown]
Administrator ~ Spirit will set you free ~Story highlights FBI, CIA criticized for not keeping better track of Tamerlan Tsarnaev before attack
Bruce Schneier: Connecting the dots seems easy in hindsight, but in real life, it's not
He says there are an enormous number of potential bad guys
Schneier: If a terrorist plot succeeds, it doesn't mean law enforcement systems failed
The FBI and the CIA are being criticized for not keeping better track of Tamerlan Tsarnaev in the months before the Boston Marathon bombings. How could they have ignored such a dangerous person? How do we reform the intelligence community to ensure this kind of failure doesn't happen again?
It's an old song by now, one we heard after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and after the Underwear Bomber's failed attack in 2009. The problem is that connecting the dots is a bad metaphor, and focusing on it makes us more likely to implement useless reforms.
Connecting the dots in a coloring book is easy and fun. They're right there on the page, and they're all numbered. All you have to do is move your pencil from one dot to the next, and when you're done, you've drawn a sailboat. Or a tiger. It's so simple that 5-year-olds can do it.
But in real life, the dots can only be numbered after the fact. With the benefit of hindsight, it's easy to draw lines from a Russian request for information to a foreign visit to some other piece of information that might have been collected.
Bruce Schneier
In hindsight, we know who the bad guys are. Before the fact, there are an enormous number of potential bad guys.
How many? We don't know. But we know that the no-fly list had 21,000 people on it last year. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, also known as the watch list, has 700,000 names on it.
We have no idea how many potential "dots" the FBI, CIA, NSA and other agencies collect, but it's easily in the millions. It's easy to work backwards through the data and see all the obvious warning signs. But before a terrorist attack, when there are millions of dots -- some important but the vast majority unimportant -- uncovering plots is a lot harder.
Rather than thinking of intelligence as a simple connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other. Or a random-dot stereogram. Is it a sailboat, a puppy, two guys with pressure-cooker bombs or just an unintelligible mess of dots? You try to figure it out.
It's not a matter of not enough data, either.
Piling more data onto the mix makes it harder, not easier. The best way to think of it is a needle-in-a-haystack problem; the last thing you want to do is increase the amount of hay you have to search through.
The television show "Person of Interest" is fiction, not fact.
There's a name for this sort of logical fallacy: hindsight bias.
First explained by psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, it's surprisingly common. Since what actually happened is so obvious once it happens, we overestimate how obvious it was before it happened.
We actually misremember what we once thought, believing that we knew all along that what happened would happen. It's a surprisingly strong tendency, one that has been observed in countless laboratory experiments and real-world examples of behavior. And it's what all the post-Boston-Marathon bombing dot-connectors are doing.
Before we start blaming agencies for failing to stop the Boston bombers, and before we push "intelligence reforms" that will shred civil liberties without making us any safer, we need to stop seeing the past as a bunch of obvious dots that need connecting.
Kahneman, a Nobel prize winner, wisely noted: "Actions that seemed prudent in foresight can look irresponsibly negligent in hindsight." Kahneman calls it "the illusion of understanding," explaining that the past is only so understandable because we have cast it as simple inevitable stories and leave out the rest.
Nassim Taleb, an expert on risk engineering, calls this tendency the "narrative fallacy." We humans are natural storytellers, and the world of stories is much more tidy, predictable and coherent than the real world.
Millions of people behave strangely enough to warrant the FBI's notice, and almost all of them are harmless. It is simply not possible to find every plot beforehand, especially when the perpetrators act alone and on impulse.
We have to accept that there always will be a risk of terrorism, and that when the occasional plot succeeds, it's not necessarily because our law enforcement systems have failed.The $3 bill was intended as a satire of President-elect Barack Obama, but instead became another blemish for a mayor who recently snatched a 15-year-old boy off a moving motorscooter.
Greeley Mayor Ed Clark, a former police officer who also is the head of security at the University Schools charter school, said today that he has apologized to the family of a student that he showed the bill to.
“I apologized to the family,” Clark said. “I think I’ll leave it where it is.”
Clark did say that he showed the bill to students in the school cafeteria Nov. 14 when one of them asked if had an extra dollar for lunch.
According to the Greeley Tribune, the fake $3 bill is emblazoned with an image of Obama wearing a Middle Eastern headdress Clark describes as a “prince’s hat.” He showed it to a girl, who then showed it to classmates.
He took the bill back from the student and has since discarded it, he said.
“It was political satire,” Clark said Saturday. “I’m not going to talk about it. I’ve got to go. sir.”
School director Sherry Sue Gerner could not be reached for comment. She was quoted in the Tribune as saying that the matter is over, but would not say whether Clark was disciplined.
Clark, elected to a two-year term last year, has been the subject of controversy before.
Fifteen-year-old Remington Stitt sought a permanent restraining order against Clark in July, claiming the mayor assaulted him for joyriding on his motorbike in a neighborhood where the two live.
Clark won the court fight but also vowed never to go near the boy again and to call police when he witnesses a possible criminal act.
A permanent restraining order against Clark was denied.
In an August court hearing, Weld County Judge Timothy Kerns admonished Clark and Stitt for allowing tensions to escalate in their Greeley subdivision just before the June 23 incident.
Stitt and his parents claim Clark grabbed the teen off his motorbike and threw him to the ground before police could arrive. Clark and his neighbors claim Stitt and his friends were cursing and driving recklessly through the neighborhood.
Clark said Saturday that the case was resolved and he didn’t wish to comment about it.
On Sept. 27, 2007, Clark brandished a hand gun and pointed it at 18-year-old Rudy Joseph Valenciano Jr., 18, after the young man drove girls from Greeley West High School to fight girls at University High School. Valenciano was charged with several counts including contributing to a delinquency of a minor, a felony.
After a fight broke out, Valenciano, who is not a student at the school, got into his car. He refused to get out on Clark’s orders; Clark drew his weapon.
Clark then handcuffed Valenciano and draped him over the car’s hood to await police.
The action became an issue in the Greeley mayoral election last year.
Kirk Mitchell: 303-954-1206 or kmitchell@denverpost.comArsenal and Arturo Vidal is continuing to turn into transfer rumour madness. The whole thing started when an Italian website we'd never heard of before claimed the midfielder's agent Fernando Felicevich had been in talks with Arsenal over a transfer for Vidal, he also represents Alexis Sanchez. Calciomercaotweb.it said Vidal had agreed a four year contract with Arsenal on an 'outline' basis. Calciomercatoweb.it is not to be confused with the better known Calciomercato.com or Calciomercato.it. Since dropping that bombshell on May 19th, they've had no update.
The report was picked up in Chile by websites such as T13 and then Argentine journalist Hernen Feler Tweeted on Saturday night'After the Copa America in Chile, it will be made official the arrival of Arturo Vidal Arsenal. Everything is closed. He will partner Alexis.'
His next tweet was'Who told me about Vidal also told me #ManchesterCity must respond to an offer made by #RealMadrid for Kun Aguero of €90 million.'
He hasn't said anything on the situation since but his Tweet was picked up by websites in Chile and all over the world, including this one, and it helped catapult the story further.
Then came Pedro Hernandez. Pedro is a Chilean college lecturer. He lives in Santiago and specialises in teaching and advising on business governance. How on earth do we know of his existence? Well, last year when the Vidal rumours were Manchester United flavoured, Pedro tweeted all kinds of things. He was told off by Chilean journalists for twisting their words and making Vidal to Manchester United sound completed. He's just a college lecturer who reads the news and then tweets his version of it, and seems to like the attention it brings. Why? Because Twitter. His Tweets were even covered by major news organisations last summer, including Eurosport.
Another 'Because Twitter' addition to the Vidal to Arsenal rumours is the claim by some that one of those men was first with the Alexis Sanchez to Arsenal scoop. Nobody has come up with anything to even remotely back that up, but once someone claimed it... it become internet fact.
This feeds the British press which in turn feeds back to Chile and then back to Italy where it all started. The claims have now reached Spain as well, all from one of the above 'events'. It's created a bubble and perhaps this latest tweet is the result of that bubble getting bigger.
La Roja supporters club, claiming to be the official supporter club for fans of the Chile national team, Tweeted on Sunday evening 'It's official: Arturo Vidal is the new reinforcement of Arsenal and will join Alexis Sanchez once Copa America is completed.'
That sounds remarkably like it's a re-hashed version of Hernen Feler's Tweet but, again, make of it what you will. Many are making a lot of it, that's their will. Since then blue ticked Brazilian journalist Paulo Andrade has RT'd both Feler and La Roja's Tweets with one comment saying 'Jeez' and another saying 'Another'. He's certainly not confirming the claims, as some have claimed.
That's the mess explained, but what of Vidal? He's ending the season really well for an excellent Juventus side. The beginning of the campaign was much worse and Juventus learned they could live without the player. Vidal struggled to get back to form after a knee injury but now he's back there he's very happy indeed. However, continued reports in Italy state he could be sold for the right price and, regardless of how often Juventus fans swear at us, we think there's probably some truth in that... with the right price being less than they'd like to think. Vidal has stated he'd like to stay at Juventus for life but those comments are ten a penny and he'd likely be tempted by comparatively huge wages elsewhere.
Him leaving would take someone pleasing both Juventus on fee and the player on wages, as with any transfer, and there's no vaguely reliable sign of either happening yet. Time will yet again tell.
Follow us on Twitter @Sport_WitnessTo compare SEM to HIM, a set of biological samples were chosen where the unique aspects of the HIM system could provide advantages in their imaging. (i) Arabidopsis thaliana, the most favored model system for plant biology to study exterior nanoscale morphology (ii) HeLa cells, as an adherent cell type to study membrane surface details and filopodia, (iii) BoFeN1 iron-oxidizing bacteria to showcase the effects of drying and heavy metal coating on surface morphology and (iv) Pristionchus pacificus predator nematodes to illustrate the depth of field of the HIM system and its precision milling abilities.
Imaging parameters were chosen to provide a rational comparison between the two technologies. Since the overarching goal of the study was to investigate uncoated samples as well as to achieve high-resolution images at high magnifications, the FE-SEM was operated at a low voltage (0.7–1.0 kV for uncoated samples, and 3 kV for coated samples) with an aperture size of 30 μm. Both In-Lens (I-L) and Everhart-Thornley (E-T) detectors were used to image the samples as only secondary electrons were studied in the HIM. Alternatively, the HIM was operated at an optimal imaging voltage of 30 kV, an aperture size of 5 μm and a beam blanker current of 0.5 pA. An Everhart-Thornley (E-T) detector was used to image the samples. In both instances, working distance and tilt were slightly varied between images and samples to produce optimal imaging conditions of electron detection, depth of field, and charge compensation.
Care was taken during sample preparation to ensure that any artifacts were minimal. To reduce drying artifacts and to make the samples vacuum stable, proper fixation and critical point drying (CPD) was necessary. It was found that small plants and nematodes could be fixed with ice-cold ethanol and then directly critical point dried. Cells, however, were more sensitive to the CPD process and required the use of robust fixatives such as glutaraldehyde to maintain intact membrane structures. In addition all samples were kept in a desiccator or under vacuum at all times to minimize artifacts caused by rehydration of the tissues from native humidity.
Arabidopsis thaliana
As a model plant, Arabidopsis was chosen as a stable and well-studied organism to compare the effects of imaging at ever increasing magnification ranges between the FE-SEM and HIM. Since the samples were critical point dried and uncoated, they were prone to charging and thus low voltage (<1 kV) imaging in the FE-SEM was required. When compared to the HIM, images in the SEM were similar at lower magnifications in both contrast, depth of field, and lack of charging (Figure 1a and b panels). However, despite low-voltage imaging in the FE-SEM, the sample exhibited charging effects starting at ~20 kX magnification (3.4 μm field of view), resulting in motion shown by streaks or bands within the image (Figure 1c, white arrowheads). In addition, at ~38 kX (2.1 μm field of view) fine textures on the sample surface and minute ridges on the cuticle could no longer be discerned. By 163 kX (478 nm field of view), the cuticle could no longer be clearly resolved in the FE-SEM as a result of either heavy charging or beam-induced thermal drift due to the very small probe size necessary to achieve such a magnification (Figure 1c far right panel). In contrast, charging in the HIM was completely eradicated via the use of the microscope's charge-compensation flood gun. As a result, higher magnifications up to 163 kX could be easily achieved without any form of charging, thermal drift and most importantly beam-induced damage, thus revealing fine surface structures, such as the defects in the wax on a single ridge of the plant's cuticle (Figure 1d panels).
Figure 1: Comparison of HIM and FE-SEM imaging in Arabidopsis thaliana. (a) Low and (c) high magnification series of uncoated and critical point dried Arabidopsis thaliana sepal cuticle structures in the FE-SEM at low voltage (<1 kV) using an Everhart-Thornley (E-T) detector. At 22 kX magnification, charging artifacts become visible in the form of streaks or bands (white arrowheads) that go horizontally across the image. (b) Low and (d) high magnification series of the sepal cuticle structure in the HIM. Throughout the magnification range, no charging or imaging artifacts are apparent and cuticle structures are still visible at 163 kX. Scale Bars: (a,b) 10 μm (c,d) 200 nm. Full size image
HeLa cells
As a model cell line used in many cell biology applications, HeLa cells were chosen to demonstrate the effects of imaging fine structures such as filopodia and cell adhesion points in both HIM and SEM. The comparison of two cells in mitosis at low magnification (Figure 2a) clearly shows the efficient charge neutralization ability of the HIM over the FE-SEM. The intensity-saturated regions of the cell as well as the appearance of dark bands on the glass coverslip indicated the areas of charging in the FE-SEM. As the magnification was increased to 38 kX (3 μm field of view), two separate effects can be seen within each microscope. In the HIM, filopodia had a tendency to appear “ghosted” or somewhat translucent when there were additional features in close z-proximity (Figure 2b, right panel, black arrowheads). As described previously, this is likely due to the deeper penetration of the helium ions that pass through thinner regions of the sample, generating not only SE1 electrons on the surface closest to the source, but also secondary electrons on the surfaces immediately behind them31. This is due to the ion beam not changing geometry over that distance. In the SEM, the filopodia exhibited edge effects, a common artifact of low-voltage imaging of fine or filamentous structures (Figure 2b, left panel, black arrowheads). As magnification was increased a third time to 163 kX (700 nm field of view) (Figure 2c), the filopodia were easily recognizable in both microscopes, however, the surface features and textures were indistinguishable in the FE-SEM (Figure 2c, left panel).
Figure 2: Comparison of HIM and FE-SEM imaging of mitotic HeLa cells. (a) Low magnification of uncoated critical point dried HeLa cells grown on glass coverslips in metaphase in both the FE-SEM at low voltage (<1 kV) with an In-Lens (I-L) detector (left panel) and HIM (right panel). Whilst the HIM exhibits high contrast and depth of field, the FE-SEM shows signs of charging in the form of saturated areas and dark and light banding on the glass coverslip. (b) At ~38 kX (3 μm field of view), the “ghosting” effect of some filopodia becomes apparent in the HIM (right panel, black arrowheads), while the FE-SEM exhibits a large amount of edge effects (left panel, black arrowheads). (c) High magnification of the same dividing cells shows no sign of loss of resolution in the HIM compared to the FE-SEM as depicted by the presence of cell membrane textures. Scale Bars: (a) 5 μm (b) 500 nm (c) 100 nm. Full size image
In addition to the comparison of the HIM to the SEM, the maximum overall resolution of the HIM was demonstrated in Figure 3. A random HeLa cell was chosen (Figure 3a) and from there, a single filopodia attachment point was recorded at increasing magnifications (Figure 3b–d) until a maximum magnification of 285 kX, or a field of view of 400 nm was achieved. At this magnification, the sample contrast between the cell and the glass coverslip was still high enough to discern the size of the attachment point (~5 nm). Remarkably, repeated imaging of these small and highly delicate structures caused no discernable beam damage.
Figure 3: Single filopodia attachment point of a HeLa cell as illustrated using the HIM. (a) A single cell was chosen that had minimal contact with neighboring cells and visible attachment points to the glass substrate. (b,c) The magnification was increased on a single adhesion point to a final magnification of (d) ~285 kX (400 nm field of view) while maintaining high enough contrast to depict an attachment width of ~5 nm. Scale Bars: (a) 5 μm (b) 1 μm (c,d) 50 nm. Full size image
Iron-oxidizing bacteria (BoFeN1)
The nitrate-reducing Acidovorax sp. strain BoFeN1, originally isolated from anoxic freshwater sediments of Lake Constance causes oxidation of Fe(II) either by an enzymatic process or by an abiotic reaction of Fe(II) with nitrite, which is an intermediate denitrification product32. It is known from numerous previous studies that, when grown in the presence of Fe(II), some cells tend to grow a crust of platelet-shaped Fe(III) minerals on the cell surface while others do not33.
The HIM images that were acquired at low magnification show three-dimensional cell mineral aggregates (Figure 4c and d, left panels). The images show a large depth of field in comparison to FE-SEM images that were acquired at low voltage at similar magnifications (Figure 4a and b, left panels). Low voltages were necessary in particular for imaging the uncoated samples by FE-SEM to avoid charging artifacts. The comparison of coated and uncoated samples by HIM at high resolution reveals two major artifacts caused by the sputter coating with platinum. Comparing the coated and non-coated critical point dried samples (Figure 4c and d) it appears that the crystallites attached to the cells end in rather sharp tips without coating, whereas mineral platelets on the cell surfaces of the platinum-coated samples appear to be relatively thick at the end and sometimes even show globule-like structures in the size-range of tens of nanometers (Figure 4c, right panel). A potential explanation for this change in mineral shape and structure might be a localized, preferential deposition of platinum due to charge-effects on the electrically isolating mineral structures. Additionally, the critical point dried samples show especially clean surfaces, whereas the surfaces of the minerals in plunge-frozen and freeze-dried samples appear to have a much smoother envelope in the case of the uncoated samples. We attribute this to a thin layer of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) coating the whole aggregate. In contrast, we observed a relatively rough surface in the case of the platinum-coated samples (see Supplementary Fig. 1). This indicates that sputter coating with platinum introduces an artificial surface roughness.
Figure 4: Comparison of platinum coated and uncoated sample preparations critical point dried BoFeN1 bacteria in both the HIM and FE-SEM at low and high magnifications. (a) Low and high magnifications of platinum coated (using an Everhart-Thornley (E-T) detector) and (b) uncoated bacterium (using an In-Lens (I-L) detector) in the FE-SEM reveal Fe(III) platelet structures that were on the order of tens of nanometers in size. Although the structures appeared much more flat in the uncoated sample, resolution was limited due to the necessity to use low-voltage imaging. (c) Low and high magnifications of platinum coated and (d) uncoated bacterium in the HIM reveal the coating induced artifact of globular structures and artificial textures on the platelets. The uncoated platelets in the HIM were for the first time revealed to be relatively flat with relatively sharp-tipped cellular attachments. Scale bars: 250 nm. Full size image
HIM imaging has, for the first time, allowed the identification of this coating artifact because of the higher spatial resolution in combination with the capability of analyzing non-conductive, uncoated samples. In addition, the existence of an EPS-envelope coating the minerals in plunge-frozen and freeze-dried samples could only be unambiguously shown in non-coated samples. Furthermore, sputter coating with platinum seemed only to affect the surface of the chemically fixed and critical point dried bacteria by creating a textured surface with network-like structures that created high secondary electron-signals (Figure 4c). We did not observe this effect when the cells were not coated with platinum (Figure 4d). We also did not observe these structures on plunge-frozen and freeze-dried samples, both with and without the heavy metal coating (see Supplementary Fig. 1). Since dehydration in solvents such as ethanol (a necessary step preceding critical point drying), can cause shrinkage in biological samples34, it is also possible that a similar effect could lead to a slightly textured cell surface that is potentially electrically insulating and thus, could favor localized deposition of platinum due to charge induced effects.
Predator nematode - pristionchus pacificus
Finally the predator nematode, Pristionchus pacificus35 served as an ultrastructural imaging challenge in the sense that the interior of the mouth cavity, including teeth morphology, had never been successfully imaged. A sister nematode, Parasitodiplogaster laevigata, a parasite of fig wasps has previously been shown via SEM imaging to have a protruding tooth structure and a visible Dorsal Esophogeal Gland Orifice (DEGO) located at the base of the protruding tooth36. However, in the initial HIM imaging of Pristionchus pacificus, it was revealed that a membranous sheath obscured the primary tooth structure (Figure 5a). This afforded an opportunity to employ another unique aspect of the HIM system – precision nano-machining using focused noble gas ions. By switching out the working gas of the HIM from helium to neon, it was possible to delicately remove the tip of the membranous sheath, while leaving the interior of the mouth cavity intact (Figure 5c). This reveals the interior mouth structure as well as the primary tooth morphology and DEGO shape and size (Figure 5b). The very precise milling ability of the neon beam was effectively demonstrated by cutting the exterior of the nematode with a final dose of 0.3 nC/μm3 (Figure 5d). This proved intense enough to cut through the outer skin of the worm without damaging any of the surrounding tissue. For deeper cuts (such as the one shown in Figure 5c), the final cutting dose was increased to 30 nC/μm3 to penetrate the entire depth of the worm and efficiently mill through some of the tougher, more filamentous portions of the sample such as the mechanosensory fibers around the nematode head.Queen Christina of Sweden caused a scandal when she stepped down from the throne and converted from the state religion of Lutheranism to Catholicism in 1654.
Known for her unconventional dress sense, deep voice and masculine behaviour, she is believed to have been born with a mix of female and male genitals and hormones.
An intense relationship with one of her ladies-in-waiting, with whom she sometimes shared a bed, fuelled rumours that the queen was a lesbian.
An eight-page parchment document that announced her abdication, complete with seals from members of the Swedish parliament, will be part of the exhibition of 100 documents in Rome's Capitoline Museums.
Only 25 of the documents have been announced so far – the rest will be revealed on Wednesday.
The Vatican Secret Archives contain one of the world's richest collections of historical documents, spanning more than 1,000 years, from the 8th century until modern times.
Few of the leather-bound documents, which are packed into more than 50 miles of shelves and in climate-controlled chambers, have ever left the walls of the city state.
The exhibition, called Lux in Arcana, includes letters and treaties relating to Henry VIII's request in 1530 for his marriage to Catherine of Aragon to be annulled, the heresy trial of Galileo, the astronomer, and the 14th century trials of the Knights Templar.
The collection also features the papal order which excommunicated Martin Luther in 1520 and a letter written by Mary Queen of Scots, a few weeks before her execution, to Pope Sixtus V.
After her conversion to the Catholic faith and renunciation of the Swedish throne, Christina moved to Rome, where she was triumphantly received by the Church.
She initially stayed in the Tower of Winds, a frescoed tower inside the Vatican Secret Archives, but later moved into Palazzo Farnese, which is now the French embassy.
She had a French marquis murdered in her presence after he betrayed her plans to become Queen of Naples.
She died in 1689 and is one of the few women to be buried in St Peter's Basilica.
Scientists exhumed her body in 1965 to search for skeletal evidence that she was a hermaphrodite but the results were inconclusive.
Even so, she became a symbol of lesbianism and cross-dressing in the 20th century and inspired plays and musicals.
The Secret Archives exhibition, which commemorates the 400th anniversary of the establishment of the archives in their present location, runs until Sept 9.“Jolene Kay: Rock Climber” is a high production short that shows an actress leaping and dancing her way up and around some sandstone cliffs. She does not, however, quite pull off the role of “professional rock climber.”
There are a lot of climbing videos out there these days and, as an editor of a climbing magazine I get to see most of the noteworthy ones. The films I remember vary from shaky, hand-held records of significant first ascents to well-produced vids of pros pulling down classics in areas I’d like to visit. Like most climbers, I watch climbing films to get inspired, but occasionally someone (usually Andrew Bisharat) will share a video that grabs my attention for another reason.
Such is the case with the short film below, which rockandice.com editor Mississippi Chris Parker sent me recently. “Jolene Kay: Rock Climber” is a high production short that shows an actress leaping and dancing her way up and around some sandstone cliffs that look a lot like Malibu Creek, California. Kay is a VERY attractive woman and she looks great as she pretends to be a climber and I applaud her acting in this film, and I think she has a great career ahead of her. Apparently she’s already appeared in TV shows and in the 2009 Star Trek movie. She does not, however, quite pull off the role of “professional rock climber |
. Ronald A. McNair Elementary School, Germantown
72. Takoma Park Elementary School, Takoma Park
73. Bel Pre Elementary School, Rockville
74. Wyngate Elementary School, Bethesda
75. Laytonsville Elementary School, Gaithersburg
76. Garrett Park Elementary School, Kensington
77. Wood Acres Elementary School, Bethesda
78. Little Bennett Elementary School, Clarksburg
79. Woodlin Elementary School, Silver Spring
80. Belmont Elementary School, Olney
81. Kensington Parkwood Elementary School, Kensington
82. Cedar Grove Elementary School, Germantown
84. Germantown Elementary School, Germantown
86. Forest Knolls Elementary School, Silver Spring
87. Rock Creek Forest Elementary School, Bethesda
88. Ashburton Elementary School, Bethesda
89. Olney Elementary School, Olney
90. Sherwood Elementary School, Sandy Spring
92. William B. Gibbs Jr. Elementary School, Germantown
93. Brooke Grove Elementary School, Olney
95. Jones Lane Elementary School, Gaithersburg
96. Montgomery Knolls Elementary School, Silver Spring
100. Lois P. Rockwell Elementary School, Damascus
Check out the full list of schools here.
Additional reporting from Patch Editor Elizabeth JanneyDevelopment Tease: The Deceived [Mummy: The Curse]
Mummy: The Curse, Open Development
Hello, mummy fans!
Sorry for as much radio silence as there’s been on my end, but I’m happy to report that Book of the Deceived is in layout in time for the Halloween season, and that’s appropriate since it contains some of the creepiest material you’re likely to see for the World of Darkness. The tone of the book and its protagonists, the mystery-shrouded members of the so-called Lost Guild, starts with the one element that sits at the core of all Deceived being…
The Temakh
Almost all supernatural character creation rules for the World of Darkness instruct players to construct a mortal character with mortal traits first, and then apply the appropriate template. In the case of the Deceived, one supernatural trait breaks this rule: the mummy’s accursed completing soul fragment, called the temakh.
The seven temakhs are entities of a sort, existing both outside and within their servants. Long ago, they counted themselves among the very Shan’iatu—the guildmasters of the Akhem-Urtu. Each presided over a specific form of artistic and cultural expression. Accordingly, they sought out followers who were adept at these same crafts, guiding and growing and molding that talent to serve their will. This means a Deceived’s temakh shaped her mortal traits almost as much as it continues to shape her supernatural ones.
The temakhs are eternal and human no longer. They are not spirits, nor gods, nor ghosts, but discorporate and chthonic presences that find collective embodiment in those deathless souls still bound to them. The mummies of each temakh are the flesh and hands by which their shared and scattered master grasps the living world. Without their mummies, who knows what the temakhs would be? Perhaps unmoored souls, screaming silently in the solitude of unending blackness and time; perhaps something darker still. Connected to their former guild underlings in this unique way, the temakhs might witness and shape the living world as even the Judges of Duat dare not.
_________________________________________________________________
For the first time, we also have a sneak peek at some of the forthcoming new material! Click the following link to check out one of the temakh splats from Book of the Deceived. Feel free to spread the link around, as this early look is for everyone.
Senebti!
CAS
Temakh Splat: The Dream-Eaterby Walter Hess
In 1938 I was 7 years old, but the events of those several days in November are more sharply inscribed in my memory than most of the events of last week. First a bit of background: I grew up in a tiny agricultural village in the Rhineland about 20 miles east of Bonn, in an area that somewhat resembled the Berkshires. In a village population of about eight hundred people there were fifteen Jewish families. There was a synagogue of which my grandfather, my “Opa” was the khazn, the unofficial rabbi, and the leader of this small community. It was my Opa who usually took me, hand in hand, to services. My father and grandfather worked together as cattle dealers and we lived together in the same house. There was a barn behind the house and further back a meadow with apple and pear trees.
I was quite aware of the various pressures on my parents that came with and from the Nazis. I knew who were the Nazis in town and who were not. Not were our neighbors on one side, the Füllenbachs, where from Mrs. Füllenbach I would receive sweaty hugs and often chocolate, and on the other side was Mrs. Schuhmacher who, each Easter, invited me to join with classmates in the Easter egg hunt in the meadow behind her house. The year before I was not invited, and that was a terrible blow. I went to the “Protestant” school, where my teacher had told me that if I did not want to sing the patriotic songs that everyone else sang so loudly, it would really be all right. One day at school, in the yard during recess, someone called out, "Look down there. Smoke." We all rushed to a low wall that ran the edge of the school playground. From the wall, we could look down on the roofs of the town. Down below, I could see, though it was somewhat hidden by other houses, that it was our synagogue from which the black smoke rose. Children moved away from me as if I had committed something foul. Our teacher, Herr Lehrer Hahraus, came over and took my hand. "I'm going to walk you home." We found my younger brother Karl. He was in first grade, I in second. Our teacher took each of us by the hand and so, hand-in-hand, our teacher walked us home. There were more people than usual out on the street, many women in aprons who, it seemed, had just stepped out of their houses, some with towels still in their hands, chatting. A crowd stood in front of the synagogue: townspeople milling, gray uniformed policemen, Brown Shirts, some SS. White smoke billowed from the front door of the synagogue. My grandfather, my Opa, appeared in the smoke. He stood in the doorway with a Torah on his shoulder as if he had just lifted it from the Ark. I wanted to run to Opa. The teacher squeezed my hand hard, looked down at me and shook his head. At our house, there was Oma, my grandmother, on the front steps. Our teacher nodded at her, maybe bowed, then turned and left. Grandmother came down and hugged us. She was crying, we were crying. Minutes later, Opa came into the house smelling of smoke and carrying a Torah. "I have to go back, get the others." He laid the Torah on the kitchen table and hurried out again. A few minutes later he came back with another. He started out again. Oma said, "The shul is burning." Opa said nothing and hurried out. Several of the older men, Gustav and Otto Gaertner, old Mr. Isaaks, Oma's brother, Julius, all came to the kitchen carrying either Torahs or an armful of thick black books. The Torahs lay on the kitchen table and all the old men sat around on chairs with their hands in front of their mouths. The town policeman, Laddach, appeared in the kitchen door, there were several SA men behind him. Laddach was about to say something when one of the brown shirts yelled, "You! Old men! Pick them up and get outside." Officer Laddach nodded. Opa first and then the others picked up a Torah and filed out the door. Outside, in front of our house the Brown Shirts yelled, “Start marching,” and then, screamed, "Left foot, right foot," over and over again. Soon all the Brown Shirts began yelling, "Left foot, right foot." I saw them move out. I tried to follow, but Mamma pulled me back and pushed me into the house. Someone, later, told us that the old men were made to march through all the streets of the village with the SA men yelling, "Left foot, right foot," laughing and enjoying themselves. The old men and Opa were then made to stand in front of the synagogue where a bonfire had been started and with guns pointing at them the men were made to throw the Torahs into the fire. ### The next few days are jumbled. I was in my Oma’s kitchen when there was a loud knocking on the front door. Police officer Laddach, stood at the door. He pulled off his cap, "I'm sorry, Oma. I'm looking for Oscar." My father in his shirt and undone collar came down the stairs from our upper floor apartment, my mother behind him. Pappa stood in the middle of the room turning in a circle, looking at his mother, at my mother. "What do you want, Laddach?" said my mother. "I'm sorry, Melli, but I have to take Oscar." "Why Oscar?"
"They're taking everybody, the Regensburgers, the Gärtners, everybody."
Oma went out into the barn. "Oscar, you have to get dressed. Dress warm."
"Where is he going?" Laddach pressed his lips together. "Laddach," she persisted, "you two were in the band together, in the soccer club."
"First to Cologne, then I don't know."
Mamma ran upstairs. Laddach and my father looked at each other. My father turned in circles. He didn't see me. My grandmother returned from the barn.
My mother and grandmother ran at my father with clothes. My father just stood there, helpless while they seemed to dress him, my mother with coat and tie, my grandmother with a scarf, my mother with a sweater, then a heavy overcoat, then a hat. Laddach said, "All right." Pappa moved toward the door and my grandmother screamed, "Wait, I have to make some sandwiches. He has to take some sandwiches." They all, except grandmother, stood there saying nothing. Grandmother came with sandwiches. She embraced my father. Then my mother embraced him. Laddach took him by the arm and they went out.
Somewhat later in the day. Laddach appeared at our door again. "Melli, you have to come. You and the kids."
My mother's knees buckled; she fell to the floor. Laddach and my grandmother helped her up,
"They want you at the synagogue. They just want some pictures."
A small crowd still stood about the synagogue, among them, several of my classmates. We were told to stand in front of the crippled doors of the synagogue, my mother, my grandmother, my brother Karl, myself. My mother held our youngest brother, two and a half year old Peter in her arms. Smoke still rose from the synagogue, and there was the smell of burning. Two men were taking pictures. My classmates, my playmates, Willibald and Horst as well as some of the others picked up clods of dirt and threw them at us. Two SS men stood in back of the crowd and as the flash bulbs popped off they began to yell at us:"Just wait, soon you'll be burning too. Just wait. Just wait." They were laughing.
The following morning, Opa came out of hiding. He had spent that November night, first outside in the field and then, when he thought he heard some men, he ran down to a nearby brook where he spent most of the night immersed in the freezing water. What I remember about that particular morning was my Opa, outside the house, somewhere, screaming, in great pain, "I'm pissing blood. I'm pissing blood."
The next day we watched our mother make frantic telephone calls trying to find out where our father had been taken. The morning after that Mom and several other women went off to Cologne to find out about their husbands and sons. I was taken along. I was not to open my mouth but to hold on to mother's hand. If she squeezed my hand, I was to cry. We went to the offices of Jewish community organizations, but there were lines of women already there when we came, many with children holding fast to their mother's hands. We went to police stations and to the offices of the Gestapo, and always there were long lines and nobody would tell us anything. We returned home and as we got off the train, Laddach was there waiting for us. He said, "Dachau. Dachau is where he is going."
Six weeks later, through the intervention of a wealthy aunt in Amsterdam, and the almost insane efforts of our mother, Dad was able to emigrate to Holland. The rest of us made it six months later. From Holland we got to Ecuador, and late in 1940 we arrived in New York City.
My Oma and Opa had remained behind. They died in the concentration camp of Terezin.
Walter Hess is the author of Jew's Harp, a new book of poetry from Pleasure Boat Studio. Hess was born in Germany and emigrated to the U.S. in 1940, via Ecuador. He is a retired documentary film editor who has worked on projects that have won two Peabody's and three Emmy's. In 2001 he received an award from the Academy of American Poets, and in 2003 a cash award from the Nyman Foundation for a portion of his memoir.KEY MESSAGES
At the national level for 2005–2007, the gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous life expectancy was 11.5 years for males and 9.7 years for females.
Life expectancy at birth for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males is estimated to be 67.2 years, and 72.9 years for females.
LIFE EXPECTANCY
Life expectancy at birth for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander males is estimated to be 67.2 years, 11.5 years less than life expectancy at birth for non-Indigenous males (78.7 years).
Life expectancy at birth for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander females is estimated to be 72.9 years, 9.7 years less than life expectancy at birth for non-Indigenous females (82.6 years).
1.6 LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH(a), by Indigenous status—2005–2007
Life Expectancy at Birth
Difference Between Non-Indigenous and Indigenous Life Expectancy at Birth(c) Indigenous Non-Indigenous Total(b) years years years years Males NSW 69.9 78.7 78.5 8.8 Qld 68.3 78.6 78.4 10.4 WA 65.0 79.0 78.7 14.0 NT 61.5 75.7 72.0 14.2 Aust(d) 67.2 78.7 78.5 11.5 Females NSW 75 82.5 82.4 7.5 Qld 73.6 82.5 82.3 8.9 WA 70.4 82.9 82.5 12.5 NT 69.2 81.2 77.6 11.9 Aust(d) 72.9 82.6 82.4 9.7
(a) Due to significant changes in methodology, estimates of life expectancy at birth for 2005–2007 are not comparable to previously published estimates.
(b) Estimates of life expectancy at birth for the total population presented in this publication differ from estimates in ABS 2007, Deaths, Australia, 2006, cat. no. 3302.0. (See:
Endnote 2
).
(c) Differences are based on unrounded estimates.
(d) Includes all states and territories.
Source: ABS 2009,
Experimental Life Tables for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, 2005–2007
, cat. no. 3302.0.55.003, ABS, Canberra.
Life expectancy estimates refer to the average number of additional years a person of a given age and sex might expect to live if the age/sex-specific death rates for 2005–2007 were to continue throughout his/her lifetime.
As outlined in Discussion Paper: Assessment of Methods for Developing Life Tables for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, 2006, the ABS has introduced a new method to produce the 2005–2007 life tables. Based on analysis of the 2006 Census data, the ABS is of the view that previously used indirect demographic methods are no longer suitable for the purpose of compiling Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life expectancy estimates.
Consequently the ABS now uses a direct demographic method, which derives life tables for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population by adjusting death registrations data by identification rates obtained from the Census Data Enhancement (CDE) Indigenous Mortality Quality Study.
Life tables for 2005–2007 were compiled on this basis for New South Wales, Queensland, Western Australia, the Northern Territory and Australia. Due to the small number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander deaths in Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the Australian Capital Territory, it is not possible to construct life tables for these jurisdictions.
Due to these changes in methodology, the ABS strongly advises that comparisons between the estimates presented here and previously published estimates cannot be made. Differences should not be interpreted as measuring changes in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life expectancy over time.
For more information on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life expectancy see ABS 2009, Experimental Life Tables for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians, 2005–2007, cat. no. 3302.0.55.003.
This topic provides an overview of estimates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander life expectancy. Data presented are from ABS experimental life tables for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians and provide context for the detailed health and welfare information presented in other topics in this release.Life expectancy is a summary measure of mortality. It represents the estimated number of years a newborn baby would live if current mortality patterns remained constant throughout the baby's lifetime ( see Box 1.7 ).At the national level for 2005–2007 Life expectancy at birth differs across the states and territories, with the highest life expectancy estimates in New South Wales (69.9 years for males and 75.0 years for females) and lowest in the Northern Territory (61.5 years for males and 69.2 years for females). As shown in table 1.6, differences in life expectancy at birth estimates between non-Indigenous and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians are greatest in the Northern Territory (14.2 years for males and 11.9 years for females) and Western Australia (14.0 years for males and 12.5 years for females), and lowest in New South Wales (8.8 years for males and 7.5 years for females) ( Endnote 1 ).1. For more recent mortality estimates, see Mortality topic.2. Estimates presented in this section are derived from abridged life tables with an upper age limit of 85 years and over, using numbers of deaths registered in 2005-2007 and the population as at 30 June 2006, while life expectancy estimates in Deaths, Australia, 2006 (cat. no. 3302.0) are based on complete life tables with an upper age group of 115 years and over, using deaths according to month of occurrence in 2005-2007 and quarterly population estimates. In addition, the graduation processes applied to both sets of life tables differ.Marijuana Industry Could Still Use Bitcoin
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Colorado’s marijuana businesses are having a hard time creating a bank. The Federal Reserve said that because the substance is federally banned they don’t want to work with the money involved with it. Now a hopeful Colorado credit union stands as a vacant building while the reefer industry shakes its head. Andrew Freedman, director of marijuana coordination for Colorado was feeling very frustrated saying:
“We tried to do the most with the building blocks of instructions they sent us, set up the most rigorous solution. And we still are left with confusion.”
Also read: FBI Advises Victims Pay Ransom on Ransomware
The court filing came from a legal feud between the Federal Reserve and the Fourth Corner Credit Union. Colorado’s cannabis and hemp supporters formed this organization to be the “only credit union in the world constructed from the ground up”. The $700 million-a-year industry can’t open a bank without the authorization from the Federal Reserve who said in its court filing: “transporting or transmitting funds known to have derived from the distribution of marijuana is illegal.”
Founder Mark Mason and a group of entrepreneurs in Colorado wanted to start the first “Marijuana Bank” in history, and one that works within just that ecosystem. The mission statement is to provide a “compliant” set of banking services to those in the cannabis industry. Despite the passion these marijuana activists have, the Federal Reserve says the Credit Union’s “very existence is prohibited by federal law.” The filing claims they won’t arrest bankers who take cannabis funds into their establishment but putting that money into the Federal Reserve system is a different story. The Fed in its court statement said these money deals were much like “trading endangered species or trading with North Korea” which gives the belief that the Reserve detests the pot cash.
In November 2014 speaking at the Web Summit in Dublin, Gavin Andresen said he believed cryptocurrency and legal marijuana businesses could help each other. “Legal marijuana industries could possibly be one of the big industries for bitcoin,” Andresen said. “It gives marijuana growers a way of charging customers that doesn’t involve cash.” Despite a many outspoken individuals speaking on the same mutual positivity of both industries Patrick Rea, co-founder of CanopyBoulder thinks Bitcoin is not the solution. Rea said in February of 2014: “The banking situation needs to be solved. I don’t think bitcoin is the solution,”
Well, the solution doesn’t seem to be working with the United State Federal Reserve. Most banks want nothing to do with the marijuana industry and have clearly stated they have no intentions with mixing with the cannabis businesses. Some feel that Bitcoin could help the situation by offering both banking services and lower fees. There is one Colorado cannabis dispensary who only accepts cash and Bitcoin yet most in the marijuana field have believed the opinions of accelerators like the one in Boulder. We now know the opinions of the Feds which is basically your credit union will not fly and you might as well be trading Siberian tiger.
Do you think The Cannabis Industry Needs Bitcoin? Let Us Know In The Comments Below.
Images courtesy of Redmemes and Pixbay
Originally posted on: Marijuana Industry Could Still Use BitcoinYou must enter the characters with black color that stand out from the other characters
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— A Fayetteville man who was accused of using fake chips in a New Jersey poker tournament last month has been charged with copyright infringement after federal authorities found thousands of bootleg DVDs at his home.
Customs agents have been investigating Christian Patrick Lusardi since mid-2012, when they started intercepting boxes of counterfeit DVDs from China heading to Fayetteville homes, according to a court document.
A search of Lusardi's home at 2537 Lull Water Drive turned up more than 37,500 pirated DVDs, along with equipment such as DVD burners and packaging equipment to make more bootleg discs, the document states. He told investigators that he had numerous boxes shipped to the homes of friends and relatives to avoid detection.
Investigators were able to determine that Lusardi made close to $1 million selling the DVDs online, as well as an undetermined sum selling them at flea markets in Raleigh and Fayetteville.
Last month, workers clearing a clogged pipe in a hotel room at a casino in Atlantic City, N.J., found counterfeit poker chips with a tournament value of 2.7 million that had been flushed down a toilet.
New Jersey authorities linked the fake chips to Lusardi, who was playing in a poker tournament at the casino, and charged him with theft and rigging a public contest. The casino had to cancel the tournament, and New Jersey gaming officials froze the prize money.
The court document noted that Lusardi recently received a shipment from China labeled "plastic chips."Students at Middlebury College in Vermont protested an author who has been called a white nationalist, causing the college to move a planned lecture to another room on campus. (Will DiGravio)
As the co-author of one of the 1990s’ most controversial works of scholarship, Charles Murray is no stranger to angry protesters.
Over the years, at university lectures across the country, the influential conservative scholar and author of “The Bell Curve” says he’s come face-to-face with demonstrators dozens of times.
But none of those interactions prepared him for the chaotic confrontation he encountered Thursday night at Middlebury College in Middlebury, Vt.
“When ‘The Bell Curve’ came out, I’d have lectures with lots of people chanting and picketing with signs, but it was always within the confines of the event and I was eventually able to speak,” Murray told The Washington Post. “But I’ve never experienced anything like this.”
The demonstrations began conventionally enough, with several hundred organized protesters packed into a lecture hall Thursday, chanting and holding signs. They ended with Murray being forced to move his lecture and later being surrounded by an unruly mob made up of students and “outside agitators” as he tried to leave campus, according to witnesses and school administrators.
After swarming Murray, a faculty member and a school official, the protesters shouted profanities, shoved members of the group and then blocked them from getting to a vehicle in a nearby parking lot. Witnesses said the confrontation was aggressive, intimidating and unpredictable and felt like it was edging frighteningly close to outright violence.
[Trump lashes back at Berkeley after violent protests block speech by Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos]
In a message to the campus community Friday, Middlebury President Laurie L. Patton said her administration plans to respond to the “clear violations of Middlebury College policy” that occurred the night before without providing more specific information. Patton — who was on hand Thursday night — said she was “deeply disappointed” by the events she witnessed and called the night “painful” for many at Middlebury, a top-tier liberal arts college with about 2,450 undergraduate students.
“Today our community begins the process of addressing the deep and troubling divisions that were on display last night,” her message said. “I am grateful to those who share this goal and have offered to help.”
“We must find a path to establishing a climate of open discourse as a core Middlebury value, while also recognizing critical matters of race, inclusion, class, sexual and gender identity, and the other factors that too often divide us,” the statement added. “That work will take time, and I will have more to say about that in the days ahead.”
I don't think physical assault is covered by 1st amendment either. But I'm not a constitutional scholar. https://t.co/EB9IYi0Jpa — Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) March 3, 2017
What happened at Middlebury to Charles Murray threatens not just campus free speech, but free speech–indeed freedom in America–generally. — Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) March 3, 2017
The Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled Murray a white supremacist and a eugenicist who uses “racist pseudoscience and misleading statistics to argue that social inequality is caused by the genetic inferiority of the black and Latino communities, women and the poor.”
“Murray, a statistically minded sociologist by training, has spent decades working to rehabilitate long-discredited theories of IQ and heredity, turning them into a foundation on which to build a conservative theory of society that rejects equality and egalitarianism,” the SPLC states.
Charles Murray. (American Enterprise Institute)
Murray bristled at the SPLC’s characterization of him and blamed it for provoking protests among college students who have failed to scrutinize his work.
“White supremacist?” he said Friday. “Let’s see: if you have a guy who was married for 13 years to an Asian woman and who has two lovely Asian daughters, wouldn’t that disqualify him from membership in the white supremacist club?”
Murray, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, was not invited to Middlebury to discuss “The Bell Curve,” but instead to talk about his latest book: “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.”
His lecture was co-sponsored by Middlebury’s Political Science Department. The other sponsor was the AEI Executive Council at the college, an outreach program by the Washington-based group that operates on dozens of campuses.
“Our goal was not to create a controversy, but to start a discussion and a dialogue,” said Alexander Khan, a member of the AEI Executive Council. “Many members of our own club here don’t agree with everything Dr. Murray has to say, but we still believe in the importance of robust discussion and the free exchange of opinions.”
“That is a cornerstone of what it means to receive a liberal arts education,” he added.
The Associated Press reported that more than 450 alumni signed a letter calling Murray’s visit “unacceptable.”
“In this case, there’s not really any ‘other side,’ only deceptive statistics masking unfounded bigotry,” the letter said.
“Both students and other community members came out to show that we are not accepting these kind of racist, misogynistic, eugenist opinions being expressed at our college,” Elizabeth Dunn, a student protest organizer, told the AP. “We don’t think that they deserve a platform because they are literally hate speech.”
Video from the lecture in Wilson Hall showed hundreds of students turning their backs to Murray once he took the stage and began speaking.
Chants including “Hey hey, ho ho, Charles Murray has got to go” and “Racist, sexist anti-gay, Charles Murray go away” followed as Murray remained at the lectern for close to 20 minutes. The students held signs that said “No Eugenics” and “Scientific racism = Racism.”
Anticipating that the lecture might be interrupted, administrators attempted to relocate the event and a Q&A with Middlebury professor Allison Stanger to a location where the exchange could be live-streamed. Some of their discussion was recorded, but the dialogue was interrupted by loud protesters who slammed chairs, chanted and periodically pulled fire alarms, which shut down the building’s power, according to Middlebury spokesman Bill Burger.
“It became very difficult to hear in there where they were recording,” Burger said. “Nonetheless, there was a principle at work in that we were determined to continue the event. Both sides felt like they were standing for principle.”
Murray said he felt like students were protesting a perceived persona more than a person, one they’d labeled “a racist, sexist pseudo scientist.” Asked why he thinks he continues to arouse such passion 23 years after “The Bell Curve” was published, Murray said he could only speculate.
“I think there is this rage on campuses about Donald Trump and — as someone who has written pretty explicitly about my disapproval of Trump — I can sympathize with that.”
“But if you have someone that they can say, ‘This is one of those people who is the problem,’ then they latch on to that person,” he added. “That’s who I was to them.”
The University of California at Berkeley canceled a talk by inflammatory Breitbart writer Milo Yiannopoulos and put the campus on lockdown after intense protests broke out on Feb. 1. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)
Burger said Stanger’s hair was pulled before she reached the car, twisting and injuring the professor’s neck. Burger said she later went to a hospital and was fitted with a neck brace. (Stanger could not be reached for comment.)
By the time Murray, Stanger and Burger made it to their car with a campus security escort, the vehicle was mobbed by masked demonstrators who climbed on the hood, pounded the windows and blocked the car’s exit while security struggled to clear a path, witnesses said.
At one point, a stop sign with a concrete base was laid in front of the vehicle to block its path. After close to 10 minutes, the car managed to separate from the mob, witnesses said. Minutes later, the group was forced to leave another campus building where a catered dinner had been arranged after security informed Murray and the others that more protesters were on their way.
Murray said he harbored no ill will toward Middlebury and praised campus administrators for not backing down from protesters as the night intensified.
Report from the front: The Middlebury administration was exemplary. The students were seriously scary. — Charles Murray (@charlesmurray) March 3, 2017
He said he didn’t want to dramatize the events or present his final interaction with protesters as a “life-or-death situation,” but noted that the crowd was “out of control.”
“Had there not been those security guards, I would certainly have been pushed down on the ground,” he said. “Maybe nothing more would’ve happened after that, but certainly that would’ve happened.”
“I was glad to get the hell out of there,” he added.
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Art Institute campuses to be sold to foundation
This lawmaker’s bio touted a business degree. It was actually a Sizzler training certificate.
These states give more grant aid to college students in need than the fedstem cells are viewed on a computer screen on August 27, 2010 in Farmington, Connecticut. AFP Scientists on Monday said that for the first time they had printed 3D objects using human embryonic stem cells, furthering the quest to fabricate transplantable organs.
Once fine-tuned, the technology should allow scientists to make three-dimensional human tissue in the lab, eliminating the need for organ donation or testing on animals, they reported.
Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) can replicate indefinitely and become almost any type of cell in the human body.
They are touted as a source of replacement tissue, fixing nearly anything from malfunctioning hearts and lungs, to damaged spines, Parkinson's disease or even baldness.
Scientists have previously tested 3D printing, which uses inkjet technology, with other types of cells, including adult stem cells.
But until now hESCs, which are more versatile than mature ones, have proven too fragile.
"This is a scientific development which we hope and believe will have immense valuable long-term implications for reliable, animal-free drug testing and in the longer term, to provide organs for transplant on demand," said Jason King from British stem cell company Roslin Cellab, which took part in the work.
The team used a specially-designed "valve-based" printer that deposited a "bio ink" of liquid containing laboratory-cultivated hESCs.
The cells are forced out with a tiny blast of air, and the flow is controlled by the opening and closing of a microvalve.
"We are able to print millions of cells within minutes," co-author Will Shu of the Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, told AFP.
"The printer is similar to the size of a standard desktop-size laser printer."
The living cells are printed onto a culture dish and left to aggregate together to form "what we call a spheroid, like... a little ball," said Shu.
Each spheroid was smaller than a millimetre.
The study appears in Biofabrication, a journal published by Britain's Institute of Physics (IOP).
The experiment was not designed to create anything but to demonstrate a method that did not damage the delicate cells.
"Most importantly, the printed hESCs maintained their pluripotency -- the ability to be differentiated into any other cell type," the IOP said in a statement.
Theoretically, the team can print any shape, but is not yet able to recreate a human organ, which needs a mesh of blood vessels.
"The challenge for printing a whole organ is to have this vascular structure inside it to feed it, allowing the tissue to survive in the long term," explained Shu. "We have our first step towards that."
Another big hurdle is fine-tuning the science of instructing embryonic stem cells to become specific types of tissue.
In the short term, said Shu, his team is seeking to print 3D liver tissue, which has one of the simplest of biological structures.
This could then be used for laboratory drug testing, "which would hopefully eliminate the use of animals," he said.
"I expect this technology can be realised in one or two years' time."
One idea behind the search for replacement organs is to grow the cells using a patient's own DNA to avert transplant rejection.
But the sector has been dogged by objections over the use of early-stage embryos, where the most adaptable, or pluripotent, cells are found.Origin, History and Evolution
of Playing Cards
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Origin of playing cards
A History of playing cards in Europe
First historical references to cards in Europe
Introduction of playing cards into Europe
A History of European packs
Arrival of playing cards to America
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I) Origin of Playing Cards
Due to the very long history of cards nobody knows with certainty where they originated first. Who invented them, how and under what circumstances will always remain an open question. Were they invented by one or few people or they appeared as a result of evolution of other gambling tools? – that mystery will stay unsolved. We only have few legends and few theories, but not the final answers. Due to fragility of cards there won’t be any archaeological evidence to prove or reject different theories of cards origin. There are 3 most probable birth places of playing cards – China, Korea and India (some historians add Persia).
Chinese Roots
Chinese dictionary “Ching-tsze-tung” dating from 1628 includes the legend about creation of “dotted” cards. According to it numerous members of Emperor’s army of concubines invented playing cards in a desperate attempt to break the monotony of their existence and keep themselves occupied. Dictionary specified 1120 as the year when collective concubines’ creativity came up with the idea of cards.
Early Chinese cards had resemblance with and relation to other tools and things which already existed in everyday life. Some cards resembled Chinese paper money; others were derived from dominoes or were inspired by chess.
Chinese had quite a few different packs in the different areas of the country. The difference was in the number of cards in the packs, number and type of suits and court cards. The most simple and wide-spread pack had 30 cards, 3 suits and three court cards. The |
, The Guardian, 15 July 2009 Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2009/jul/15/self-help-positive-thinking Quick fixes often make the underlying problems worse. Letting go of the desire for self-improvement is the answer London, UK -- "Start each day by affirming peaceful, contented and happy attitudes and your days will tend to be pleasant and successful". So wrote Norman Vincent Peale, author of the 1952 bestseller, The Power of Positive Thinking. Peale's prescription for contentment has been regurgitated and recycled in thousands of self-help books over the past half-century, but despite a never-ending avalanche of sales, the alluringly simple "think happy-be happy" formula hasn't made much of a dent in mental suffering. According to the World Health Organisation, depression is set to be the planet's second biggest cause of disability by 2020. Now, a study published in Psychological Science confirms what many people have discovered from personal experience – not only do crude positive thinking techniques often fail, but for some they can be counterproductive. Researchers at the University of Waterloo in Ontario evaluated people's self-esteem levels before and after they were asked to repeat typical mantras such as, "I am a loveable person", and found that while the affirmations helped those who already felt good about themselves, they made subjects with low self-worth feel even worse. For those of us weary of what psychiatrist Jimmie Holland calls the "tyranny of positive thinking", these results are more likely to boost our mood than ploughing through The Secret. It's not that optimism is a bad thing (it isn't), or that cultivating cheerfulness can't lead to a happier experience of life (it can), but in their eagerness to sell blanket positivity as a surefire cure for gloom, the self-help gurus miss out on a crucial first step to transformation – a willingness to accept your current circumstances. Viewed from a Buddhist angle, self-help is an oxymoron. Any technique designed to bolster the self is bound to lead to more, not less suffering, because clinging to ego is considered the source of anguish in the first place. However, when we let go of the desire for self–improvement, we can relax with the mind instead of badgering it into well–being. By surrendering the battle with neurotic fixations, paradoxically they start to fall away, or at very least, the space created by dropping the struggle makes them seem less powerful, and loom less large. Mature spiritual traditions tend to be good at developing this spacious mindset. Magnificent architecture, inspiring liturgies, and a community of practitioners dedicated to discovering ultimate reality, are reminders to expand beyond concerns about the self and see them in a panoramic perspective (to be "a grain of sand with gigantic eyes" as Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche once put it). But neither is it a preserve of the religious – Richard Dawkins has written movingly of the awe to be experienced when opening up to a vast and wonderful natural world. Crude positive thinking on the other hand, and self–help in general, tends towards the small–minded. Spawned in our materialist, consumerist culture, it locates problems and solutions within the tight confines of the individual (me, me, me!). This ignores the fact that our circumstances, and our thought patterns, are part of a wider set of causes and conditions – genetics, family history, social and economic situation, the existential limitations of birth, ageing, sickness and death – over which we may have little or no control. By telling people they can take full and immediate charge of their lives with a bit of early morning mental jiu-jitsu, advocates of positive thinking end up making some people feel even more frustrated – adding the guilt of failure to depression. The authors of the Ontario study came to just that conclusion. Affirmations which fly in the face of facts, or negative perception of the facts, cruelly highlight the contrast between how some people would like to feel and how they actually feel. This then become another stick for self-flagellation, a reminder of all the ways in which that person feels inadequate. Perhaps this is why the most promising new psychological treatments focus less on positive thinking and self–improvement, but on developing qualities such as acceptance, mindful awareness, wisdom and compassion. Indeed, out of five evidence-based recommendations for mental health made in the government's Foresight report last autumn, four could be considered recastings of traditional "spiritual" values – "Connect" (love others), "Keep Learning" (develop wisdom), "Take Notice" (meditate), and "Give" (be charitable). Whether you decide to view these strategies as spiritual is irrelevent – they lead to wellbeing irrespective of your take on the existence of God or the hereafter. With his books Turning The Mind into An Ally,and Ruling Your World, Buddhist teacher Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche joked that he was trying to start a new publishing genre – "other-help" – to rival the mountains of ego–fuelling, Peale copycats stacked up at WH Smith and Waterstones. Clearly the genre has yet to takeoff, but the growing popularity of authors grounded in the acceptance approach (Pema Chödron, for example) suggests that more people are realising their minds cannot be cajoled into confidence by growling "I'm A Tiger" in front of the mirror.Home Animals Movies Comics / Superheroes Cartoons Misc Flags Pokemons Contact Coloring gallery of Star Trek pictures Press on the picture to make it bigger.
The Star Trek fictional universe created by Gene Roddenberry is the setting of ten films and six television series.
The stories of Star Trek are usually the adventures of human and alien who serve in the Federation's Starfleet.
Captain Kirk controls the enterprise
Captain Kirk controls the enterprise
Captain Kirk the doctor
Captain Kirk the doctor
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Dr McCoy and Mr pock
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Mr Spock and Scotty
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Mr Sulu and Nurse Chapel
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Custom Search Page generated in 0.015 sec. Confidentiality ©2018 All Rights Reserved to coloring-pictures.netA man walking past an uprooted tree after Typhoon Vicente hit Hong Kong in 2012. Reuters
There are China analysts, and then there is Charlene Chu.
She has been called a rock star of Chinese-debt analysis. Money managers the world over pay tens of thousands of dollars for access to her research at her new firm Autonomous Research. Her reports are rarely leaked, and she rarely gives interviews.
Business Insider got a glimpse at a massive report she wrote at the end of July.
This was when everyone was freaking out about the precipitous fall of China's stock markets, and it predates the Chinese authorities' decision to devalue the yuan.
Her base case in the report was for Chinese authorities to maintain stability of the equity market and forestall contagion.
There is also a doomsday scenario, however, in which there is contagion to other domestic and international markets, large capital outflows, and an acceleration of problems associated with financial-sector weakness and corporate indebtedness.
The report said: "This in turn would likely lead to a significant pullback in credit, putting the brakes on GDP growth and bringing an end to China's decades of stellar economic growth. At that point, social and political stability — the critical wild cards in this equation — could come under question."
This is what doom looks like
Chu's thesis goes against an idea we've been hearing over and over since Chinese stocks started crashing: that the stock market is not at all connected to China's real economy.
The connection is in corporate working capital loans that banks lent out that, she posits, may have been invested in the stock market. Now that the stock market is crashing, those loans are under intense pressure. That, in turn, puts major pressure on the banks and zaps liquidity.
As the picture darkens, investors will start to take their money out of China — capital flight.
The Shanghai Composite, finally not falling like a knife. Yahoo Finance
Capital has already been leaving China at a rapid rate for months, but investors haven't been panicking because they believe the Chinese government has as much as $3.7 trillion in foreign-exchange reserves to shore up the system. Chu's report challenges that notion, noting that as much as $900 billion of that pile is tied up in illiquid investments.
There are also some eye-popping statistics on the level of unrecognized losses in the financial sector and leverage in the corporate sector.
This idea that China isn't investing in a way that will grow its economy in a new direction has been out in the ether for years, but the numbers here are staggering. The report estimates that there is 40% more credit in the economy than is required, and as a result the return on that credit — or the amount of gross domestic product generated by an additional yuan in the economy — has slumped.
In short, Chinese companies are pursuing uneconomic projects.
You can bet some of these are in the property sector, a sector the government has now decided to throw more investment money at to keep the economy going.
Reuters/Aly Song
That is important because if the returns from a project aren't sufficient to cover the interest payments, then losses will surely follow.
The report said: "A large increase in credit that isn't matched by a similar rise in GDP/income is likely generating insufficient returns that one day will turn into losses."
And it is the banks that bear those losses.
Banks have historically incurred losses close to half of their share of the excess credit in countries that have undergone a boom and bust, according to the research. That would put losses in the range of $4 trillion to $8 trillion, depending on how it unfolds in China and whether the losses continue to build until 2018.
Chinese President Xi Jinping at a meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing in 2013. Reuters/Jason Lee
No path to growth... right now
Last week the Chinese government weakened its currency in response to dismal export numbers and (probably) troubling employment figures.
Chu's entire scenario is made worse by the weakened yuan. Why? Because it adds billions more in debt to China's corporate balance sheets. Bloomberg estimated that number to be about $10 billion right after the yuan was allowed to slide 1.9%.
The only solution available to China is the reform of what Chu describes as "a broken growth model." The Chinese authorities have made the right noises on this point, but progress has been slow thus far.
Policymakers have often backed down when reform is seen as challenging, and directives announced by senior politicians often look very different in the field.
The note said: "Reform is relatively effortless when GDP growth is in the teens; it is much more complex and painful in a climate in which GDP growth is rapidly slowing.
"For this reason, we see a risk that Chinese policymakers won't be able to stomach the pain of some reforms and will simply back away — the same way they recently walked away from their pledge last fall to cut off new local government borrowing."
That would mean the Chinese authorities putting off the hard decisions in the hope that they can maintain stability and ultimately grow their way out of the difficulties they currently face. Every time they do that they increase the likelihood that the blowup will be more devastating if and when it comes.
The report said: "The problem is the challenges facing the Chinese authorities are growing rapidly and becoming more intractable each year."Temple students told NBC10 they are scared and frustrated with police on and off campus. (Published Tuesday, March 25, 2014)
Another Temple University student has come forward claiming she was attacked by a group of young girls minutes before a brutal off-campus assault with a brick that forced a fellow co-ed into surgery.
The 20-year-old junior, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, tells NBC10.com she was text messaging a friend as she walked down her street, the 1700 block of Willington Street, around 5:45 p.m. on Friday when she was blindsided by a fist.
“I typed [the message] and lifted my head to start walking again and as I lifted my head up, there was a girl coming at me, swinging at me, and I was able to lean back. She barely hit my chin, and then she swung again and hit my mouth area and my neck and I was able to shove her away and sprint away,” she said.
The student says a group of seven to 10 girls took part in the unprovoked attack that left her with a few bruises. When she was able to break away, the woman says she ran to her nearby house, which is just feet from Philadelphia Police’s 22nd District headquarters.
Exclusive Temple Student Attacked With Brick Speaks
Minutes after, the woman said a Philadelphia Police officer knocked on her door asking if she was OK. A driver apparently witnessed the attack and flagged down an officer, the student said.
“The officer said ‘Are you OK? Are you OK?’ and I was in shock and told her that I wasn't hurt bad,” she said.
The student said she was in shock and couldn’t really speak about the incident, so later that night, at the urging of her roommate, she walked over to the 22nd District headquarters to make a report.
Exclusive Temple Student Attacked With Brick
But she says that attempt fell on deaf ears.
“His attitude was very nonchalant and he was acting like it was no big deal,” she said speaking about the officer inside the station.
The woman said the whole conversation happened from within the station’s waiting room, which was full of people at the time, and that she didn’t feel comfortable talking about all of the details regarding the assault in public.
“He said if it happened again to call 911. I didn't think to call 911 because I was at the station, I was four doors down,” she said.
The co-ed was planning to let the situation go, until she heard about the unprovoked attack of two other Temple students only three blocks away, just 15 minutes after hers.
NBC10.com was first to report that assault, in which a group of girls and boys, some of whom are believed to be as young as 8-years-old, punched and used a brick to hit a couple as they walked near Temple’s athletic fields at 16th and Norris Streets around 6 p.m. on Friday.
In that attack, a 19-year-old girl was hit in the mouth with a brick, dislodging her teeth – an injury that required emergency surgery.
“My boyfriend pushed the girl away from me that hit me in the face and then the girl’s sister came at me with a brick,” the victim told NBC10.com in an exclusive interview. She also asked to remain anonymous citing safety concerns. “I tried to get away as fast as I could. My teeth were halfway out of my mouth. I wasn’t thinking about anything besides getting to safety.”
The victim in the first attack is a family friend of the 19-year-old. The two plan to meet on Temple’s North Philadelphia campus this week to discuss their experiences. The 20-year-old says she also plans to return to the police station on Monday to try to file an official report.
NBC10.com reached out to Philadelphia Police about the attack and whether they are investigating a connection.
In a written response, the Philadelphia Police Office of Public Affairs said the department was not aware of the second attack.
"If there is someone else out there indicating they were assaulted, then we want to know about it, so that it can be investigated, and to see if they are connected. More importantly, so that those who are responsible for this brutal attack are off the streets," a spokesperson wrote.
Questions as to why a police report was not taken by an officer at the woman's home or at the station were not answered.
Ray Betzner, Assistant Vice President of University Communications at Temple, says the university had not been notified of the alleged attack. Having taken place off of the university's campus, he said it is out of Temple University Police's jurisdiction, which ends at 16th Street.
"We have primary concern of ensuring the safety of the 5,000 to 6,000 students who live on campus," he said. "Those students who choose to live in the City of Philadelphia are protected by Philadelphia Police."
Monday night, Temple University Police sent an email to students alerting them of the crimes. They also say a student reported Monday night that two teen girls tried to snatch her purse. Both Philadelphia Police and campus police are investigating.
For the past two years, Temple has paid the city $1 million a year to enhance police patrols in the neighborhoods surrounding campus, Betzner said. He adds that they rely on police to notify them about crimes in those areas and involving Temple students.
Betzner says the university also has a number of programs -- including escorts -- to keep students safe.
Asked why Temple did not sent out an alert about the brick attack after officials were made aware of it, he said such alerts are reserved for situations where people are in imminent danger.
As for the woman, she says the attack is prompting her to change her ways when walking through the neighborhood.
“I’m definitely never going to have my head down again,” she said. “I am just going to be with people all the time. Maybe if I was just with another person they wouldn’t have targeted me."
Contact Vince Lattanzio at 610.668.5532, vince.lattanzio@nbcuni.com or follow @VinceLattanzio on Twitter.Contact Alison Burdo at 610.668.5635, alison.burdo@nbcuni.com or follow @NewsBurd on Twitter.As you may be able to tell by now, I love mushrooms. I also have been trying to do some more vegetarian dishes ONLY BECAUSE it’s just cheaper most of the time. I like to think of myself as the mathematical finance queen and am playing games with our monthly budget to see how we can better save for a house.
But that’s neither here nor there.
This is a vegetarian lasagna. I wouldn’t call it a vegetable lasagna, because I hate the normal things that go into veggie lasagna like zucchini, and i don’t like red bell peppers with my Italian dishes unless they are roasted. UGH! Why didn’t I put roasted red peppers? You should add them to this dish. This is simply a lasagna absent of meat, and still very flavorful. Anyway, feel free to add any cooked and seasoned veggie to the ricotta cheese & mushroom mixture to better satisfy your taste bud’s desires.
This is not too bad for you for a lasagna. Before you make your sauce, saute all your veggies in olive oil and garlic.
Then chop them and set aside in a bowl. Or chop them before you saute… I don’t know why I did things backwards. Then start your simple marinara. As you may notice in the recipe, this will be more than enough for the lasagna. I like to make a lot and freeze or refrigerate for later; plus it’s so annoying to not use whole cans of tomatoes to me so I just made the recipe so that you use up both cans of tomatoes in one shot, and save the extras for a lazy, all-I-can-manage-to-do-is-boil-pasta day.
While it’s cooking, mix your ricotta filling – veggies, parsley, parmesan, S&P. Eggs optional.
Anddd assemble! This looks like not enough cheese, but trust me, once you spread it with the spoon and it bakes, it melts down and covers the entire surface.
Repeat a few times until you run out of the components, and top with more parmesan and the 2 cups of mozzarella cheese. Bake at 350 for 50 minutes, covered.
Mushroom Lasagna
Serves 8
Ingredients:
4 tbsp olive oil
12 oz baby bella mushrooms, chopped
56oz (2 cans) san marzano tomatoes
4 cloves garlic, minced
1-2 tbsp Italian seasoning (or a few leaves of chopped fresh basil if you have it on hand)
¼ cup dry red wine
1 package no boil noodles (or boiled lasagna noodles)
1 package part skim ricotta cheese
½ cup parmesan cheese
3 tbsp dried parsley
Salt & pepper
2 cups shredded low fat mozzarella cheese
Method:
Preheat your oven to 350 degrees Heat 2 tablespoons of olive oil on a deep skillet, sauté one of the garlic cloves for about a minute, and add chopped mushrooms, sautéing until just softened, about 5 minutes Put mushrooms to the side and add 2 more tablespoons of olive oil and sauté the rest of the garlic until softened, about 2 minutes. Add tomatoes and mash gently, then add seasoning, salt and pepper, and wine. Bring to a boil and then simmer for at least 10 minutes While the marinara is cooking, mix the mushrooms with the ricotta cheese, adding salt and pepper, parsley, and the parmesan. At this point you may want to add an egg or two as traditionally used in lasagna, however the recipe will be fine if you leave it out (it reduces the cholesterol in the dish). Spray your 9×18 pan and add a thin layer of sauce on the bottom. Then layer lasagna noodles, then cheese mix, then sauce, repeating until the last layer. Once you top the final layer with the noodles, top with more sauce, then mozzarella cheese and the rest of the parmesan. You will have leftover sauce, freeze or refrigerate to use later on some delicious ravioli or chicken parmesan Bake covered at 350 for about 50 minutes, until cheese is bubbly and the edges start to brown.
Damage: 483 Calories/43g carbs/23g fat/26g protein/3g fiber
AdvertisementsObamacare's second enrollment period has been far less technologically embarrassing than the famous debacle of 2013 and 2014 -- but despite billions of taxpayer dollars having been spent on the website, it still didn't go off without a hitch:
A technical problem that had been interfering with sign-ups for President Barack Obama's health care law has been fixed, officials say. Any consumer whose enrollment was hampered by the glitch will be provided with a special enrollment period. The problem popped up the day before a Sunday deadline to sign up for subsidized private health insurance. It had been intermittent, meaning some people were able to complete their applications and submit them...Some people trying to get coverage hadn't been able to get their income information electronically verified. That's crucial because the amount of financial assistance to help pay premiums is based on people's income. The health care law offers health insurance to people who don't have coverage on the job. More than 8 in 10 of those who apply qualify for help. Without it, most can't afford the coverage.
Start with annual deductibles. For bronze plans in 2015, they're enormous -- $5,372, or about five times what the average person with employer-based individual coverage faced last year. More important, and potentially worrisome for the law's defenders: Average deductibles for silver plans (the most popular type of exchange coverage) are about three times as high as on employer plans. Even gold plans have slightly higher average deductibles.
Maher said he still thinks that Obamacare has been good for those with preexisting conditions and for those who were able to get insurance because of the bill, he is no longer sure Obamacare has been so grand overall. “But The New York Times on Sunday did an article that basically said, you know, when Obama said if you like your plan nothing will change — well, everything has changed,” Maher said. “46 percent of people are having trouble paying health care costs now, up 10 percent from a year ago because the deductibles went the up, the co-pays went up. They can’t see the doctor they used to see because he’s in a different network. They go to get questions answered and they’re talking to somebody reading a script in the Philippines. It’s like your prostate cancer is being handled by Comcast now.” “The most frightening thing in this article is when somebody said ‘it’s so confusing, I’ve just stopped seeing a doctor’ — and that’s going on a lot, apparently,” Maher later added. “People are just not going because it’s more expensive, too confusing and I think this was intentional. I think the insurance companies wanted this to happen because that’s how they make money. ”
Three senior House members told The Associated Press that they plan to strongly urge the administration to grant a special sign-up opportunity for uninsured taxpayers who will be facing fines under the law for the first time this year. The three are Michigan's Sander Levin, the ranking Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee, and Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, and Lloyd Doggett of Texas. All worked to help steer Obama's law through rancorous congressional debates from 2009-2010. The lawmakers say they are concerned that many of their constituents will find out about the penalties after it's already too late for them to sign up for coverage, since open enrollment ended Sunday.
The "Affordable" Care Act isn't affordable for "most" enrollees without hefty taxpayer assistance. Even with the subsidies, many consumers are discovering that they can't afford the substantial out-of-pocket costs beyond the premiums, while others are turned off by coverage plans' inconvenient and narrow networks. A Bloomberg piece published last week entitled, "Yep, Obamacare Costs a Fortune" lays out why expenses beyond monthly rates (which are still on the rise) are hitting Obamacare consumers hard: Click through for more details on costs like co-pays and out-of-pocket maximums. Over the weekend, I participated in a Fox News segment regarding what Republicans should do if the Supreme Court correctly reads the law as written by Democrats and strikes down subsidies in most states. I've addressed that question in several posts. The Democrat on the panel claimed that Republicans have no alternatives to Obamacare, are obsessed with failed repeal votes, and that the law is a success:Paul Ryan is right that the GOP needs to unite around a plan (and a rhetorical strategy to combat Democrats' inevitable, furious blame storm over their own failures), but it's not true that the party hasn't offered any alternatives over the years ; they produced another version within the last few weeks. It's also untrue that all of their repeal votes were futile. And it's most untrue that Obamacare is working. It's not. Even with the expected last-minute flurry, the administration's projections have been downgraded substantially -- plus, it's not a "success" when people sign up for a product after the government…requires them by law to sign up for that product. The law was marketed as a means of reducing everyone's healthcare costs, including the governments, improving care, and allowing satisfied parties to maintain their existing plans and doctors. None of these promises have been kept. On MSNBC last week, Ed Schultz actually had a guest on who's been harmed by Obamacare (significantly more people who've been impacted by the law have been hurt than helped ). After hearing the man's story, Big Ed declared it no big deal The gentleman describes how he and his family have had their preferred coverage and doctors stripped away, prompting Ed to say that at least they're not getting denied coverage (which wasn't their problem in the first place), and shrugging that all they have to do is "pay a little more, that's all." Only every major pledge made to you hasn't been kept. That's all! Stop whining. There's a winning message. Obamacare supporter Bill Maher, who prefers a Native American healthcare- and VA-style'single payer' government-run system, is waking up to the fact that the law is falling far short of promises and hurting a lot of people:Maher lays the blame on greedy insurance companies, of course, but this was President Obama's law. Jonathan Gruber has admitted that "cost containment" was a pipe dream cooked up to garner public support for a redistributionist scheme. He co-opted much of the insurance industry (not that they had much choice), but policies have consequences. And several of those consequences are turning out to be unpleasant surprises for average people -- in the form of unkept promises, extra taxes owed, buggy websites, and "unexpected" tax fines Oh, right: The individual mandate tax nobody's heard about. Sure, people might be angry when they get punished for not buying insurance. But they might get even angrier when they see what insurance costs, and what that "coverage" buys them. By the way, these three Democrats all opposed Republican efforts to delay the individual mandate tax last year, natch.Typnoon Chan Hom is on its way for Taiwan on Friday July 10, 2015 and it will bring 100+ mm of Rain and the Winds will be Very Strong and Damaging Gusting Well over 100 km/h and it will be Big Waves Crashing the Beaches and Shores of Taiwan Especially in Taipei Taiwan and Typhoon Chan Hom is Currently Moving West Northwest Direction and it will Turn to the Northwest and it will Aim Towards Taiwan on Friday July 10, 2015 Including Taipei and the Wind Shear is Very Low and the Waters is Very Warm that will Strengthen Typhoon Chan Hom and it will bring Mud Slides and Land Slides and a lot of Rain will Cause the Sewers to Back up on the Streets in Taipei and that will Cause a lot of Flooding and the Typhoon is Capable of Bringing Down Power Lines and Snapping Telephone Poles and Tree Branches in Half and it will be a Powerful Typhoon in Taiwan on Friday July 10, 2015 and People in Taiwan Be Prepared have your Rubber Boots, Rain Coats and Rain Suits Ready and Wear your Rain Gear, Rubber Boots and Rain Coats to Keep you Dry and when the Typhoon Gets Real Bad Get inside of your House so you can be Safe and Have your iPads, iPhones, Samsung Galaxy Smartphones, Samsung Galaxy Tablets, Cell Phones, Laptops and Tablets Charged and have your 3G and 4G Internet Ready and Stay Indoors and Don't Go Outside and Order your Food from your Local Restaurant and Stay away from the Beaches and Don't Go Near the Shores and it will Bring Big Waves Crashing the Shores and Beaches in Taiwan and Have your Flashlights, Medical Kits, Emergency Kits, Candles, Crank Up Radio, Extra Batteries, Generators, Extra Batteries and Battery Operated Lanterns Ready and Buy Extra Bottled Water Before the Typhoon Chan Hom Hits Taiwan on Friday July 10, 2015 and if you have anybody living in Taiwan Especially in Taipei Be Prepared for Typhoon Chan Hom on Friday July 10, 2015 Take Care and Stay Safe and Don't Get Caught in the Typhoon Stay Dry and Be Safe.Click image for larger version. BUYSOUNDTRAX Records presents the original motion picture soundtrack for RELENTLESS JUSTICE, featuring music composed by Chuck Cirino (CHOPPING MALL, DEATHSTALKER II, RETURN OF SWAMP THING) for the 2014 action film written and directed by David A. Prior, starring Leilani Sarrele (BASIC INSTINCT), Mimi Michaels, Vernon Wells (THE ROAD WARRIOR, COMMANDO), Lisa Langlois, Eric Roberts (THE POPE OF GREENWICH VILLAGE, RUNAWAY TRAIN), Sherrie Rose, Ted Prior and Mark Rolston (THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION, ALIENS). Former Australian Intelligence operative Victoria De Vries (Leilani Sarelle) lives a quiet life in suburban America where she raises her only daughter and trains fighters in her own M.M.A. gym. But when her daughter (Mimi Michaels) goes on a camping trip with her boyfriend and fails to check in, Victoria suspects foul play and is forced back into action. Arriving in a small town close to where her daughter was expecting to make camp, Victoria encounters resistance and indifference as she tries to retrace her daughter’s steps. After being falsely detained by the town sheriff, she is reunited with her daughter and uncovers the town’s best kept secret. It would seem that a handful of people, including the Mayor (Vernon G. Wells) and his girlfriend (Lisa Langlois) and the sheriff (David Campbell) along with a handful of other townies have a rather strange hobby. They like to hunt people for sport. And they’ve become rather good at it. But when it comes down to hunting Victoria, they need help and so they bring in another former Intelligence operative, Joe Mangine (Mark Rolston) to balance the scales for them. But this may not be enough because, for Victoria, the only justice she knows is Relentless Justice. Chuck Cirino did not start his career as a composer, but rather as a programmer in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania for a Public Access cable TV station, where he learned how to create TV shows by himself, without a crew. In his spare time, he experimented with the station’s video equipment and created a series of genre productions that allowed him the opportunity to learn how to incorporate special effects into his work. After relocating to California, Cirino transitioned into directing high-end special effects television commercials. His first work as composer was for the 1980 cult film GYPSY ANGELS, which starred Vanna White and Richard Roundtree. In the late-1980s Chuck began scoring films for Roger Corman’s New Horizon Pictures. He recorded musical soundtracks for many action, horror, science fiction and drama films through the mid-1990s.
To date Chuck has composed and recorded over 60 feature film scores, two TV series and a several web series. He scored such retro epics as Tracy Lord’s “Not of the Earth”, Heather Locklear’s “The Return of Swamp Thing” and the 1980s VHS monster hit “Chopping Mall”. Chuck now scores contemporary films for Syfy, Cinetel Films, Insight Films and many independent film producers. RELENTLESS JUSTICE is a limited edition of 1000 units. As a special offer, the first 100 people to order the package from the record label’s website will have their copy autographed by the composer at no additional charge.SEATTLE— It seemed a straightforward case: A man with a string of convictions and a reputation as a drug dealer was going on trial in Montana for distributing a small amount of marijuana found in his home—if only the court could find jurors willing to send someone to jail for selling a few marijuana buds. The problem began during jury selection this month in Missoula, when a potential juror said she would have a “real problem” convicting someone for selling such a small amount. But she would follow the law if she had to, she said.
Marijuana sits on a table during a demonstration on July 15, 2010. ( Toronto Star / Darren Calabrese )
A woman behind her was adamant. “I can’t do it,” she said, prompting Judge Robert L. Deschamps III to excuse her. Another juror raised a hand, the judge recalled, “and said, ‘I was convicted of marijuana possession a few years ago, and it ruined my life.’ “ Excused. “Then one of the people in the jury box said, ‘Tell me, how much marijuana are we talking about?... If it was a pound or a truckload or something like that, OK, but I’m not going to convict someone of a sale with two or three buds,’ “ the judge said. “And at that point, four or five additional jurors spontaneously raised their hands and said, ‘Me, too.’ “ By that time, Deschamps knew he had a jury problem.
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“I was thinking, maybe I’ll have to call a mistrial,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of citizens obviously that are not willing to hold people accountable for sales in small amounts, or at least have some deep misgivings about it. And I think if I excuse a quarter or a third of a jury panel just to get people who are willing to convict, is that really a fair representation of the community? I mean, people are supposed to be tried by a jury of their peers.” The Missoula court’s dilemma was unusual, yet it reflects a phenomenon that prosecutors say they are increasingly mindful of as marijuana use wins growing legal and public tolerance: Some jurors may be reluctant to convict for an offense many people no longer regard as serious. “It’s not on a level where it’s become a problem. But we’ll hear, ‘I think marijuana should be legal, I’m not going to follow the law,’ “ said Mark Lindquist, prosecuting attorney in Pierce County, Wash. “We tell them, ‘We’re not here to debate the laws. We’re here to decide whether or not somebody broke the law.’ “ Twelve states plus the District of Columbia have decriminalized possession of small quantities of marijuana. Led by California in 1996, 17 states have laws that allow medical use of marijuana. But federal authorities have in the past continued to pursue prosecutions in those states, prompting increasing calls among drug-law reform advocates for juries to simply follow their consciences and refuse to convict—a legal concept, widely used during Prohibition and in the Jim Crow-era South, known as jury nullification.
“This is one of the first times in a number of years there’s a general discussion around this powerful but rarely used jury tool,” said Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. “But going back 20 years plus, there’s been some tumult in the courts where the issue is cannabis and the person being prosecuted wants to turn to the jury and say, ‘Yes, I am guilty, and here’s why.’ “ The phenomenon is difficult to measure, St. Pierre and several others said, because the term jury nullification is rarely invoked; defendants with substantial evidence against them are simply acquitted, or juries deadlock.
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“Sometimes, we’re not told what the reason was, whether it was nullification or they just had a factual question about the case, we just don’t know,” said Ian Goodhew, deputy chief of staff for the King County prosecutor’s office in Seattle. “Some (prospective) jurors will honestly tell us that they don’t think they can follow the law because they think the law’s wrong and should be changed. At that point, we ask the judge to consider dismissing them,” he said. “As attitudes change more and more, that’s a problem we could face in trying cases to a jury. You could have that issue trying before a judge, too, if a judge has a strong opinion on the validity and necessity of those kinds of laws.” St. Pierre said he is convinced that is what happened in the case of Northern California pot activist Ed Rosenthal, whose conviction on federal charges in 2003 prompted prosecutors to seek a 61/2-year sentence. Rosenthal instead was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer to a single day—in part reflecting the |
,105 in 2000, according to the report. Britain has most of them -- 836,524, up from 452,144 in 2000.
Canada now has 602,144 people from India, an increase from 319,138 in 2000. Australia showed a huge jump of more than four times, from 90,719 people from India in 2000 to 408,880 now.
In the current political climate, “migration has become a toxic” topic, said Leonard Doyle, the spokesperson for International Migration Organisation’s Director-General William Lacy Swing.
As a result migrating is a problem for those outside the “global elite” made up professionals who can move easily to other countries, he said. Therefore, he added, there was need for policies to take care of the migrants who do not fall in that category.
First Published: Dec 19, 2017 10:17 ISTThe death of research scientist Anita Kurmann, who was struck and killed at a Back Bay intersection, is the latest sobering reminder that creating a safe city for cyclists involves more than painting white lines for bike lanes on congested Boston streets.
Although public discussion around sustainable transportation tends to focus primarily on automobile traffic and the MBTA and commuter rail systems, urban planners and city and state officials should accelerate their efforts to factor in the swelling ranks of bicycle commuters as they build and repair the region’s streets and parkways.
Since late Mayor Tom Menino launched a bike initiative with great fanfare in 2007, scores of bike lanes have been designated in Boston. But those painted lines are merely a beginning, and sometimes impart a false sense of security, creating confusion as parked cars, buses, and cyclists vie for the same turf. The city should follow the lead of Washington, Philadelphia, and Minneapolis — all of which are on Time’s list of the best cities for biking to work — and look well beyond bike lanes.
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The new cycle track planned for the busy section of Commonwealth Avenue that runs through the Boston University campus offers one promising model: The track will be on raised pavement, separate from cars and pedestrians alike. It also will incorporate innovative intersection design that improves the line of sight for pedestrians, drivers, and cyclists, according to James Gillooly, the city’s deputy transportation commissioner. Although the track, which will be built with federal and state funding, will only extend six-tenths of a mile, it is a crucial buffer on a crowded street traversed by more than 30,000 cars a day. Another project in the works, called Connect Historic Boston, will result in a two-mile-long cycle track that links the North End and Beacon Hill.
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The most promising effort by far, however, is the city’s Vision Zero initiative, which will work to identify the most dangerous intersections. That program is commendable for its focus on big data and its long-term scope. Mayor Marty Walsh’s office is developing themes for the city’s Imagine Boston 2030 project, which includes transportation and accessibility. Cycling should be an important part of that effort, and planners would do well to include Stefanie Seskin, who starts next week as the city’s transportation director responsible for enhancing bike infrastructure. In recent years, there were 14 collisions involving cyclists near the site where Kurmann lost her life; aggressive steps need to be taken to make conditions safer not just for this intersection, but for every major street and intersection in the city.
Related:
• Derrick Z. Jackson: Seattle’s Second Ave. should inspire Comm. Ave. plans
• 2014 | Editorial: Bike tragedy shows need for new safety measures
• Editorial: Comm. Ave. redesign lacks adequate plans for bikes
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• Brainiac: How bike snobs ended Boston’s first cycling boomA young boy has survived a motorbike accident that killed his father north-west of Sydney, police say.
The pair were riding along Putty Road in Mellong when they crashed on Sunday morning.
The father, aged in his mid-30s, died at the scene while his son, 12, was taken to The Children's Hospital at Westmead with serious hip and leg injuries.
On Sunday night he was in a serious but stable condition.
The pair were at the front of a group of motorcyclists out for a morning ride when they crashed.
Putty Road was closed for several hours as an investigation into the cause got underway.
There have been several fatal crashes on Putty Road at Mellong in recent years - including in November 2011 when two motorcyclists died after hitting a ute.
AAPIf the best ability is availability, then Moise Fokou has won the Tennessee Titans middle linebacker, says head coach Mike Munchak.
Fokou, signed as an unrestricted free agent from the Indianapolis Colts, has been running with the first team all through OTAs, mini-camp and all but one day of training camp. On that one day, incumbent Colin McCarthy ran with the first group and injured his hamstring. He hasn't practiced since.
“Right now, (Fokou is) our starter, unless something changes between now and three weeks. I don't know what's gonna go on with Colin. But right now, he would be our starter. I don't know if Colin will be practicing this week, and next week. It all depends on how that plays out,” Munchak said. “I'd like him to play. I would think he would want to play too. I think if he's healthy enough you want to get him on the field.”
McCarthy missed nine games last year with a high ankle sprain and then a concussion. It sounds as if McCarthy has nearly waited too late to be the starter for the opener, rendering the competition moot.
“You want to get him on the field. I think it helps the players to get some playing time in, especially guys who haven't done anything in so long, where all of a sudden, you're in a game and things are going pretty fast,” Munchak said. “It takes awhile. I don't care who you are. If you haven't played in a while, and you step into Pittsburgh, and you're gonna play well – that's not easy to do.”
It sounds as if Fokou has won the job by default.
“He's the best linebacker that's lined up and practiced everyday,” Munchak said.DC and Warner Bros. hit it big with “Wonder Woman,” arguably the first big hit in its ambitious extended universe based on DC Comics characters. However, for every critical hit, there is always at least one voice of dissent.
Director James Cameron, who is currently working on a slew of “Avatar” sequels and another “Titanic” TV special, wasn’t as impressed as most people with “Wonder Woman.” In his opinion, it was over-hyped and served to do the opposite of forwarding the cause of women in Hollywood.
“All of the self-congratulatory back-patting Hollywood’s been doing over Wonder Woman has been so misguided," Cameron said in an interview with The Guardian. "She’s an objectified icon, and it’s just male Hollywood doing the same old thing! I’m not saying I didn’t like the movie but, to me, it’s a step backwards."
The director went on to explain that he believes one of his popular protagonists, Sarah Connor from the “Terminator” franchise, sets a better example for female leading characters in movies.
“Sarah Connor was not a beauty icon. She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit,” he said. “And to me, [the benefit of characters like Sarah] is so obvious. I mean, half the audience is female!”
Despite how Cameron feels about “Wonder Woman,” it was a hit amongst viewers and critics alike, scoring an impressive box office outing of more than $400 million domestically, according to Box Office Mojo. This figure shatters the other installments in the DCEU. Recently, The Hollywood Reporter notes that director Patty Jenkins addressed the same issue of women in Hollywood as well.
"I hope the success of the film will lead to change and lead to other people getting opportunities," Jenkins told reporters. “I hope women become a diverse, easy hire for all sorts of jobs in the future.”The tarot cards hold special meanings, warnings, characteristics and actions that may need to be taken in order to change your course in life. Keep in mind that some aspects are changeable and some are not. It is all up to you. With the Ace of Wands as the tarot card for the week of 5-18-14, this might be the week of some temporary delays. Don’t be surprised if some of the best laid plans are cancelled. It also may be the start of a new venture or even some unexpected excitement that may bring you toward a new career path. Most important, you must remember to keep an open mind and heart concerning all aspects of your life. This might also be a good time to reflect on your attitudes of late and try to be as generous and considerate as you can be toward others. If you are planning a pregnancy, now is the time to start taking care and control of your health. This card brings a message that it is time to embrace your spirituality.
UPRIGHT:
The Ace of Wands, Minor Arcana, is the card of actions and energy. Intuition is high. Ideas with ambition and hard work create a reality. Ambition is your driving force. Possible opportunities are in front of you. You need to figure out how to go forward. It can also represent family, start of a new venture, unexpected inheritance, a new path in life and a birth.
REVERSED:
There is a blockage in clarity and in defining goals. You may be overloaded with current obligations. There are circumstances getting in the way of starting a new project. Misunderstandings with your partner.
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Join our FB Fan page!While we wait for the next major git release which will bring about some serious updates let’s peel off the notes of the latest point release: 1.8.5 is upon us!
Here is what I could dig from the release notes that was interesting to me in my role of average git user.
Oh and if you haven’t seen them yet check out my earlier notes on releases 1.8.2, 1.8.3 and 1.8.4.
Customary installation pointers
It is customary for me to provide a few pointers for the upgrade, with caveats and reminders that package managers in some cases might delay the distribution; that is out of my hands. In any case, here are some painless instructions to upgrade:
Type brew update && brew upgrade git if you use homebrew on OSX.
if you use homebrew on OSX. Use a magic apt trick if on Ubuntu based distributions (I leave other distributions as an exercise for the reader).
Simply run the new installer if on Windows (the Windows port sometimes lags a bit behind so please be patient if you can’t find it right away).
HEAD new alias is finally live
This had been cooking for a while and it’s finally in: HEAD has a new alias, instead of typing four capital letters you can say “@” now, e.g. “git log @“.
Some rebase polish
Rebase saw some polish:
In the operations sheet of the –interactive rebase the list of commit ids will now conform to the core.abbrev length ( core.abbrev is the configuration that holds how long the abbreviated hashes of the commits should be, the default being 7 ).
the list of commit ids will now conform to the length ( is the configuration that holds how long the abbreviated hashes of the commits should be, the default being ). You can now customize if git pull –rebase should use the default flattening or preserve merges by modifying setting pull.rebase to preserve. For more details on what this and rebase –preserve-merges do, please check Stack Overflow’s answer.
Tiny status improvements
Varied improvements to git status have been included in this release:
It no longer prints dirty status information for submodules for which submodule.$name.ignore is set to “all”.
During a cherry-pick it shows what original commit is being picked.
it shows what original commit is being picked. It will not spit out its output prepended by # comment markers. If you require scripts to parse the output of git status you should now update them to use git status –porcelain.
comment markers. If you require scripts to parse the output of you should now update them to use. git status and git branch -v -v now distinguish among a branch that does not build on any other branch, a branch that is in sync with the branch it builds on, and a branch that is configured to build on some other branch that no longer exists.
Diff for “all-but” classes
git diff –diff-filter could already filter several classes of changes:
--diff-filter=[(A|C|D|M|R|T|U|X|B)...[*]] Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Deleted (D), Modified (M), Renamed (R), have their type (i.e. regular file, symlink, submodule,...) changed (T), are Unmerged (U), are Unknown (X), or have had their pairing Broken (B). Any combination of the filter characters (including none) can be used. When * (All-or-none) is added to the combination, all paths are selected if there is any file that matches other criteria in the comparison; if there is no file that matches other criteria, nothing is selected.
It can can now take lowercase letters to mean show everything but these classes.
HTTP variables per site
The “http.*” variables can now be specified per URL that the configuration applies. For example the following would flip http.sslVerify off only when talking to that specified site: [http] sslVerify = true [http "https://weak.example.com/"] sslVerify = false
Welcome submodule awareness on move
Submodule support has been steadily improving with every release, this time git gains the ability to relocate submodules:
'git mv A B' when moving a submodule A has been taught to relocate its working tree and to adjust the paths in the.gitmodules file.
Performance, Internal Implementation, etc.
The HTTP transport will try to use TCP keepalive when able.
git repack is now written in C.
Other tidbits
Other interesting tidbits directly from the release notes:
git whatchanged deprecated but not removed. It’s been made less prominent in the general part of the documentation.
deprecated but not removed. It’s been made less prominent in the general part of the documentation. git cherry-pick now understands git cherry-pick – to pick from the previous branch.
now understands to pick from the previous branch. xdg-open can be used as a browser backend for git web-browse (hence to show git help -w output), when available.
(hence to show output), when available. Just like make -C, git -C … tells Git to go there before doing anything else.
, tells Git to go there before doing anything else. Make foo^{tag} to peel a tag to itself, i.e. no-op., and fail if “foo” is not a tag. git rev-parse –verify v1.0^{tag} would be a more convenient way to say test $(git cat-file -t v1.0) = tag.
to peel a tag to itself, i.e. no-op., and fail if “foo” is not a tag. would be a more convenient way to say. git push –no-thin actually disables the “thin pack transfer” optimization.
actually disables the “thin pack transfer” optimization. Magic pathspecs like “:(icase)makefile” that matches both Makefile and makefile and “:(glob)foo/**/bar” that matches “bar” in “foo” and any subdirectory of “foo” can be used in more places.
git blame can now take more than one -L option to discover the origin of multiple blocks of the lines.
can now take more than one -L option to discover the origin of multiple blocks of the lines. The http transport clients can optionally ask to save cookies with http.savecookies configuration variable.
git fetch (hence “git pull” as well) learned to check fetch.prune and remote.*.prune configuration variables and to behave as if the –prune command line option was given.
That’s it for now. Let me know if you find this update useful and stay tuned for more. Follow me @durdn for more DVCS rocking.[1] A male brothel, illustration by La prostitution contemporaine, 1884, pg. 384, Plate VII. Molly-houses were often considered as brothels in legal proceedings.A male brothel, illustration by Léon Choubrac (known also as Hope), included in Léo Taxil's book, 1884, pg. 384, Plate VII.
Molly-house was a term used in 18th- and 19th-century England for a meeting place for homosexual men. These meeting places were generally taverns, public houses, coffeehouses[2] or even private rooms[3] where men could either socialize or meet possible sexual partners.
Even if these clubs tended to display a heavy sexual connotation, some critics are reluctant to classify them as brothels. Rictor Norton, for example, argues that the regular customers could have been in fact mutual friends, at least at the beginning, since consistent evidence concerning male prostitution seems to be insufficient until the 1780s.[3][4] At that time homosexual sexual activities were illegal and were heavily prosecuted; they remained capital offences until 1861.[5] In this context, particularly during the 1720s, molly-houses came to be the scenes of raids and arrests,[2] and their customers the ideal target for blackmailers.[6]
Molly-houses can be considered a precursor to some types of contemporary meeting places for the gay community.[2][7]
Etymology [ edit ]
The word molly (also spelt as molley, mollie, mally) is a pet-form of the female forename Mary, and had two main connotations in 18th century English.[8] The first one is close to the word moll, designating a lower-class girl or woman, occasionally a prostitute. The second one is classified as slang, defining an effeminate, usually homosexual, male.[8][9][10] Along with the possible perception of intrinsic female features deriving from the association with the name Mary, another possible origin of this denomination for a homosexual man could be found in the Latin form mollis, indicating the supposed passive-effeminate partner in male homosexual relationships.[11] In a 1762 Swedish/English dictionary by Jacob Serenius and in a 1767 French/English dictionary by Thomas Nugent the word was present, but simply defined a sodomite, without effeminate connotations.[12]
Other uses of the word can be seen in the verb to molly (to have a homosexual intercourse),[13] in the expressions mollycot (a British regional expression indicating man interested in activities traditionally associated with women)[14] and Miss Molly[15] (referring to an effeminate or homosexual male).
History [ edit ]
A parodic cartoon depicting male and female crossdressing,c. 1780, after a work by John Collet
Gender issues in 18th century London [ edit ]
According to several critics, the English society of the time was giving an increasing importance to the concepts of family and household as fundamental units for reproduction, subsistence and interaction between generations:[16] in this context, male and female roles evolved into more static forms. Men were associated with an active, assertive role both in sexual behaviour and in managing the household,[17] while women were defined in terms of their maternal functions,[18] contrarily to a tradition common at the start of the century, attributing them features related to lustfulness and aggressiveness in sexual matters.[16] It is possible to see that the notion of molly-house seems to be deeply rooted in the developing of a distinctive identity according to gender and sexual orientation, a peculiar social phenomenon considered crucial by some critics in gender studies.[17][19][20][21]
As stated by Robert Shoemaker,... any activity (such as homosexual intercourse), in which [men] could be seen as acting passively was further marginalised.
In fact, some of the activities popular among the homosexual community, that were seemingly taking place in molly-houses (by nature, marginalised meeting places), were often associated both to female roles and to a family environment (i.e. cross-dressing, marriage and mock birth rituals, as described in a satire work of the time, Edward Ward's Satyrical Reflections on Clubs, Chapter XXV Of the Mollies Club).[22]
Molly-houses and the homosexual subculture in London [ edit ]
As sodomy was a capital offense, the organisation of homosexual men and their activities had to be a crucial point, in order to keep the community as safe as possible from prosecution. As a consequence, molly districts seemed to appear, and eventually grow, in areas in which their business could be acknowledged and tolerated at the same time: such connivance could be often found in areas with a high rate of criminal acts such as theft and prostitution.[23]
An editorial in The London Journal singled out a number of areas:[23]
The presence of pillories punishing sodomitical offenses, ironically, identified the sites where such acts frequently took place. Pillories were often organised near the crime locations attributed to the accused.[23]
Molly-houses could be considered the most organised phenomenon of London 18th century homosexual subculture.[24] They were enclosed, private spaces gathering individuals with a common purpose, that is to say, socializing and seeking pleasure with partners of the same sex.
Law enforcement and sources of information [ edit ]
Before 1533, the "unnatural sin" (also defined "detestable crime" in trial records[25]) of sodomy or buggery, (a specific common law offence, meaning anal intercourse between a man and another man or woman, or anal or vaginal intercourse with a beast – in this way encompassing both sodomy and bestiality) was dealt with by the ecclesiastical courts. From that year however, the country's first civil sodomy law was introduced as An Acte for the punishment of the vice of Buggerie (Buggery Act 1533), and also criminal courts could prosecute individuals accused of such "crime".[26] According to the Old Bailey Online Proceedings site:[27]
In order to obtain a conviction, it was necessary to prove that both penetration and ejaculation had occurred, and two witnesses were required to prove the crime. Both the "active" and "passive" partner could be found guilty of this offence. But due to the difficulty of proving this actual penetration and ejaculation many men were prosecuted with the reduced charge of assault with sodomitical intent.
From the late 1690s to the early 1710s, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners (organizations born after the Revolution in 1688, seeking to eliminate immorality and disrespect for religion from public life)[28] actively pursued prostitutes, Sabbath breakers and also homosexual men, through the means of spies and provocateurs to dismantle molly houses and prosecute individuals. In the 1720s and 30s thief-takers like Charles Hitchen and Jonathan Wild stimulated the Societies' activities. The peak of this wave of prosecution is to be recognized in the late 1720s with a raid on the most famous molly house, Mother Clap's.[25] According to Rictor Norton:[24]
“ The organized molly subculture was effectively suppressed by the mid-1730s. However, molly houses began to reappear again after 1750. ”
Molly-houses at that time were evidently and intrinsically related to since they gathered sodomites being a capital offence, so most of the information concerning molly-houses and the community around them is available through an indirect form, that is, mostly through newspaper reports and the accounts given during the Old Bailey trials relating to sexual offences, such as sodomy, assault with sodomitical intent and keeping a brothel, or sometimes the ones related to theft cases (for example, in cases with men caught stealing during a sexual encounter).[25][29][30]
Other important sources are satires and pamphlets, such as An Answer To A Late Insolent Libel by Jonathan Wild, Edward Ward's Satyrical Reflections on Clubs, Chapter XXV Of the Mollies Club,[31] John Dunton's The He-Strumpets. A Satyr on the Sodomite-Club,[32] James Dalton's A Genuine Narrative of all the Street Robberies Committed since October last and as well as other works.
Later in the eighteenth century, waves of prosecutions can be identified in the 1750s and 1770s.[25] However most of the details concerning sexual offences trials came to be more and more rare due to an increasing need of a strait-laced morality, but fraud and extortion cases seemed to continue in giving retail at length detailed accounts of alleged sexual encounters between men.[25]
Activities [ edit ]
The adoption of specific codes and rituals in relating to each other seemed to be another feature allowing cohesion in the group. These peculiarities were often described in trials and libels, often to be put on public display and disapproval. Some of the uses seemed to be:
the use of Female Dialect, and the assumption of female names, the Maiden Name tradition:[33] the controversial figure of Charles Hitchen (alternative spelling: Hitchin) member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, notable thief-taker, former Under City Marshal in London, was described as a regular in molly-houses according to a libel written by Jonathan Wild and also to be referred by using female names.[34]
the Marshal was complimented by the Company with the Titles of Madam and Ladyship.
From James Dalton's A Genuine Narrative of all the Street Robberies Committed since October last:[35]
Their chief Names are as follows. Ellinor Roden, China Mary, Flying Horse Moll, Smal Coal Mary, Johannah the Ox-cheek Woman, Tub Nan,' Sukey Pisquill, Garter Mary, Hardward Nan, Prety Criss, a Soldier of the 2d Regiment, Aunt England, a noted Soap Boyler, Pomegranate Molly, Orange Mary, an Orange Merchant near London-Bridge,'Old Fish Hannah,'Kate Hutton an old Man that never wears a Shirt, Thumbs and Waste Jenny, Queen Irons, alias Pippin Mary, Hanover Kate, spouse to Pippin Mary,Miss Kitten (Oviat), Rose Gudger, 'Black Moll, &c.
They could take on a female persona, have a female name, and affect feminine mannerisms and speech. Again from Jonathan Wild:
The men calling one another my Dear, and hugging, kissing, and tickling each other, as if they were a Mixture of wanton Males and Females, and assuming effeminate Voices and Airs[34]
Cross-dressing, from Jonathan Wild: At the expected Time several of the sporting Youngsters were seized in Women's Apparel, and convey'd to the Compter. Next Morning they were carried before the Lord-Mayor in the same Dress they were taken in. Some were compleatly rigg'd in Gowns, Petticoats, Head-cloths, fine lac'd Shoes, furbelow'd Scarves and Marks; some had Riding-hoods; some were dressed like Milk-Maids, others like Shepheardesses with green Hats, Waistcoats and Petticoats; and others had their Faces patch'd and painted, and wore very extensive Hoop-petticoats, which had been very lately introduced. [34]
Marriage ceremonies: often a euphemism for sexual intercourse but sometimes actual ceremonies between a Mollie and his male lover, enacted to symbolise their partnership and commitment to each other. [36]
"Mock-birth" rituals: during which a man dressed in a nightgown pretended to be a woman giving birth to a baby assisted by fellow Mollies as "midwives" — a fact confirmed by other sources including trials.This ritual almost certainly originated as a couvade, designated to collectively relieve the extreme stress this particular social group was forced to live under. The ceremonies described by Ned Ward took place in specific periods called "Festival Nights", which other sources indicate took place towards the end of December.[22]
Mother Clap's molly-house [ edit ]
Field Lane, Holborn, the location of Mother Clap's molly-house on the left side of the picture, Rocque Map of London, 1746.
The most known molly-house in 18th century London was the one owned by Mother Clap, which had been open from 1724 until 1726, when a raid sustained by the Societies for the Reformation of Manners had it dismantled. It was located in Field Lane, near to another tavern The Bunch of Grapes in Holborn, a suburban parish of Middlesex a short distance from the City of London.[37][38] This area came to be renowned as a rookery[39] in the next decades, and described as a sort of distinct town, or district calculated for the reception of the darkest and most dangerous enemies to society; in which when pursued for the commission of crimes they easily conceal themselves and readily escape.[40] A literary example can be interpreted as a sort of confirmation of the reputation of this lane, since Charles Dickens placed here Fagin's den, an old Jewish man earning a living as a fence, in his 1837 novel Oliver Twist.
This peculiar homosexual meeting place, however, became well known to the public during the 1720s through the trial of its keeper, Margaret Clap, indicted for keeping a disorderly house and for encouraging her customers to commit sodomy;[41] and, particularly, through the account given by an agent provocateur, Samuel Stevens.[28]
On Sunday Night the 14th of November. I went to the Prisoners House in Field-Lane, Holbourn. I found near Men Fifty there, making Love to one another as they call'd it. Sometimes they'd sit in one anothers Laps, use their Hands indecently Dance and make Curtsies and mimick the Language of Women - O Sir! - Pray Sir! - Dear Sir! Lord how can ye serve me so! - Ah ye little dear Toad! Then they'd go by Couples, into a Room on the same Floor to be marry'd as they call'd it. The Door at that Room was kept by - Ecclestone to prevent any body from balking their Diversions.[41]
She and half a dozen of her customers were also put into the pillory, fined, and imprisoned for periods of up to two years. Three of her customers were hanged for sodomy: Gabriel Lawrence, a 43-year-old milkman; William Griffin, a 43 year old furniture upholsterer; and Thomas Wright, who was a molly house keeper.[37]
Trials and personalities related to molly-houses [ edit ]
In the eighteenth century according to the Old Bailey Proceedings, only two individuals were formally arrested for keeping a molly-house: Margaret Clap and Julius Cesar Taylor[42] but several accused of sodomitical practices seems to be reported as brothel keepers as well (i.e. Thomas Wright).
On 9 May 1726, three men (Gabriel Lawrence, William Griffin, and Thomas Wright) were hanged at Tyburn for buggery following a raid of Margaret Clap's molly-house. Their trials are fundamental since they provide important details for the descriptions of the gay community surroundings. On 12 April 1727 Charles Hitchin was convicted of assault with sodomitical intent.[43][44]
In popular culture [ edit ]
References and representations of molly-houses and gay subculture during the 18th and the 19th century London can be found in several contemporary productions.
TV series
2008: Episode 2 of the Channel 4 series City of Vice grants molly-house and mollies a predominant role.
grants molly-house and mollies a predominant role. 2010: Episode 2 of the second series of Garrow's Law, a BBC production set in and around London's Old Bailey courthouse, depicts legal issues surrounding gay life in the 18th century, including a molly-house in its settings.
, a BBC production set in and around London's Old Bailey courthouse, depicts legal issues surrounding gay life in the 18th century, including a molly-house in its settings. 2013: Episode 2 of the NBC horror drama Dracula features a molly-house.
features a molly-house. 2013: A molly-house appears in episode 3 of the first series of the BBC's Ripper Street, set in London's Whitechapel area in 1889.
, set in London's Whitechapel area in 1889. 2017: A molly-house and related characters feature heavily in Taboo.
. 2018: Several molly-houses (referred to as boy brothels within the series) and multiple characters are one focal point of The Alienist set in 1896 New York City.
Theatre
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
NotesThis article first appeared on the Dorf on Law site.
It was apparently too much to hope that Hillary Clinton would, in defeat, be treated with the respect that she was denied during the campaign – or, more accurately, during her entire career.
What is more depressing is that even some of her most prominent supposed admirers still enjoy piling on when Clinton is being attacked.
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When Clinton kept herself out of the public eye after the election, she was mocked for "wandering in the woods" and was the target of other smart-alecky criticisms from avowedly liberal comedians and commentators.
Now that she has broken her silence and made some public appearances, we are being reminded of the double standards and outright nastiness that has been aimed at Clinton for decades.
Last week, Clinton gave an extended interview to the journalist Christiane Amanpour at the 9th Annual Women for Women International Conference. (A transcript is available here.) It was predictable that Amanpour would ask about the election, and it was just as predictable that anything Clinton said on that subject would be featured in sound bites across the media landscape.
What I did not predict — perhaps because, after all these years, I have still not given up hope that liberals will stop being so self-defeating – is that Clinton would immediately be bashed by supposedly sympathetic commentators.
Michael Loccisano/Getty
I make no claim to having systematically surveyed the range of responses to Clinton's interview. A tiny bit of online searching confirmed that the right-wing sites went nuts, engaging in what must have felt like a greatest hits reunion concert for their favorite attack lines.
No surprise there. After all, even at a Senate subcommittee hearing about Russian interference in the election, which was held on Monday of this week, Republican primary runner-up Ted Cruz decided to ask a witness about Clinton's use of a private email server. A collective rolling of the eyes is the only plausible response.
Here, I will focus on responses to the interview from two Clinton-friendly precincts, because both amply demonstrate that anti-Clinton presumptions and biases are alive and well. On "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah," the host devoted an eight-minute segment to the Clinton interview, while the editorial board of The New York Times devoted a lead editorial to scolding Clinton for supposedly undignified behavior.
To get a sense of the petty, tut-tutting nature of the complaints about Clinton's supposedly unseemly attitude, consider that the editors of The Times decided that it was worth writing this: "Her insights were strained by insinuations against the president, whom she still refers to as'my opponent.'" Bad Hillary!
Before I go further, it is worth recalling just how restrained Clinton had been during the campaign. She coolly crushed Trump in all three debates, even though he spent a great deal of time trying to rattle her with references to Bill Clinton's infidelities, including bringing his accusers to one of the debates.
Throughout the campaign, Clinton was able to act like an adult in the face of the childish, hateful antics of an avowed sexual predator who re-tweeted neo-Nazi messages and who mocked the very idea that being prepared and qualified should mean something.
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Before the campaign began, I was not a fan of Clinton, based on her history of center-right policy views. I expected to support her if she became the Democratic nominee (given how far around the bend the Republican Party has gone), but I never expected to feel enthusiastic about it.
Much to my surprise, however, both on policy substance (with a few exceptions) and on everything that can be called style (including her almost supernatural ability to remain calm under pressure), she had won me over long before the campaign's end.
I was not surprised that Monday morning quarterbacking began immediately following the election. That is part of any campaign. What amazed me, however, was that Clinton was faulted for everything that she did and did not do, and I never saw any of her critics acknowledge that the real-time decisions that she made might have been smart at least as an ex ante matter.
So, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, people -- most definitely including liberals -- were quickly faulting Clinton for everything under the sun. One prominent line of attack was that she had taken for granted the post-industrial states that ultimately cost her the election, with hair's-breadth margins in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin providing Trump's majority in the Electoral College despite his big loss in the popular vote.
For example, some media outlets reported on the mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, who claimed to have told the Clinton campaign that they should be worried by what he was supposedly seeing "on the ground" in his state.
I have no doubt that there were people such as that mayor trying to get the attention of the Clinton campaign. I also have no doubt that it is extremely difficult to determine when such people are merely crying for more attention as opposed to the times when they have something important to say. I suspect that campaigns receive calls all the time saying, "You need to pay more attention to us."
But maybe the difference between what counts as a good campaign and a bad campaign is that the professionals running it know how to separate the wheat from the chaff |
range of services such as, health and parenting support in joined-up way to ensure that the needs of children and families are met. Issues can be picked up early and parents can be helped to support their children's development and learning."
NCB chief executive Dr Hilary Emery said cuts to local authority services such as play facilities, support for disabled children and youth services, are all painting a picture of children as the biggest losers of the recession.
Melian Mansfield, chairwoman of the Early Childhood Forum, said: "The emerging evidence that children's centres are closing or drastically reducing their services because of the cuts is extremely worrying, as families will lose the direct access to specialist health, education and safeguarding services and opportunities for early intervention are lost."The Irish Farmers’ Association has said it wants to remind people a reward of €10,000 is being offered for “significant” information on the theft of cattle and sheep – a serious issue that affects all parts of Ireland.
Up to 60 sheep, mainly ewes, have been stolen on Mount Brandon in Co Kerry and the sheep were discovered missing after farmers Mikey Joe O’Shea and Richie Griffin brought the flocks down for the lambing season.
One of those farmers is also offering a reward of up to €2,000 for information on the thefts.
Mr O’Shea told RTÉ News he believed the thefts of at least 45 of his sheep were carried out under “a full moon” while Mr Griffin said whoever took his 10 sheep knew what they were doing and were organised. With the aid of a good sheepdog, it was easy to steal sheep, he said.
Gardaí in Dingle are investigating and have sent a report to the Department of Agriculture.
Meanwhile, the Cork Southwest TD Jim Daly (FG) has posted on Facebook warning farmers in his area to be alert.
There had been three recent reports from Skibbereen, Schull and Ballydehob of calves being stolen, Mr Daly said.
Crimestoppers and Garda
A spokeswoman for the IFA said the joint campaign by Crimestoppers, the IFA and the Garda to combat livestock theft launched last year and was still in operation.
No one had yet availed of the award money, which will be given on information leading to conviction.
“Information can be given anonymously to the Crimestoppers confidential telephone service by calling 1800-250025. Alternatively, information can be provided to your local Garda station,” the IFA said in a statement.
Theft of both cattle and sheep affects all regions of Ireland, causing significant problems for the farmers who fall victim to the criminals. Apart from the financial loss, the trauma inflicted on farm families leaves them very vulnerable and stressed, the IFA said.Circadian rhythms control when we’re at our peak performance physically and mentally each day, keeping our lives ticking in time with Earth’s day/night cycle. This year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to three American scientists, Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash of Brandeis University and Michael Young of Rockefeller University, for shedding light on how time is measured each day in biological systems, including our own bodies.
From Darwin’s finches on the Galápagos Islands to modern city dwellers, organisms adapt to their environment. Regular 24-hour cycles of day and night on Earth led to the evolution of biological clocks that reside within our cells. These clocks help us unconsciously pick the best time to rest, search for food, or anticipate danger or predation.
The field of modern circadian biology got its start in the 1970s, when geneticist Seymour Benzer and his student Ron Konopka undertook a revolutionary study to track down the genes that encode biological timing in fruit flies. With that gene in their sights, the labs of Hall, Rosbash and Young ushered in the molecular era of circadian biology as they untangled the molecular mechanisms of biological timekeeping.
Why flies?
To get started, Benzer and Konopka performed a simple experiment: tracking when the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster would emerge from its pupal case. This developmental process, called eclosion, served as a powerful tool to study the complicated biological process of circadian rhythms. Because Drosophila pupae emerge only at a specific time of the day, Konopka could measure the timing between rounds of eclosion for different strains of flies and identify those that had a bad clock. By isolating fly strains with timing problems, they hoped to be able to zero in on the relevant genes that controlled this internal clock.
In the end, Konopka found three mutant strains: one that had a short, 19-hour day; one with a long, 28-hour day; and one mutant that appeared to have no clock at all. Using genetic tools, he was able to show that each of the responsible mutations lay remarkably close on the same chromosome, suggesting that they were all located within a single gene, which Benzer and Konopka named period for its apparent control over clock timing.
Then the race was on, and in 1984, two teams finally identified this so-called clock gene period in flies: the labs of Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash working in close collaboration at Brandeis, and Michael Young’s lab at Rockefeller.
With the gene in hand, these groups then aimed to figure out how period fit into a biological clock. The first clue came when Jeffrey Hall and Michael Rosbash discovered that the protein encoded by this gene (called PER) increased during the night and decreased during the day, suggesting that levels of the protein might somehow communicate time information to the rest of the cell.
Biological loops and timers
If you just imagine how a biological clock might best keep track of time over a day, you might jump to a mental picture of an hourglass timer. Sand gradually disappears over time; when all the sand is gone, it could signal the process to begin again. Was PER the substance that kept biological time by gradually changing throughout the day?
One key insight came when Hall and Rosbash reasoned that this PER protein might actually block the activity of the period gene, turning itself off each day. As levels of PER build up over the course of the night, less and less new PER protein would be made. Eventually the protein levels drop and the process starts over again. This is called a negative feedback loop. It’s the same type of biological balancing act that keeps everything from your blood sugar levels to your circadian rhythms in line throughout your body.
This kind of negative feedback system is similar to how a thermostat controls the temperature of a room. If the temperature drops below the set point, the thermostat turns on the heater. When the room gets too toasty, the thermostat turns off the furnace. Here, negative feedback – a buildup of heat – works to control the heater and maintain a constant temperature.
Now imagine having to repeat this process over and over each day with nearly exact timing. Biological clocks use negative feedback from clock proteins like period to turn themselves on and off again each 24 hours. Additional studies in the Young lab identified other key genes – dubbed Timeless and Double-Time – that fit into this puzzle by controlling how PER travels around the cell to turn itself off each day.
Fitting the cogs together into molecular clocks
Work over the last two decades has rounded out a much deeper understanding of circadian rhythms to show how most organisms have clocks based on feedback loops similar to Drosophila. Rosbash’s lab identified part of the PER protein known as the PAS domains that we now find in many clock proteins from fungi and plants to humans. PAS domains help clock proteins like PER pair up with their partners to control the negative feedback loop.
By comparing differences in the structures of PER PAS domains of Drosophila and mice, scientists are now beginning to learn how the protein “cogs” of the molecular clock fit together to tell time. Understanding circadian rhythms at atomic resolution like this allows us to explain how newly identified mutations in PER lead to changes in clock timing and open the door to therapeutics that could harness the power of circadian rhythms to improve human health.
Living with your clock and its natural rhythms
We now have a much greater appreciation for the central role that circadian rhythms play in coordinating our lives with Earth’s day, controlling everything from your metabolism to the timing of sleep. Young’s lab recently identified a prevalent mutation in a human clock gene, cryptochrome 1, that lengthens the cellular clock and makes it difficult to get to bed before midnight. This inherited “night owl” gene is estimated to be pretty common, found in nearly 1 out of 75 of us.
Understanding the powerful regulation of biology by circadian rhythms is beginning to lead to far-reaching changes in policy. For example, rather than arbitrarily forcing our sleep schedules into routines that require early morning wake times, some researchers are showing that adjusting our schedules to fit our natural rhythms may pay off at work and school. This is particularly true for adolescents, who have a natural “night owl” tendancy – delaying school start times by even just one hour can significantly improve academic performance.
The science is now far enough along in our understanding of circadian clocks that researchers are working to optimize work and sleep schedules with our biology in mind. And all these policy innovations are built on the foundation of the Nobel Prize-winning research with those tiny fruit flies.Paul Pogba on how his Manchester United return feels like a homecoming
Paul Pogba joined Manchester United in a world-record transfer fee in the summer and remains one of the game’s most talked about players. But what drives him on and how does it really feel to be back at United? In this wide-ranging Q&A, Pogba revealed all…
Speaking at an exclusive adidas event in London, Pogba claimed it's like he's never been away. "I have United in my heart," he said. "It's my house. When I left I always knew that I would come back. For me, it's just normal. It's like I went on holiday and just came back. Seriously. Nothing really changed. I'm the same person."
It's like I went on holiday and just came back. Paul Pogba
Pogba singled out Jesse Lingard as one particular familiar face he was looking out for on his return to the club where he spent three seasons from 2009 to 2012. "When Jesse saw me, I was really happy to see him," he added. "We grew up together. To see him in the first-team, I'm very happy and very proud."
As for on the field, Pogba wants to keep playing with the freedom that's made him a star. "They teach you some things but football is instinct sometimes," he explained. "You just get the ball and sometimes you dribble past three players and pass it, other times you can shoot from far away. It's just instinct. It you feel something, just do it. I am free to do that."
Pogba's promotional shoot for the adidas Red Limit pack in London
He is already eyeing his first trophy with the club since his return, describing United's 4-1 EFL Cup quarter-final victory over West Ham as "perfect" and turning his thoughts to the next round. "I'm looking forward to the semi-final against Hull," he said. "Hopefully we can get to Wembley." But there are bigger prizes on his radar in the long term.
When asked what the biggest game is that he has played in, Pogba pointed to a near miss with Juventus in 2015 when they were edged out by Barcelona. "The Champions League final I would say. I saw the trophy next to me and we were close to winning and didn't so it makes me more hungry, you know. It gives me more motivation to win it."
Who were your heroes? “Ronaldo, the Brazilian Ronaldo. Zidane. Ronaldinho. I had a few. Kaka. I just like a lot of players. I love to watch them play.”
But where does that drive to succeed really come from? Pogba touch upon it in some depth during the 30-minute question-and-answer session. Here are some of the highlights...
ON GROWING UP
"My family always helped me. I had people around me who always pushed me to be the best, my dad, my mum. My dad used to play and coach as well. But I wasn't born with shiny things. I grew up in a flat with my brothers and my cousins. My brothers were in the same bed. It wasn't always easy so you want to do something else so your life can change."
Pogba and Jesse Lingard caught doing their secret handshake against Feyenoord Pogba and Jesse Lingard caught doing their secret handshake against Feyenoord
ON THE SACRIFICES
"I wasn't really interested in girls. Only football. I was just enjoying football all the time. There was a five-a-side next to the flat and I used to play there all the time. It was all about football. I wanted to be a professional. That was my goal. I didn't want to be anything other than a footballer."
ON HIS BROTHERS
"I'm always in touch with my brothers. One of them is at Saint-Etienne in France and the other is in Holland with Sparta Rotterdam. I always follow them. I always trained with them and played with them because they were bigger than me and older than me. They told me it was better for me. Sometimes I played with my brothers but I liked to play against them as well. They didn't want me to hang out with them and their friends but when it came to football they were always with me."
Pogba and Stormzy help launch the adidas Red Limit boot in London
ON HIS MUM
"My mum always helped me because she knew I wanted to play football. She supports me all the time. I think she knew before all of us I was going to be a footballer. She's everything. I was her baby as I'm the youngest one so I was always with her. Why would it change? I did the same thing in Paris and Le Havre. My mum even came with me to Manchester. Everything that happens now, she deserves it."
ON AFRICAN ROOTS
"To be honest, I don't go back to Africa much but I went once just to see Africa. My brothers were born in Guinea but they moved when they were two so they didn't really get to see it. But they play with the national team so they see more than I do. When I went back there I saw how poor people were but they are always happy. They don't have anything. So when you come back to Europe you have to be happy because you think about them."
World Cup memories France ’98: "I remember because people were running everywhere, they were so happy. They were going outside and shouting for no reason. It was good."
"I remember because people were running everywhere, they were so happy. They were going outside and shouting for no reason. It was good." Brazil ’14: "It was a dream come true. All football players want to play in a World Cup. The No 1 thing is to win the World Cup as a footballer so it’s the best competition to play in."
ON LIFE AWAY FROM FOOTBALL
"I like rap, R&B and African music. I listen to it in my car and everywhere. Music makes me happy and in life you have to be happy all the time. I just try to do something else because every day I am training and you have to think about football so sometimes it's good to cut it out and think about something else. I like basketball. I used to play ping pong as well."
ON THE FANS
"You have the fans. You just do what you love. For them, it's something different. They can lose one game and not talk for two days. That's why we play for the fans as well as myself and the family. You have to give them the same love. I enjoy football and I enjoy the fans. I have done since I was young. That won't change."[dropcap]On[/dropcap] September 20th 1976 singer Siouxsie Sioux, and bassist Steven Severin asked Malcom McClauren if they could replace an act that had been scheduled to play the 100 Club Punk Festival, but canceled last minute. This was a chance to open for the headliner that night—Sex Pistols—who inspired Severin and Sioux to start a band.
But in fact they did not even have a band yet, and borrowed a pre-Pistols Sid Vicious on drums and pre-Adam and the Ants Marco Pirroni on guitar, and performed a set that consisted of a 20-minute improvisation based on The Lord’s Prayer.
Watch the 40 years in 40 minutes video above ( Courtesy of Peter Routley) to celebrate the formation of one of the greatest bands in rock and roll—Siouxsie & the Banshees!
And here is an interview recounting the 100 Club Punk Festival gig below.Fox News President Roger AIles and Newscorp CEO Rupert Murdoch AP There's a strange subterranean world where Fox News and military intelligence meets, and that's in the comments section.
Utilizing something called sock puppets — fake social media or Internet personas — Fox's public relations specialists were allegedly expected to counter "negative" or "even neutral" commentary on posts about the network, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik claims in his forthcoming book, "Murdoch's World."
They even reportedly used common counterintelligence tactics in order to mask their cyber footsteps.
Liberal Media watchdog Media Matters highlighted one paragraph in particular that sums up the practice:
One former staffer recalled using twenty different aliases to post pro-Fox rants. Another had one hundred. Several employees had to acquire a cell phone thumb drive to provide a wireless broadband connection that could not be traced back to a Fox News or News Corp account. Another used an AOL dial-up connection, even in the age of widespread broadband access, on the rationale it would be harder to pinpoint its origins. Old laptops were distributed for these cyber operations. Even blogs with minor followings were reviewed to ensure no claim went unchecked.
Oddly enough, the Air Force contracted HBGary Federal to develop a more sophisticated tool that would allow military intelligence operatives to manipulate several fake personas simultaneously. The tool was used in order gather intel on potential terrorists, but also, like Fox, to sway public opinion in (albeit it foreign) online communities.
The NYPD even uses fake personas to bust criminals. And, hilariously enough, the Taliban pretends to be hot chicks to scoop information from hot dogging Aussie soldiers.
Take note, that is probably the first time that Fox News, the Air Force, the NYPD, and the Taliban all occupy the same subset of company SOP.
Hopefully it's the last.Working in R&D since '95, Mark became Magic head designer in '03. His hobbies: spending time with family, writing about Magic in all mediums, and creating short bios.
Every week for five consecutive weeks, I am revisiting a series of columns I wrote about color philosophy back in 2003. I started with white ("The Great White Way Revisited"), then did blue ("True Blue Revisited"), followed by black ("In the Black Revisited"), and today I'm up to red.
For each of these five columns, I will answer the six questions I first posed in the original articles and present a few updated thoughts from the last twelve years. Here are the six questions:
• What does the color desire? What is its end goal?
• What means does the color use to achieve these ends?
• What does the color care about? What does the color represent?
• What does the color despise? What negatively drives the color?
• Why does the color like its allies and hate its enemies?
• What is the color's greatest strength and biggest weakness?
As this is the fourth week, I'm hoping you get how this goes.
What does the color desire? What is its end goal?
Red wants freedom.
Everyone seems preoccupied with the meaning of life. Red's not, because red already knows the answer. You see, your heart tells you what it needs in order to be fulfilled. All you have to do is listen to it and act accordingly. It's not a mystery. You are literally bombarded with constant feelings that guide you down the correct path. The problem is all the other colors ignore the message.
Fiery Impulse | Art by Daarken
Life's an adventure, and it's up to each individual to experience it. The key is to embrace your emotions and let them guide you. If you're happy, laugh. If you're sad, cry. If you're angry, hit something. If you're scared, run away. Listen to your inner voice and you will have the opportunity to experience all that life has to offer.
Too many individuals live their life questioning choices they've made. Not red. Red lives in the moment; red is spontaneous; red embraces every adventure put before it. Red knows that on its deathbed, it will look back on a fulfilled life with no regrets. That's all red wants—the ability to live life doing what it needs to.
This doesn't mean red is alone. Quite the opposite actually. Part of living life is embracing relationships. Red knows passion and loyalty and camaraderie and lust. When red bonds with another, it bonds strongly and fiercely. Whether a lover or a friend, red is someone who will always be there when you need them. Well, unless, life has taken them somewhere else for some length of time—but then when they get back, they're definitely going to be there for you.
To outsiders, red might seem a bit chaotic; but that's only because others can't see what's in red's heart. They cannot feel red's emotions guiding them. Living life to its fullest takes a lot of dedication and perseverance, but red is always up to the task.
What means does the color use to achieve these ends?
Red is a color of action. If you want something, you have to constantly be taking steps towards your goal. You can't cross the finish line if you're not in the race. Red achieves its goals because it prioritizes making things happen and it takes the steps to ensure that they will.
Mage-Ring Bully | Art by Karl Kopinski
A big part of this is red being very attuned to its feelings. Red always knows the next action it has to take, because it listens to what its heart is instructing it to do. Red is never without direction or guidance. Now, that direction can change—sometimes quickly—because the heart is fickle, but red is always ready to act.
Red has a few different tools at its disposal. First, it has the resources to be destructive when it needs to be. If something is causing red problems, red can blow it up. Or burn it down. Or destroy it through a variety of different means. Red's not afraid to get its hands dirty, and it never backs down from a challenge.
Red also has speed on its side. Red's impulsiveness allows it to act instantaneously, and it doesn't ever need time to think through its actions. Red can hit fast and strong before others can even prepare for what's coming.
Red is good at manipulating emotions. Just as red feels every impulse strongly, it can fan the flames of emotions within others—often to powerful effect.
Red can be very tricky. It has an impish nature that it can tap into, which allows it to interfere with the plans of others.
Red is relentless. As long as red cares about something, it will keep trying until it gets what it needs.
Ravaging Blaze | Art by Aleksi Briclot
Red's focus and energy make it the most driven color. It knows what it wants and it acts on those feelings without the slightest hesitation. Getting between red and what it wants can be very, very dangerous.
What does the color care about? What does the color represent?
Here are some things essential to red:
Emotion—If you're going to follow your heart, that means being in touch with your emotions. And not just some of your emotions, but all of them. Magic is a combat-oriented game, so we obviously focus more on anger and aggressive emotions that make sense in combat. But red is just as swayed by every emotion. Red also doesn't bottle up its emotions, it lets them out. Red loves action, and emotions are great motivators.
Mood Swings—Not only is red focused on emotions, it's always focused on many emotions all at once. This means that red is more prone than any other color to have emotional swings. Red can laugh one moment and be in tears the next. Others might see this as being unfocused and easily distracted, but red feels it's important to always stay in touch with your feelings—and if that means some emotional swings, then that is just what was meant to be.
Impulse—Red doesn't have time for thinking. Thinking takes way too long. Red's competitive advantage is its speed and the ability to make big decisions instantaneously. The way red can accomplish this is by relying on its impulses to make the right call. Your gut is just so much faster than your brain.
Act on Impulse | Art by Brad Rigney
Might (Solving problems through brawn)—If red has to choose between letting its mind solve a problem and letting its body solve it, red heavily leans towards the latter. Red has a lot of practice using action to get things done.
Violence—Red prefers blunt answers. One blunt answer is physical violence. Someone gets in your way, hit them until they fall down. That usually solves it... for now. But that's good enough.
Brutality—Some other colors draw a line between what is acceptable and what is not. Red blurs that line. Red prefers amicable resolutions—but if it finds other, more direct solutions, red has no problem using them.
Destruction—Red likes easy-to-remember plans of action. If a thing is a problem, there's a simple universal answer: Destroy the thing. To red, destruction is an art unto itself, and those who master the art have a lot fewer things bugging them.
Chaos—This is white's word, not red's. Red just wants things to run the way they want to run, and as we're dealing with humans, it's messy. But that mess contains the beauty red sees in the world. Each individual is living the life determined for them, and as different people's lives crash into one another, we start to understand the impact individuals have on the group. It seems disjointed from afar, but as you dig in deep you find that the inconsistencies, the variance, the flaws all add that extra layer of humanity.
Randomness—Life isn't orderly, so why should people act as if it is? Part of finding happiness is recognizing that things don't always happen for a reason; red has embraced randomness as an inevitable component of life.
Spontaneity—Red recognizes that one of the great joys of life is the ability to do what you want to do in the instant you want to do it. In order to allow this to happen as much as possible, red embraces the idea that things don't have to be planned ahead but rather can be created in the moment.
Humor—Red loves to laugh, and as such is the color that most actively creates and appreciates humor. The other four colors all have their own form of humor, but none are as blunt, as broad, or as entertaining as red's.
Mischievousness—Red enjoys doing things to entertain itself. One of those things is messing with other individuals. It's really funny when things don't go as others have planned.
The Elements of Fire and Earth—Red values the volatile side of these natural elements (lightning, fire, earthquakes, mudslides, etc.), and quite often uses them as the source of its direct damage.
Fighting (Brawling)—Red does not back down from a fight, but note that these fights are much more unstructured brawling than any formalized combat.
Goblin Piledriver | Art by Matt Cavotta
Romance—Red's a lover and a fighter. Just as red won't back down from a fight, red is also not afraid of letting others know how it feels. Red isn't scared of relationships. It knows that through close bonds with others, some of life's happiest moments happen.
Hedonism—Red embraces following your feelings. Most of the time, that means doing things you want to do because they're things you'd enjoy. Red sees no shame in delivering on this basic need.
Barbarism—The offshoot of valuing action over thought is that many times you act in a more primitive manner.
What does the color despise? What negatively drives the color?
Red doesn't like being frustrated or bored. The first happens when someone tries to inform red that it cannot do what it wants to do. Red's default reaction is to just do it anyway, but if something tries to stop red, red will figure out how to remove the obstacle in its way. Red likes to see itself as an unstoppable force that will just keep taking action until it get what it wants.
Alesha, Who Smiles at Death | Art by Anastasia Ovchinnikova
Red's other pet peeve is when nothing is happening. Red is a color of action, so anything leading to inaction drives red crazy. Red has no patience nor long-term plan, so the last thing it wants to do is not do anything. Red would much rather fail miserably than sit back and never try.
Why does the color like its allies and hate its enemies?
Red looks at black and sees a color guided by an internal voice, not external ones. Black also values the ability to do what it wants, and it understands the importance of destruction. Black plans and plots a little more than red likes, and is a bit more selfish than even red is comfortable with, but overall black is a color that red can identify with.
Green embraces its instinct and, like red, can act without needing to think about it first. Green has a wild side that red appreciates. Green is also big on "might making right," a concept that red can get behind. Green is a little more orderly than red would prefer and, at times, a bit more serene than red can handle; but it's definitely a color that red feels at home with.
Red looks at white and sees a color that seems to exist solely to complicate things unnecessarily. White's obsession with rules and laws creates system after system designed to prevent red from doing what it wants to do. Even worse, it has the tools to enforce its structure. Scariest of all, white has the means to imprison red, along with the infrastructure to falsely justify such an action. This leads to the worst possible outcome for red: a complete loss of freedom.
Red sees blue as a danger, because blue lives to undercut the value of feelings. If blue had its way, individuals would be emotionless automatons never knowing what it was to experience raw emotions. In addition, blue's mission seems to be to make nothing happen. Blue wants to destroy red's way of life, and bore red to death in the process.
What is the color's greatest strength and biggest weakness?
Red's greatest strength is its ability to know what it wants. Red has purpose and clarity. In addition, red is committed to taking action to get the things it wants. Others might pine for things; red actively takes the steps to acquire them. This drive grants red a passion and speed that can often overwhelm its adversaries. Red's enthusiasm creates an energy that allows it to do amazing things.
Sarkhan's Rage | Art by Chris Rahn
Red's greatest weakness is an unwillingness to think long-term. Red is very short-sighted, trying to accomplish what it wants right now and seldom thinking of the ramifications of its actions. Red often puts all its eggs in one basket, and if that plan doesn't work out, red can easily get itself in trouble. In addition to all that, red is very bad at taking advice from others, choosing to follow its own path even when everyone around it is saying that disaster awaits.
Examples of Red Characters in Recent Pop Culture
Helena (Orphan Black)
Helena is the clone that acts rather than thinks. You never know what she is going to do, because Helena herself never knows until right before she does it.
Knux (Mad Max: Fury Road)
Throughout the movie, Knux makes decisions moment-to-moment, because he can only plan for his immediate future. Knux is very much driven by his emotions, which leads him to bounce around a lot throughout the film.
Quicksilver (Avengers: Age of Ultron)
Pietro's power is super speed, which allows him to act impulsively a lot faster than a normal human. Even though he has the ability to quickly think things through before he acts, he never does.
All the Emotions (Inside Out)
Joy, Sorrow, Anger, Fear, and Disgust. Each one of them is clearly motivated by a singular emotional impulse (you know, them being emotions and everything), leading them to make reckless decisions that bring all sorts of ramifications.
Mabel Pines (Gravity Falls)
Mabel is completely at the whim of her feelings. Jeopardize the time-space continuum so she has the chance to win a pig at the county fair? Done! She is constantly motivated by her latest crush or current project, which usually has near-disastrous implications for the people around her.
Human Torch (Fantastic Four)
Johnny Storm is figuratively and literally a hot head. He's impulsive, gets in fights, and often acts before he thinks his actions through. Oh yeah, and he lights himself on fire.
Homer Simpson (The Simpsons)
Homer is completely run by his emotions, leaving chaos in his wake. He is the embodiment of short-sighted thinking.
Painting the Town Red
That is the philosophy of red. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on each week of the color philosophy, either through my email or any of my social media accounts (Twitter, Tumblr, Google+, Instagram).
Join me next week for my fifth and final color philosophy article, covering green.
Until then, follow your heart and have an adventure!
"Drive to Work #248 – 10 Things Every Game Needs – Strategy"
This is the seventh in my "10 Things Every Game Needs" series. In this episode, I talk all about the importance of strategy to a game.
"Drive to Work #249 – Evergreen Keywords"
Many weeks ago, I wrote an article called "Evergreen Eggs & Ham" where I talked about the history of evergreen keywords. This is the podcast about that article, including a correction of an oversight I made in the article.Metropole caters to the interests and needs of English-speaking expat communities. Here are our curated recommendations for what you won’t want to miss in Vienna this Week (August 15 – August 22, 2017).
EVENT OF THE WEEK
19 days in celebration of African culture through music and dance performances and food! There are dance workshops and drum lessons and a whole program designed for kids. Performance highlights include Osibisa, one of the first African heritage bands to reach international renown, and Iyasa, Zimbabwe’s award-winning performing arts school for youths.
Donauinsel, Through September 5
ON STAGE
August 15: Summer Jam Session
Tuesday’s Summer Session opens with a performance from Intone, a jazz collective comprised of Austrian, American and Swedish musicians. The group blends influences from traditional jazz to pop whilst always leaving space for improvisation. After their performance you’re invited to bring an instrument on stage for an open improvisation session!
ZWE, 19:30
August 16: Schadenfreude Comedy Night
Local comic Reginald Bärris comperes a unique evening of stand up in which performers arrive on stage with no prepared material and have to interact with the audience to create their shows. Featuring Jack Holmes, Tamas Vamos, David Stockenreitner and Luke Hacker.
Kramladen, 20:30
August 17: Daniel Lanois
Canadian Lanois made his name producing U2’s Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby alongside Brian Eno, and Time Out of Mind, the grammy award-winning record that resurrected Bob Dylan’s career. His solo work has been more experimental than his country/pop clientele though, incorporating electronics and jazz rhythms alongside effected pedal steel. Here in his live show he transitions neatly between styles.
Porgy & Bess, 21:00
ON SCREEN
August 16: Hidden Figures
This is the story of three extraordinary African-American women that were instrumental in masterminding NASA’s space mission to send an astronaut into orbit. The feel good film addresses the difficulties they faced and overcame in the United States of the sixties.
Kino Wie Noch Nie, 21:00
August 17: The Graduate 50th Anniversary Screening
A young and somewhat despondent Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman) returns home after finishing college and finds himself led into a peculiar engagement with the wife of his father’s business partner. As well as this being the 50th anniversary, the screening comes just over a week after the 80th birthday of Hoffman. “Are you trying to seduce me, Mrs Robinson?”
Filmcasino, 20:30
Formed by a group of bike enthusiasts, this is the healthy, if only marginally less romantic, answer to drive-in cinema. The concept is simple: CCC brings all the equipment, you bring your legs, using electric bikes to power the show. Thursday’s film is Wadjda, the story of a young girl growing up in Saudi Arabia and trying to earn the money to buy a bike so she can race her friend.
Adria, 20:30
August 19: Swiss Army Man
A castaway on an island is saved from desperation by the appearance of a body on the shore. Together they have to escape the island and return to civilisation. A bizarre but delightful comedy starring Paul Dano and Daniel Radcliffe
Karmeliterplatz, 20:30
The adaptation of the book that was conceived on an Innsbruck hill comes to a Viennese garden. The story revolves around Arthur Dent whose adventures begin on a day when contractors come to bulldoze his house, and his best friend turns out to be an alien.
Der Garten, 20:30
August 21: Leonard Cohen Live in Dublin
The sold-out concert documented in this film was supporting what was to be Leonard Cohen’s antepenultimate record, Old Ideas, passing away just three years later in 2016. Look back at the terrific performance that takes you through an astonishing body of work spanning half a century.
Rathausplatz, 20:45
ON DISPLAY
August 19: Artificial Tears
Subtitled ‘Singularity & Humanness – A Speculation’, this mixed media exhibition studies our developing interaction with technology and tries to discern what continues to separate humans from it, in a desire to retain those elements.
MAK, guided tour 14:30-17:00
Linda Christanell’s oeuvre focusses primarily on the female |
wish to live in fear the way you do. (link)
In all honesty, fear has very little to do with it. Consider what it is like to drive a car: Most of us aren’t afraid when we get behind the wheel. In fact, we may even enjoy driving—and probably enjoy it most when driving fast. But we’re also aware that very bad things can happen on the road, and we take prudent steps to avoid getting ourselves or others killed. I don’t spend any more time feeling fear while training in the martial arts, or with guns, than I do while putting on my seatbelt or adjusting my rear-view mirror. And self-defense training is much more fun.
I also happen to be researching a book on these topics—and that Atlantic writer had come for the explicit purpose of interviewing me about Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. So, I’m not sure why he found it surprising that we spoke mostly about violence.
17. Your position on banning “assault weapons” like the AR15 is contradictory. In “The Riddle of the Gun” you say that such a ban would be purely symbolic and that these rifles are not objectively more threatening than other guns. But then you say that you would support such a ban—which seems illogical. What is your actual position? (link)
Point taken. The truth is, I am somewhat conflicted about this—and my support for an assault weapons ban is more rhetorical/political than anything else. As I’ve said, handguns are the problem. If you aren’t dealing with handguns, you aren’t addressing the real issue of gun violence.
A rifle like an AR15 is not scary for the reasons that most gun-control advocates allege—and there is no reason to think that Newtown or Aurora would have been any less tragic had the shooters been armed only with pistols. Rifles are scary because they allow even untrained people to shoot with great accuracy at distances beyond 50 yards. After only a few hours of practice, a person can reliably hit an 18-inch target 400 yards away—surpassing the abilities of even the best marksmen on earth with a handgun. Thus, the rational objection to civilian ownership of these weapons is that they give people unwarranted destructive power at a distance. But, as I’ve said, hunting rifles pose a similar problem.
It is hard to argue that anyone needs an AR15 for the purposes of self-defense. If you are shooting someone over 50 yards away in “self-defense”, something has either gone very wrong with you or with the society in which you live. It is true that many gun owners think it prudent to prepare for the latter case. While I can’t entirely fault their logic or their reading of history, and understand that it is a lot of fun to practice with an AR15, I don’t take the civilian need for these guns seriously. So I’m willing to say, in effect, “Fine, let’s ban assault weapons. Now can we talk about the real problem of gun violence?”
…Manipulation of California energy market gives consumers a jolt
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the regulator of the ISO and its trading markets, has started a formal investigation into Morgan's allegedly manipulative energy deals in California and with the Midwest ISO, which covers 11 states from Michigan to Montana.
But that could be just the tip of the iceberg: The bank continued its activities past that time frame, according to the ISO. It also says JPMorgan's alleged manipulation could have helped throw the entire energy market out of whack, imposing what could be incalculable costs on ratepayers.
That's the accusation leveled by the California Independent System Operator, which has jurisdiction over 80% of the state's electrical transmission. The ISO, a nonprofit corporation controlled by the state government, estimates that JPMorgan may have gamed the state's power market for $57 million in improper payments over six months in 2010 and 2011.
The next time your electricity bill prompts you to curse your local utility, here's another target where you should direct your anger: JPMorgan Chase & Co., which has manipulated the California energy market for its own profit and at a cost to residents and businesses in the state that could be $100 million, $200 million or much more.
Forget JPMorgan's well-publicized multibillion-dollar trading loss in derivatives; this trade turned a handsome profit, and it came directly out of electric customers' hides. The toll may not have amounted to much for each of the 37 million men, women and children in California. But collectively it's a massive, illegitimate tax on the entire state.
What's worse, it shows that we haven't learned anything from Enron's bogus energy trading, the disclosure of which helped destroy that firm in 2001 and land several of its executives in jail. To the extent it was designed to exploit loopholes in energy trading rules, experts say, the scheme allegedly perpetrated by JPMorgan Ventures Energy Corp. is cut from the same cloth as Enron's infamous "fat boy" swindle, which cost the state's ratepayers an estimated $1.4 billion in 2000.
"There's nothing really new under the sun," says Robert McCullough, a Portland, Ore., energy expert who reviewed the ISO complaint at my request. "But it's a cost you're paying in your monthly bill."
Asked for a response to the ISO's allegations, a JPMorgan spokeswoman referred me to a court brief the bank filed last week stating that its trading involved no misconduct and pointing out that FERC hasn't found any, to date. FERC says its inquiry is still at an early stage. But given the complexity of the energy market, this may be one of those cases in which the scandal lies not in what's illegal, but in what's legal.
One issue raised by this affair is whether government regulators have adequate tools to enforce trading rules. FERC's investigation could take years, and its maximum penalty is $1 million per day of violation. If the agency hit JPMorgan for even six months of misbehavior, the $180-million bill would be a pittance compared with the $14 billion in revenue collected annually by JPMorgan's investment banking arm, which houses the energy trading.
The incentive remains for outfits like JPMorgan to stretch the rules to the breaking point — if they get caught, the cost is tolerable; if not, the returns are fabulous. This raises again the age-old question: Can Wall Street be trusted? And it suggests an age-old answer: no.
"You set up these rules," says Carl Wood, a former Public Utilities Commissioner who served during the California power crisis of 2000-01, "and you have all these very smart people figuring out how to game them."
Indeed, there are signs that trading scams are rife: FERC in December accused Deutsche Bank of manipulating the California market and in March extracted a $245-million settlement from Baltimore-based Constellation Energy over charges it made manipulative trades in the New York market. (The Deutsche Bank determination is "preliminary" and subject to further investigation.)Given that tens of millions of Americans cheered in blissful agreement when a Democratic National Convention promotional video claimed that the only thing we all belong to is the government, it would make perfect sense that everything else belongs to the government as well.
Case in point:
In July of 2011 a jeweler’s heirs found ten double eagle $20 gold coins in a family safe that dated back to the Roosevelt administration. They then sent the coins to be authenticated and appraised by the Philadelphia Mint.
The coins come from a batch that were struck but melted down after President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the country off the gold standard in 1933.
Two were preserved for the Smithsonian Institute. But a handful more mysteriously got out.
Because the coins had never been released into circulation and were struck after Roosevelt’s gold confiscation executive order #6102 in April of 1933, the Treasury Department assumed they had originally been stolen from the mint.
Without any evidence or consideration given to statute of limitations, the government seized the coins – valued at $80 million.
The family sued in federal court and a judge has finally handed down a ruling.
A judge ruled that 10 rare gold coins worth $80 million belonged to the U.S. government, not a family that had sued the U.S. Treasury, saying it had illegally seized them.
…
Last week, Judge Legrome Davis of the Eastern District Court of Pennsylvania, affirmed that decision, saying “the coins in question were not lawfully removed from the United States Mint.”
Barry Berke, an attorney for the Langbords, told ABCNews.com, “This is a case that raises many novel legal questions, including the limits on the government’s power to confiscate property. The Langbord family will be filing an appeal and looks forward to addressing these important issues before the 3rd Circuit.”
Source: Yahoo News
So, the gold, which was originally stolen by the Federal government because hoarding had been forbidden by Presidential decree mysteriously disappeared from US Treasury vaults in 1933, to be found 78 years later, only to be re-stolen by the same government again.
What’s more is that the judge claims the family who found the coins in their father’s safe were actually the ones who committed the crime by seizing said coins nearly decades before any of them were ever born.
The lesson here is that the government, its representatives and the myrmidons who blindly support it believe they own you, everything you’ve worked for, everything your parents and grandparents worked for, and everything your children can expect to work for in the future.
If they want it, they will take it.Photographs by Tobias Lang
German photographer Tobias Lang had a brilliant idea, he started photographing his friends and their pets and suddenly folks from all over the world where asking him to capture them too.
Check out his Facebook page to see. Tobias is in the process of putting together a coffee table book of his impressive collection.
Tobias Lang is a veritable newbie to the photography game. It was only in 2008 that the former IT director quit his job and started a photography apprenticeship leading to a permanent role as a full time freelance photographer in 2010.
His latest project Your Pet and You is a seemingly simple premise whereby pet owners are photographed alongside their pets on a wooden plinth. However the resulting shots, published in mainly in “charismatic” black and white hold much more depth, and are all at once sweet and quirky.
RELATED: This golden retriever loves to strike a pose
The project began simply enough, as Lang couldn’t help noticing his roommate’s cats would constantly perch on the wooden block in his living room. He began shooting both the cats and their owners and gradually, the idea took on a life of its own and extended to more friends and family, and eventually strangers. Lang says of the project, “I love animals; they have so many characteristics and behaviors. I like to work with them, because they are not vain, they just act! Normally I like to photograph people, which is my real passion. In the project both subjects appear so all my favorites appear.”
Yes some of the shots prove that pets really can look like their owners but there is so much more to the project, and the warmth and personality lying beneath is a joy to behold. Lang puts it best himself. “I like the confidence between the pets and their owners… working out their characters, is the most sparkling thing about the series”. (Text provided by Tobias Lang)Millennials are also more likely to be told they have depression or an anxiety disorder.
Elizabeth Solomon, 31, has two master's degrees and carries close to $150,000 in student loan debt. She moved back into her parents' house less than two years after graduation while she looks for work. (Photo: Josh T. Reynolds for USA TODAY) Story Highlights In survey, 39% of Millennials (ages 18-33) say their stress level increased in the past year
Work is the top source of stress for Millennials
Most common coping mechanism is listening to music
Stress levels for Americans have taken a decidedly downward turn across the USA — except for young adults, whose stress is higher than the national norm, says a survey to be released Thursday.
Those ages 18-33 — the Millennial generation — are plenty stressed, and it's not letting up: 39% say their stress has increased in the past year; 52% say stress has kept them awake at night in the past month. And more than any other age group, they report being told by a health care provider that they have either depression or an anxiety disorder.
The online survey of 2,020 U.S. adults 18 and older, conducted in August by Harris Interactive for the American Psychological Association, has been taking the stress pulse of Americans since 2007.
On a 10-point scale, where 1 means "little or no stress" and 10 means "a great deal of stress," the 2012 average is 4.9.
But for Millennials, it's 5.4.
"Younger people do tend to be more stressed than older people do. It may be they are more willing to admit to it. It may be a phase of life. They just don't know where they're going in life," says Mike Hais of Arcadia, Calif., a market researcher and co-author of two books on that generation, including 2011's Millennial Momentum.
But for this group, there is more cause for worry, Hais says.
"Millennials are growing up at a tough time. They were sheltered in many ways, with a lot of high expectations for what they should achieve. Individual failure is difficult to accept when confronted with a sense you're an important person and expected to achieve. Even though, in most instances, it's not their fault — the economy collapsed just as many of them were getting out of college and coming of age — that does lead to a greater sense of stress," he says.
Overall, the survey finds that 20% of Americans report extreme stress, which is an 8, 9 or 10 on the stress scale. Still, the extreme-stress report has declined since 2010, when the number was 24%. Also on the decline are unhealthy coping behaviors. Since 2008, eating to manage stress dropped from 34% to 25% in 2012. And drinking alcohol as a stress reliever dipped from 18% to 13%.
Among other survey findings:
35% of Americans say their stress increased in the past year.
69% of those with high stress say their stress increased in the past year, compared with 13% of those who report low stress (a 1, 2 or 3 on the scale).
In the past five years, 60% of those surveyed have tried to reduce their stress; 53% are still trying.
Top stressors include money (69%), work (65%) and the economy (61%).
For Millennials, top stress sources are work (cited by 76%), money (73%) and relationships (59%). The economy came in fifth, at 55%, just behind family responsibilities, cited by 56%.
The news on the job front doesn't help either, suggests Matthew Faraci of the non-partisan Generation Opportunity, a Washington, D.C.-based Millennial advocacy group.
January statistics show unemployment among 18- to 29-year-olds at 13% and suggest that as many as 1.7 million young adults aren't even counted as unemployed because they've given up looking.
"For young people, the jobs picture has been persistently bleak," Faraci says.
Elizabeth Solomon of San Francisco currently works as a freelance consultant and is temporarily staying with her mother in Northampton, Mass. Solomon, 31, who was not part of the survey, says her stress is mostly about her long-term financial future. She owes about $150,000 in student loans; last year, she completed two master's degrees, in counseling psychology and organizational psychology.
"You kind of get stuck in this middle ground," she says. "You're highly educated and have a significant amount of student loan debt, and it's hard to find a place in the job market."
Kelly Wiggen, 23, of Champaign, Ill., was among those surveyed. A second-year veterinary graduate student at the University of Illinois, she says she's "definitely stressed." And she says her stress increased in 2012.
"Vet school is pretty intensive. In my undergraduate years, I kept myself very busy, but I would not say I was really stressed. As soon as I got to vet school, the stress skyrocketed. It's pretty much a full-time job," she says.
In addition, she volunteers several hours a week at a wildlife medical clinic and serves as a team leader, which takes up to 15 hours a week, including nights and weekends.
But the stress can become too much and lead to other problems, suggests clinical psychologist Norman Anderson, CEO of the Washington, D.C.,-based psychological association.
"Stress is a risk factor for both depression and anxiety," he says. "We don't have data on the specific causes of depression and anxiety in this sample, but it does make sense scientifically that the Millennials who report higher levels of stress in their lives are also reporting higher levels of depression and anxiety."
The survey finds that 19% of Millennials have been told they have depression, compared with 14% of Generation Xers (ages 34-47); 12% of Baby Boomers (ages 48-66) and 11% of those ages 67 and older. And more Millennials than other generations have been told they have an anxiety disorder: 12% of the youngest, compared with 8% of Gen X, 7% of Boomers and 4% of the oldest.
"There is a greater awareness of mental-health services available, many more medications than there used to be for this, and perhaps more self-awareness in terms of feelings that might be receptive to some sort of treatment," says Lisa Colpe, an epidemiologist at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Md. "All those have combined to create a different picture than maybe what we've seen decades ago."
Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School in Boston, who has studied the prevalence of mental disorders in the USA, says it is difficult to know whether young people are more troubled today, because few surveys in the past asked the questions to provide a valid long-term look at depression and anxiety disorders.
"There is not a lot of evidence of true prevalence having gone up," he says. "There doesn't seem to be a great deal of evidence to suggest rates have changed dramatically over time. When we do those retrospective kind of things, it looks like younger people are in worse shape, but unfortunately, we just don't know."
Kessler says young people do have higher rates of anxiety and depression, but rates go down in middle age and then rise again in the late 70s. And a new generation of doctors is more willing to discuss mental health, he says. "Anybody who has anxiety or depression today would be more likely to be told they have it than if they went to a doctor 20 years ago."
To cope with stress, Millennials are more likely to report sedentary behaviors, such as eating (36%) or playing video games or surfing the Internet (41%), the survey finds. But the most common coping mechanism is listening to music, cited by 59% of young adults; 51% exercise or walk, about the same as the national average (52%).
"They also showed the highest level (compared with other generations) of spending time with friends and family as a way of coping with stress, which is very good," says Anderson. Forty-six percent cited that, compared with 35%-38% of the other groups and a national average of 39%.
Software programmer Scott Treadwell, 24, of Seattle says his stress level is "very low." He had a job before graduating college, as did many of his friends, who also moved from Michigan to the West Coast, so he has plenty of social support.
"Work is enjoyable, so because of that, I don't feel stress. I get to work on what I like," says Treadwell, who was not part of the survey. "For relaxing, I usually like working out, going to the weight room and running, and playing video games. I am more active and have more opportunities out here to ski or snowboard or hike."
Wiggen says she runs five days a week with her dog, Talia.
"I get up little earlier," she says. "It's a quick run, but it's something."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/YUhBeMCLEVELAND, Ohio - The city of Oxford, home to Miami University, is the best college town in the country, according to a new study by WalletHub.
The personal finance website ranked 280 college cities based on an analysis of 23 metrics, including quality of higher education, crime rates and cost of living.
Other Ohio cities and rankings in the "Best & Worst College Cities & Towns in America" are: Bowling Green (28), Columbus (32), Kent (42), Cincinnati (47), Dayton, (92), Cleveland (129), Akron (166) and Toledo (204).
Each city also was ranked on "Wallet Wellness," "Youth Oriented Environment" and "Opportunities."
In other categories, Columbus ranked third for lowest adjusted cost of living for young people, making it a good place to settle after graduation.
Oxford ranked first in the lowest brain drain and highest number of students per capita population. It ranked third for percentage of part-time jobs.
Bowling Green was 280th for brain drain.
Higher education institutions and their cities drive one another socially, culturally, economically and intellectually, making university areas great environments not only for students but also for families, the elderly and other non-student groups, WalletHub said.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has recently rejected 30 Syrians out of thousands seeking to enter the country, Obama administration officials told a congressional panel on Wednesday, as the United States tightens vetting of immigrants and other visitors following attacks in California and Paris.
In addition, hundreds of applications from Syrian refugees have been put on hold and many might ultimately be rejected, Leon Rodriguez, director of the Citizenship and Immigration Services unit of the Department of Homeland Security, told the committee.
A spokesman for Rodriguez later said that the 30 Syrian refugee applications had been rejected over the last 16 months.
At a time when millions of refugees are arriving in Europe and elsewhere from the Middle East and Africa, Democratic President Barack Obama’s pledge to take in 10,000 people fleeing war-torn Syria has come under fire, especially from Republicans. The United States so far has admitted 2,000 refugees.
Michael McCaul, the Republican chairman of the House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, said at a hearing that authorities have identified about 40 violent militants who had attempted to enter Europe posing as refugees.
Other committee Republicans at the hearing questioned why the Obama administration wanted to admit any Syrian refugees, given that the Syria-based Islamic State movement has pledged to attack the United States and other western countries.
“Our intelligence community has... told me that individuals with terrorism ties in Syria have already tried to gain access to our country through the refugee program,” McCaul said.
“What’s even more concerning is that top officials have testified before this committee that intelligence gaps prevent us from being able to confidently weed out terrorists,” he said.
Rodriguez and other Homeland Security and State Department officials told the committee that U.S. procedures for vetting Syrian refugees were among the most rigorous in the world.
U.S. agencies have tightened procedures for checking backgrounds of would-be U.S. immigrants and visitors after a recent arrival from the Middle East was one of two shooters who killed 14 people in San Bernardino, California.
Francis Taylor, the Homeland Security Department’s intelligence chief, said his department was routinely doing social media checks on would-be immigrants and visitors.While Toronto has become a city that thinks like a suburb, Mississauga has quietly turned itself into the opposite, a suburb that thinks like a city. Or at least, a suburb that’s learning to think like a city. Either way, the difference couldn’t be more stark. For example, where Toronto just opened its first city-owned mall, a grimly familiar gaggle of shops next to the Wilson subway station, Mississauga recently launched a study to look at the “future intensification” of six of that city’s shopping centres.
Mississauga's planned LRT line will be built on Hurontario St., from Port Credit to Steeles Ave. ( Bernard Weil / Toronto Star )
Though proud of Mississauga’s desire to transform itself, the Commissioner of Planning and Building in Canada’s sixth-largest city, Ed Sajecki, has no illusions. “Quite frankly,” he says, “we’re not even close to New York, London or Paris; what we’re investing in now is catch-up.” Then again, Mississauga wasn’t incorporated until 1974, which in civic terms means it’s too young to have learned to walk yet, let alone run. On the other hand, Toronto, even after a couple of centuries, remains a municipal Baby Huey, big but small. “Mississauga is maturing,” Sajecki declares. “I like to say it’s no longer growing out, it’s growing up, not just building high but learning to deal with the issues that other big cities are dealing with.”
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Interestingly, Mississauga had to face these big-city issues even before it realized it was a big city. The transformation from satellite suburb to emerging urban conurbation happened while no one was watching. Though Mississauga’s longtime former mayor, Hazel McCallion, began as the Queen of Sprawl, she became an urbanist long before many of her supporters. McCallion deserves credit for her change of heart, though there was really no alternative. While many municipalities still allow developers to carve up the landscape into subdivisions, Mississauga, to its credit, wants to do something smarter. Most obviously, perhaps, it begins with public transit. How telling is it that the planned LRT line, which will run north up Hurontario St. from Port Credit to Steeles Ave., will end before it reaches Brampton, which, in a spectacular act of stupidity, refused the provincially funded route in 2015? Mississauga’s response, by contrast, has been to set about rezoning Hurontario for greater density. Already, developers are selling nearby condos on the basis of their proximity to the LRT. Hurontario in 20 or 30 years will be a fine-grained, bike-laned main street lined by mixed-use towers connected by transit. “A bigger transit network will help everyone,” says Mississauga’s director of city planning strategies, Andrew Whittemore. “Our objective is to create complete communities. We’re trying to be proactive.”
That word — proactive — is the key to Mississauga’s new civic culture. Sajecki talks about Hammarby Sjostad, Stockholm’s brilliant new waterfront neighbourhood, as a model for future development in his city. Like Waterfront Toronto, the tripartite agency overseeing waterfront revitalization, Hammerby started as part of a failed Olympic bid. Today, it is a hugely successful, leading-edge community constructed around sustainability principles such as transit, district heating and cooling, underground garbage collection, renewable energy and a highly evolved public realm.
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Read more: Opinion: Haunted by the rise of ghost hotels $358,000 in Mississauga, $1,325,000 in Entertainment District: What these condos got Trudeau kicks off China visit with tourism pitch, boost for Mississauga company These are approaches that Mississauga will implement on its waterfront, where three massive redevelopment schemes are unfolding. These projects, the largest of which occupies 200 acres of prime real estate, will be where Mississauga enters the 21st century. The fact that each site is empty means planners can incorporate state-of-the-art technology and build fully sustainable communities from the ground up. Among the obstacles Mississauga planners face is inadequate provincial legislation. Because regulations, including the Ontario Building Code, set a relatively low bar for new development, cities are limited in the demands they can make. Still, significant progress has been made. “I never thought we’d see the day when the Imperial Oil site would be redeveloped,” admits Mississauga strategic planning leader Jim Doran. If Mississauga officials get their way, the highly polluted 72-acre waterfront parcel just west of Port Credit will become an exemplar of green growth. Meanwhile, here in the centre of the universe, Councillor David Shiner, the chair of Build Toronto, told those on hand for the opening of Shops at the Wilson Station last month, “It is a new gathering place for people who are living in this growing residential community to get to by walking, biking or taking public transit, or by car.” These weasel words and the occasion they marked say everything about a city that has run out of ambition, imagination, and worse still, the energy to care. Christopher Hume’s column appears weekly. He can be reached at jcwhume4@gmail.com
Read more about:When a show features a slow push in towards a sign bearing a town’s folky name, especially if the setting appears to be the US Pacific Northwest, there’s no way to avoid comparisons to Twin Peaks. And when the show in question also features a lot of rustic wood interiors, quirky characters, and a federal agent arriving in town on an official errand, well, then you’re almost in SNL parody territory. But here’s the trailer for the new M. Night Shyamalan show Wayward Pines. It features all those elements, and looks to all the world like Shyamalan is just producing his own personal Twin Peaks… at least until it also starts looking a lot like The Prisoner.
Somehow, this is a real thing that people made, and other people paid for. At least Fox knows that it looks a hell of a lot like Twin Peaks, as the official marketing blurbs aren’t shy about name-checking Mark Frost and David Lynch’s show. And this is based on a novel, Pines, by Blake Crouch, so it didn’t just come out of nowhere. And maybe it goes in its own unique direction — that’s certainly possible. But at this point, a half dozen major landmark genre TV shows seem to be represented here.
The show will be presented as a 10-episode “event series,” with a cast that includes Matt Dillon, Carla Gugino, Melissa Leo, Terrence Howard, Toby Jones, Juliette Lewis, and many more.
Trailer via THR. Info below presented by Fox.
Imagine the perfect American town… beautiful homes, manicured lawns, children playing safely in the streets. Now imagine never being able to leave. You have no communication with the outside world. You think you’re going insane. You must be in Wayward Pines. Secret Service Agent ETHAN BURKE (Academy Award nominee Matt Dillon, “Crash,” “City of Ghosts”) drives to the bucolic town of Wayward Pines, ID, searching for two missing federal agents. One of the best Secret Service agents in the Seattle office, he’s the man who knew missing agent KATE HEWSON (Carla Gugino, “Watchmen,” “Entourage”) better than anyone. They were more than partners; their relationship nearly destroyed Ethan’s marriage.
Everything changes when a truck slams into his car…and he wakes up in the Wayward Pines Hospital, with the intense and unpredictable NURSE PAM (Academy Award and Emmy Award winner Melissa Leo, “The Fighter,” “Treme”) at his bedside. It soon appears that Pam is more interested in harming than healing. She and Ethan grow into deadly rivals, and her role in the town proves much deeper than anyone realizes.
As the mysteries within the town pile up, Ethan starts to question his own sanity. He is confronted by the mysterious and charismatic DR. JENKINS (Emmy Award nominee Toby Jones, “The Girl,” the “Harry Potter” franchise), the psychiatrist who treats him at Wayward Pines Hospital. As he begins to meet some of the local residents, including toymaker HAROLD BALLINGER (Reed Diamond, “24,” “Much Ado About Nothing”), Ethan forms a bond with BEVERLY (Academy Award and Emmy Award nominee Juliette Lewis, “Hysterical Blindness,” “Cape Fear”), a bartender who is as wary of Wayward Pines as he is.
Back home in Seattle, Ethan’s wife, THERESA BURKE (Shannyn Sossamon, “40 Days and 40 Nights,” “How to Make It in America”), a former Secret Service Agent trainee, is informed by Ethan’s boss, ADAM HASSLER (Tim Griffin, “Prime Suspect”), that early testing shows Ethan was never in the car which was recovered on the side of the road outside of Wayward Pines. They’re still investigating. But this isn’t enough for Theresa. So she sets out on her own search for her husband, along with their teenage son, BEN (Charlie Tahan, “The Harvest,” “Charlie St. Cloud”).
Meanwhile, Ethan is challenged at every turn by the town’s die-hard residents, especially SHERIFF ARNOLD POPE (Academy Award nominee Terrence Howard, “Crash,” “Hustle & Flow”), who takes offense at a Secret Service agent showing up on his turf. Ethan’s continuing investigation only turns up more and more questions, and each one leads him to the most important question of all: What’s wrong with Wayward Pines?
WAYWARD PINES is a production of FX Productions. The series was developed for television by Chad Hodge (“The Playboy Club,” “Runaway”) and executive-produced by M. Night Shyamalan, Donald De Line (“Green Lantern,” “The Italian Job”), Hodge and Ashwin Rajan (“After Earth,” “Devil”). Hodge wrote and Shyamalan directed the premiere episode.Name-Calling
Ad Hominem
Responding to Tone
Contradiction
Counterargument
Refutation
Refuting the Central Point
The most obvious advantage of classifying the forms of disagreement is that it will help people to evaluate what they read. In particular, it will help them to see through intellectually dishonest arguments.
But the greatest benefit of disagreeing well is not just that it will make conversations better, but that it will make the people who have them happier.
Most atheists, secular humanists, freethinkers, and skeptics pride ourselves in making an effort to be rational in our thought and communication. We do not always succeed, but we generally try. Or do we? In looking at a number of blog posts on prominent atheist blogs, comments left on these blogs, and Twitter interactions by well-known atheists, one could be forgiven for asking.We have discovered that the Internet is ideal for one-directional forms of communication (e.g., videos, blog posts) and not well suited for complex argument. Dueling blog posts where two or more bloggers respond to each other over a length of time may be interesting to some but are likely to lose many others. Moreover, they are almost certain to attract trolls. Facebook and Twitter have a way of dumbing-down communication, often reducing things to crude metrics (e.g., "likes" or retweets) and oversimplifying to the point where communication breaks down. So much of what begins with lofty goals ends in childish insults. Perhaps it is silly to blame the various technologies of the Internet. It is still us who are doing the typing and clicking the buttons. Maybe we've simply forgotten how to disagree. To the degree that we value a rational community, it makes sense that we would all have a stake in elevating our discourse.Back in 2008, Paul Graham wrote an essay titled " How to Disagree " in which he presented a hierarchy of disagreement. The levels of Graham's hierarchy, ranging from most primitive to most sophisticated, are as follows:He describes precisely what each level means and provides examples. It really is an interesting read, so I urge you to check it out, especially if you've been been feeling frustrated lately by what passes for discussion in the atheist community.Graham notes that although his hierarchy describes different forms of disagreement, it omits one important consideration: it does not evaluate the truth of various claims. That is, something presented as a refutation could be based on false claims. So we still need to keep the matter of truth in mind.How might one use Graham's hierarchy? Here's what he suggests:I agree completely. For those of us still concerned with the promotion of reason and critical thinking, this could indeed be helpful. Whether you are reading a blog or perusing Twitter, Graham's hierarchy could give you a mechanism to evaluate what you are reading.I also think Graham is correct when he says that evaluating what we read may be the most obvious benefit but is probably not the primary one.Absolutely. To the degree that we want conversations to be productive, it makes sense to shift our communication to higher levels of the hierarchy and avoid the lower levels. In the past couple of days, I've had a few Twitter conversations with atheists with whom I have strongly disagreed. I can tell you that I felt much better following those that remained free from name-calling, ad hominem attacks, and mockery. I actually felt like we had accomplished something by providing each other with opposing points of view.Clearly, not everyone in the atheist community is interested in being rational or in having civil discourse with those who might disagree with them. I have encountered several people in our community who seem more interested in pushing emotionally-charged agendas of one sort or another no matter where they might lead. Some are hateful trolls who do little more than engage in personal attacks and character assassination (see this post from Elevatorgate for an example). They are not mounting any sort of argument; they are simply peddling in childish insults. Others include prominent bloggers and their supporters who are quick to demonize those who dare to disagree as misogynistic "rape apologists," dismissing any dissenting views as hateful attacks. They claim to be champions of social justice but give the trolls a run for the money when it comes to insulting their critics, condemning those with different opinions, and ineffectually attempting to hold up others as examples of irrationality when doing so only exposes their own blindness (for an example of the latter, see this post from Lousy Canuck).One option when one is confronted with this sort of thing is simply to walk away. I think it is healthy to seek out and engage persons who may challenge us and with whom we may disagree, as this is how we grow. But there is a difference between those interested in - and capable of - rational discussion and those who are not. Walking away from those who condemn, demonize, and insult without offering even a difference of opinion is a viable option. We can unfollow them on Twitter, unsubscribe from their blog feeds, etc.For many of us, walking away is more challenging when those engaging in this behavior claim to represent the atheist community. We wrestle with the question of whether it is our responsibility to publicly address this behavior just as we ask liberal to moderate Christians to do with |
ess of mainstream modern American journalism". We learn that Watts suffers from an anti-science syndrome and wages a jihad against the actual climate science, among other things. Media Matters, an outlet design to attack any deviation from the hard left orthodoxy in the media, thinks that the PBS News Hour propagated confusion on climate change. We learn that something must be really terrifying here because Watts may have some vague connections with the Heartland Institute. What a horror! The Heartland Institute is a rather important and respected think tank and it may have been their idea to convince PBS to do a somewhat balanced piece.For Skeptical Science and Dana 1981, it was a "PBS false balance hour". The article uses this context to parrot all the mandatory alarmist talking points or prayers or how I should exactly call this amazing junk. Desmogblog uses a similar terminology, "balance trap by providing megaphone to Anthony Watts".For Daily Kos, the program was a public disservice showing how bad journalism can get. Joe Romm of Think Progress thinks it was the worst climate story of the year. Doug Craig screams: Shame on PBS! The Huffington Post summarizes these and other reactions by saying that the program "raised eyebrows".You may want to read some of the reactions in their full glory. Lots of activists have clearly written angry e-mails to PBS. PBS acknowledged them and it has de facto apologized for the piece, by referring to their previous (alarmist) programs on the climate. They don't even dare to try to suggest that it was legitimate for PBS to invite a meteorologist who runs the world's most influential climate blog. At least, they allowed the host of the program, Spencer Michels, to "defend" himself. Kind of.The degree of intolerance and fascism among the climate alarmists is just striking – I apologize to less radical fascists for the comparison. Well, after all, Michael Mann, in an interview for Scientific American, was dreaming about a future in which it is illegal to deny "climate change" These people simply don't belong to the Western civilization with its traditions of freedom, democracy, and enlightenment. They belong to a medieval civilization controlled by ultimate cults that can never be questioned, divine entities and beliefs that have the right to create a whole hierarchy of power here on Earth. The similarity to the Islamic fundamentalists is particularly hard to overlook in these days when we see how both of these groups are terrified that someone is even allowed to talk about something.And both of these groups fail to appreciate (or want to deny, in front of themselves) that there exists a whole world – the genuine Western world – that has no problems to flourish despite its disbelief in Allah or climate change.File photo: Shakti Gauchan ended with figures of 7-2-7-2 for Nepal © ICC
Uganda clinched a one-run win against Singapore by defending nine runs and taking two wickets in the last over. Chasing 197, Singapore were 119 for 2, but squandered the strong start to hand Uganda their second win in a row.
Opting to bat, Uganda got an opening stand of 62 in 14 overs but they lost wickets regularly once the stand was broken. Opener Roger Mukasa top-scored with 37 off 44 and No. 3 Hamu Bagenda's 36 took them to 150. But medium-pacer Saad Janjua ran through the middle- and lower-order with four wickets, and Uganda collapsed from 150 for 4 to 196 all out.
Singapore were cruising in the chase as their top four batsmen scored 136 runs together. They were 119 for 2 in the 33rd over, after Chetan Suryawanshi's 42, but Jonathan Sebanja and Mukasa took two wickets apiece and put Singapore off track. Janjua nearly pulled it off for Singapore with a 26-ball 20 but he fell in the final over.
The left-arm spinners Basant Regmi and Shakti Gauchan, as well as the medium-pacer Amrit Bhattarai snared two wickets apiece, as Nepal crushed Bermuda by eight wickets in Kuala Lumpur to record their first win of the tournament.
Bermuda, having been inserted, were steady at 77 for 2 in the 20th over, but the run-out of their top scorer Christian Burgess (28) triggered a collapse, as the team lost their last eight wickets for just 23 runs. Bhattarai (2 for 20) and Regmi (2 for 23) wrecked Bermuda's top order before Gauchan claimed 2 for 7 from his seven overs to help bundle them out for 100 in 40.1 overs.
Nepal had little trouble reaching the paltry target. The opener Naresh Budayair fell cheaply for 6, but a 55-run stand for the second wicket between Subash Khakurel (30) and Binod Bhandari (43*) ensured they completed they waltzed home in 11.1 overs.
Fifties from Suharril Fetri and Shafiq Sharif helped Malaysia register their first win by beating USA by five wickets. Chasing 187, a stand of 96 between Fetri and Sharif took them home in the penultimate over.
USA were put in to bat and lost their openers cheaply. The innings was resurrected by Srini Santhanam (36) but progress was sluggish. Shahrulnizam Yusof and Khizar Hayat didn't let them settle down and reduced them to 124 for 7 in the 44th over with two wickets each. A 21-ball 42 from Adil Bhatti propelled them to 186 for 8.
Malaysia's openers didn't survive for too long either before captain Ahmed Faiz (32) and Fetri resisted. They lost two quick wickets after the 20th over and were soon 93 for 5 before Fetri and Sharif sealed the win.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.When it comes to Frederik Andersen's masks, everything is awesome.
The Anaheim Ducks goaltender had three new helmets made last season, including an incredible homage to "Reservoir Dogs," a tribute to former teammate Teemu Selanne, and a Lego-themed mask in honor of his Danish roots.
Now, Andersen is taking the Lego theme one step further. Here's his latest, courtesy of noted mask designer David Gunnarsson:
"Frederik Andersen is a huge Lego fan, just like me," Gunnarsson wrote on Facebook.
"And since Frederik is from Denmark, just like Lego, Frederik wanted to pay tribute to the coolest toy ever. His Lego mask from last year was a huge success … and (here) comes the next chapter.."
It's the mask Andersen deserves, but not the one he needs right now.
- With h/t to InGoal MagazineLocusts make a quick meal of early plantings
Updated
A Mallee grower in South Australia says locusts have eaten their way through hundreds of hectares of early-sown crops.
Wunkar farmer Ian Cass said he thought sowing crops including rye slightly early was a good idea after good rains, but they are now all gone.
"100 per cent of that, the whole lot's gone, there's not even a blade left out there of any kind," he said.
With sowing to begin soon throughout the region, there is widespread concern about how long locusts will hang around.
South Australian Research and Development Institute entomologist Ken Henry says temperatures need to cool down before the locust problem will ease.
"The locusts [will] probably be around 'til the middle of winter," he said.
Growers are being encouraged to watch for locust eggs which would hatch in spring.
Topics: pest-management, pests, agricultural-crops, grain, rural, sa, port-pirie-5540, renmark-5341
First postedStory highlights The strike took place on Friday near the Syrian town of al-Shaddadi
A defense official said 12 additional ISIS fighters were likely killed along with Shishani
Washington (CNN) A top ISIS leader, known as Omar "the Chechen" al-Shishani, was "critically injured" in a U.S. airstrike in northeastern Syria last week, activists for a Syrian opposition group said Wednesday.
The U.S. military and intelligence community was assessing Tuesday whether the strike had killed al-Shishani, several U.S. officials told CNN. The strike took place on Friday near the Syrian town of al-Shaddadi. There were also 12 additional ISIS fighters likely killed in the strike, Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook said in a statement.
Al-Shishani has a reputation as one of ISIS' most capable commanders. There has been a $5 million reward on his head from the U.S. State Department. Shishani is a former member of an elite Georgian military unit.
"Batirashvili is a battle-tested leader with experience who had led ISIL fighters in numerous engagements in Iraq and Syria," Cook said in the statement.
Read MoreDeath of Sri Lankan asylum seeker Leorsin Seemanpillai in Geelong a 'tragic incident', says Scott Morrison
Updated
Immigration Minister Scott Morrison says the death of an asylum seeker who set himself on fire over the weekend in Geelong was a "terrible and tragic incident".
But the Minister is warning his critics against making "assumptions" about what led Sri Lankan man Leorsin Seemanpillai to take his life.
The Tamil man arrived in Darwin from India on January 9, 2013, and was held in detention before being granted a bridging visa with work rights in June last year.
He died of his injuries in hospital in Melbourne yesterday from burns to 90 per cent of his body.
Today Mr Morrison said Mr Seemanpillai had been "receiving community mental health support" for "some period of time".
He said Mr Seemanpillai had not received an outcome on his visa application, and that his claim for asylum was still being processed.
"There was no indication he was being removed anywhere or he hadn't been found to be a refugee or for that matter that he had," he said.
"This man sadly died as a result of a very serious set of injuries that were self-inflicted.
"And I don't think we're in any position - and I frankly don't think anyone is in any position - to draw any conclusions about what is in a person's mind in this situation."
Refugee groups say asylum seekers living in fear of torture on return
Mr Seemanpillai is the second asylum seeker to set himself alight in two months and refugee advocates are now calling on the Federal Government to reverse its policy of returning Tamils to Sri Lanka.
Trevor Grant from the Tamil Refugee Council met Mr Seemanpillai and says he was depressed over the handling of his application for protection.
"Leo has been severely depressed for some time, for well over a year, and what we basically believe is that it was caused by the fact that there was no decision on his application for a protection visa, and he'd been living in fear basically," he said.
"A lot of these asylum seekers are telling us that they would rather die here than go back to Sri Lanka and possible torture. Perhaps that is what was in Leo's mind."
It is a sentiment echoed by Phil Glendenning of the Refugee Council, who said: "Young Leo, who came to this country to seek protection, was instead punished".
"The desperation is something that is very hard to describe," he said. "The depression meets the certainty that if they return they will be killed."
Mr Glendenning says there is a fear of being sent back to Sri Lanka and a fear of "utter hopelessness" of being trapped in a system that sees compassion for people as weakness.
Chair of the Australasian Federation of Tamil Associations, Dr Victor Rajakulendran, says the Government process of assessing Tamils' refugee status needs to be improved.
"In my opinion, nobody should be sent back to Sri Lanka because Sri Lanka considers them as traitors and treat them accordingly," he said. "The treatment is mainly torture."
Dr Rajakulendran says the Australian Government needs to talk to the Indian government regarding sending Tamil refugees to India rather than Sri Lanka, if they fail the refugee test.
Friends say Seemanpillai was 'lovely', 'honourable'
Mr Seemanpillai's family in India has been contacted and has requested he be given a Roman Catholic funeral in Geelong.
Tim Gooden, from Geelong Trades Hall, told 774 ABC Melbourne he was a good friend of Mr Seemanpillai and that he had known him since last year.
"He was lovely. He was smaller than a lot of the other men. He was very kind and quite shy," he said.
Cathie Bond, another close friend of Mr Seemanpillai, described him as an "extraordinarily honourable man".
"Leo and his housemates were lent some money for a bond for their rental home. Leo was meticulous about paying that money back within weeks," she said through a statement from the Combined Refugee Action Group.
"His bridging visa allowed him to work, and he took various jobs, including cleaning, yard work and truck washing, in order to bring in an income.
"One of Leo's bosses told me that Leo was the best worker he's ever had. Out of the money he earned, he made contributions to children living in poverty in India.
"Even in his death, he contributed to the lives of others through organ donation. Such was the calibre of the man."
Topics: death, immigration, community-and-society, suicide, geelong-3220, australia
First postedDormitories at Aviano Air Base, Italy. A U.S. airman suspected of stabbing a fellow servicemember in a base dormitory in April has been formally charged with multiple crimes, including attempted murder.
AVIANO AIR BASE, Italy — An airman suspected of breaking into a dormitory room and repeatedly stabbing a female airman in April has been formally charged with several crimes, including attempted murder, officials said Tuesday.
Airman Cameron Ashley Owens faces a court-martial, though no date has been set, said Capt. Tom Barger, chief of public affairs for the 31st Fighter Wing. He has been in military custody since he was suspected of committing the acts in the early morning hours of April 11.
Lt. Gen. Richard M. Clark, commander of the 3rd Air Force, referred the charges to a general court-martial last week, Barger said. Other charges against Owens, who is assigned to the 31st Operations Support Squadron, include attempted unlawful entry, aggravated assault and burglary.
Barger said that the court-martial would be held at Aviano and that the accused is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
Owens was reportedly identified on video surveillance footage and initially apprehended by Italian authorities. He was later turned over to Air Force custody and eventually transferred to a military holding facility in Sembach, Germany. He is expected to be remain there until the court-martial.
At an April 20 hearing to determine whether Owens would remain in custody, prosecutors did not provide a motive for the alleged crimes and said they believed that the 19-year-old did not have any prior connection to the victim. The knife reportedly used in the attack was later found by Air Force Office of Special Investigation agents during a search of Owens’ dorm room.
The victim, who has not been identified, was initially treated by fellow airmen who heard her screams and transferred to the hospital in Pordenone. The wing declined Tuesday to discuss her current status.
harris.kent@stripes.com'Wrong' note in Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1 corrected
Pianist Stephen Hough has uncovered a mistake in the second movement of the manuscript, corrected in blue pencil on the score.
Pianist Stephen Hough has uncovered a mistake in Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1, 138 years after the work was finished. After looking at the manuscript online in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, Stephen noticed a 'wrong note' F had been changed to a B flat in blue pencil.
Initially, Stephen believed the correction to be in Tchaikovsky's writing, describing the revelation as 'one of the most exciting musical discoveries' of his life. It's since emerged that the manuscript was a copyist's manuscript, prepared for Hans von Bülow as he performed the concerto throughout the world, and the correction may have been made by Bülow himself.
Before seeing the manuscript, Stephen cited a number of reasons for wanting to change the note in the score: the theme appears a number of times throughout the concerto, but only once with the F in the flute part. The rogue F also creates a clash between the G flat in the strings and changes the symmetry of the theme, which spans five notes up and five notes down in the four-bar phrase.Several times in the last few weeks, OSTraining students have asked us about maps in Drupal.
The students wanted to set up directories that would show Google maps for each location.
They also wanted to create larger maps that would display multiple locations at once.
We recommended that the students use the GMap module. However, although that module is powerful, it is poorly documented and can be confusing to use.
So, here's a beginners guide to the GMap module.
Adding a Location Field to Content We need two key modules to make our maps work. Install and enable both of those modules: GMap : https://www.drupal.org/project/gmap
: https://www.drupal.org/project/gmap Location: https://www.drupal.org/project/location After installing and enabling them, enable the Location CCK module too. Now we need to select Google Maps for our maps. Go to Configuration > Content authoring > Location > Geocoding Settings.
Select Google Maps for all the countries in which you want to list locations.
Go to Structure > Content types > Manage fields
Add an "Location" field to your content type:
On the field settings, choose what options you want to collect for each location:
Save the field.
Click the Manage Display tab
Choose a format for your field that will show the map. "Address with map" is a good choice.
Click "Add content"
Create a new content, including entering the address:
If everything has worked correctly, your content will appear with the map automatically generated, as in the image below. We found a lot of people on the Drupal forums had problems with this step. They could manually enter their latitude and longitude settings, but GMap wouldn't generate them automatically. If you have this problem, you're not alone, and there are several possible solutions on the Drupal forums.
Controlling the Layout of Maps By default, GMap provides a very small default map, but it also provides a great tool to solve that problem. GMap has a "Build a GMap macro" option will allows you to design your map display:
The image below shows the macro that GMap will create for you. Copy the macro that you create.
Go to Structure > Content types > Manage fields > Edit your Location fields.
Paste your new macro into the field settings:
Creating the Large Map Before you move onto creating the large map, make sure you have created more than one content item that uses your location field, otherwise you won't be able to see if this large map is working. Go to Structure > Views > Add new view
Choose your view settings, but make sure to choose "GMap" for Display format:
Click Continue & edit
Click Settings next to GMap
Enter a macro for a large map:
Save your view and your markers will show on your map.
There is much more that can be done with GMap, including adding tooltips for each marker, but hopefully this beginners guide is enough to get you up and running.Under FASTR, every federal agency that spends more than $100 million on grants for research would be required to adopt an open access policy that gives the public access to all research no later than 12 months after publication.
FASTR isn’t a perfect bill. An ideal open access mandate would require that the research be shared under a license that allows anyone not only to read the research, but also to reuse and redistribute it for any purpose. It would also have a much shorter embargo period. That said, this is a crucial moment for Congress to take action, and FASTR is the best option on the table.
There’s already a White House Office of Science and Technology memo that requires agencies to develop public access policies, but White House directives can come and go. That’s why it’s essential to lock an open access policy into law this year before the next administration takes over.Texas man steals from Walmart, police let him go because he was hungry
The holiday spirit must be afoot in Kaufman, Texas. According to the Star-Telegram a Kaufman Police Department officer is under investigation after letting an alleged Walmart shoplifter off with a warning for swiping a turkey leg and a bottle of Gatorade last Wednesday.
Learn more about Walmart in the following slides... less The holiday spirit must be afoot in Kaufman, Texas. According to the Star-Telegram a Kaufman Police Department officer is under investigation after letting an alleged Walmart shoplifter off with a warning for... more Photo: Alan Diaz, STF Photo: Alan Diaz, STF Image 1 of / 15 Caption Close Texas man steals from Walmart, police let him go because he was hungry 1 / 15 Back to Gallery
The holiday spirit must be afoot in Kaufman, Texas.
According to the Star-Telegram a Kaufman Police Department officer is under investigation for letting an alleged Walmart shoplifter off with a warning for swiping a turkey leg and a bottle of Gatorade last Wednesday.
RELATED: Texas family creates massive Star Wars Christmas lights display
The young suspect told the officer that he hadn't eaten in two days, according to the officer's daughter. The officer gave the man money for food and let him go with a warning.
While Walmart staff wanted to press charges on the suspect the officer declined, saying that he didn't believe it was appropriate.
Kaufman police, meanwhile, appear to be backing the officer according to a press release late last week, but they still were obligated to relieve him of duty temporarily while a full investigation is completed.
The department actually commended the officer for his act of kindness in the release but said that there was an incident that occurred at the station when he returned and discussed the incident, which required an internal investigation.
RELATED: Texans rookies treat kids to Christmas shopping spree
According to WFAA-TV, the officer is a five-year police veteran and previous to his law enforcement service he served in the United States Marine Corps for nine years.
Kelsey Stevens, who identified herself as the officer's daughter, said that she stands by what her father did in regards to the hungry man, who she says was only trying to feed himself.
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"He didn't rob anyone at gunpoint, he was a young guy who was literally hungry," Stevens said. "It was a turkey leg, a Gatorade, and that was it."
Wal-Mart declined to comment to the outlet on the matter.
Craig Hlavaty is a reporter for Chron.com and HoustonChronicle.com. He's an intolerable native Texan with too much ink in his skin and too much brisket stuck in his teeth.Toys for Tats Details So how does Toys for Tats work? Simple! Just donate a new unwrapped toy $5 value or greater at a Participating Store and you get a $20 Toys for Tats Gift Voucher Card! Of course there is the fine print! Promotion runs November 15th through December 23rd during normal business hours at participating stores. For more information on normal business hours contact a participating store. You must donate a new unwrapped toy $5 value or greater at a participating store. A list of participating stores will be available November 15th. Any participating tattoo studios, tattoo artists, body piercers or any other staff member or employee may refuse service to anyone at anytime for any reason whatsoever. All local, state and federal laws governing tattooing are to be observed. Therefore, you may have to be 18 yrs of age in order to receive a tattoo from a participating tattoo studio among other legal requirements. Contact the participating tattoo studio for more information. Any of these offers are not valid with or in combination with any other offers, specials, price breaks, special price quotes and/or any other promotion of any kind. No cash value or rain checks on any product, service, or offer related to this promotion. Some limitations may apply, rules subject to change without notice. Only one card activation allowed per user registration. Failure to follow the rules will result in automatic disqualification and removal from the premises. $20 Toys for Tats gift voucher cards are limited to one per donation. Not valid until issued at a store after a donation. Expires after expiry date. Expiry date is available on website. No cash value. Not redeemable for cash. No change on redemption. Not valid in combination with any other gift certificate, gift card, discount, promotion or offer of any kind. Valid only on a single individual service $60 or greater. Valid only at participating stores. Participating stores list will only be available on the website. Lost or stolen cards will not be replaced except as required by law. $20 Toys for Tats gift voucher card valid from date of donation in store to January 31st the year after the current year on purchases of of a single individual service greater than $60.(updated below)
The New York Times and the Obama administration have created a disturbing collaborative pattern that asserted itself again on Sunday with the paper's long article purporting to describe the events leading up to the execution by the CIA of US citizen Anwar Awlaki. Time and again, the Obama administration shrouds what it does with complete secrecy, and then uses that secrecy to avoid judicial review of its actions and/or compelled statutory disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. "Oh, we're so sorry", says the Obama DOJ, "but we cannot have courts deciding if what we did is legal, nor ordering us to disclose information under FOIA, because these programs are so very secret that any disclosure would seriously jeopardize national security".
But then, senior Obama officials run to the New York Times by the dozens, demand (and receive) anonymity, and then spout all sorts of claims about these very same programs that are designed to justify what the US government has done and to glorify President Obama. The New York Times helpfully shields these officials - who are not blowing any whistles, but acting as government spokespeople - from being identified, and then mindlessly regurgitates their assertions as fact. It's standard government stenography, administration press releases masquerading as in-depth news articles.
Sunday's lengthy NYT article on the Awlaki killing by Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane is a classic case of this arrangement. It purports to provide "an account of what led to the Awlaki strike" that is "based on interviews with three dozen current and former legal and counterterrorism officials and outside experts". But what it really does is simply summarize the unverified justifications of the very officials involved in the killing, most of whom are permitted to justify themselves while hiding behind anonymity. It devotes itself with particular fervor to defending the actions of former Obama OLC lawyers David Barron and Marty Lederman, who concocted the theories to authorize due-process-free assassinations of American citizens (those same Democratic lawyers were, needless to say, among the most vocal critics of the Bush administration's War on Terror policies that denied due process and relied on rampant secrecy).
There are many points to make about all of this. To begin with, will the Obama administration - which has persecuted whistleblowers with an unprecedented fervor and frequency - launch a criminal investigation to determine the identity of the "three dozen current and former legal and counterterrorism officials" who spoke to the NYT about the classified Awlaki hit, or, as usual, are such punishments reserved for those who embarrass rather than glorify the president?
Moreover, why can Obama officials run to the NYT after the fact and make all sorts of claims about the mountains of evidence supposedly proving Awlaki's guilt, but not have done the same thing in a court of law prior to killing him? As the NYT notes, when the ACLU sued on behalf of Awlaki's father seeking to enjoin Obama from killing his son, the Obama DOJ invoked the "state secrets" privilege, insisting that the evidence against Awlaki was so secret that national security would be jeopardized if disclosed to the court: the very same alleged evidence that Obama officials are now spilling to the NYT. They also deliberately refused to indict him, which would have at least required showing some evidence to a court to justify the accusations against him and would have enabled him to turn himself in and defend himself if inclined to do so.
All of this highlights why it's so odious to prosecute and convict people in a newspaper after you execute them, rather than in a court of law before you end their life. As but one example, the statements about Awlaki from attempted underwear bomber Umar Abdulmutallab on which the NYT heavily relies to assert Awlaki's guilt would have been subjected to intense cross-examination to see if they were simply the results of Abdulmutallab giving the government what they wanted - namely, statements that incriminated someone they wanted to kill - in exchange for favors as part of his plea agreement. It's so basic, though the NYT seems not to have heard, that statements made by accused criminals in exchange for favors as part of a plea bargain are among the most unreliable.
But that kind of critical scrutiny only happens in courtrooms, with due process. By contrast, asserted government evidence is simply mindlessly assumed to be true when it's fed to journalists after the fact without anyone to contradict it or any process available to disprove it. As the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights jointly said yesterday about this NYT story:
"This is the latest in a series of one-sided, selective disclosures that prevent meaningful public debate and legal or even political accountability for the government's killing program, including its use against citizens. "Government officials have made serious allegations against Anwar al-Aulaqi, but allegations are not evidence, and the whole point of the Constitution's due process clause is that a court must distinguish between the two. If the government has evidence that Al-Aulaqi posed an imminent threat at the time it killed him, it should present that evidence to a court."
Indeed, while the NYT asserts as though it's incontrovertible that he was "a senior operative in Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen", Yemen experts such as Gregory Johnsen have long said the opposite: "We suspect a great deal about Anwar al-Awlaki, but we know very little, precious little when it comes to his operational role" and "Mendelsohn [said]: '(Awlaki) played an important role in a string of attacks in the West'. We just don't know this, we suspect it but don't know it."
Beyond that, the DOJ officials whose conduct is defended by this story have long been important sources to the very NYT reporters writing this article (not just during the Obama years but also the Bush years), so it's a typical case of journalists using anonymity to serve the agendas of their government sources. And it's yet another case where journalistic anonymity is granted not to protect whistleblowers from recriminations by the powerful, but to protect government officials from accountability so they can justify government conduct. And, finally, Marcy Wheeler details several extremely dubious claims that were passed off as fact by this NYT article: here and here.
But I want to focus on one key point. What prompted my opposition from the start to the attempted killing of Awlaki was that it was very clear he was being targeted because of his anti-American sermons that were resonating among English-speaking Muslim youth (sermons which, whatever you think of them, are protected by the First Amendment), and not because he was a Terrorist operative. In other words, the US government was trying to murder one of its own citizens as punishment for his political and religious views that were critical of the government's policies, and not because of any actual crimes or warfare.
The NYT addresses this concern directly with a long, convoluted explanation that the Obama administration refrained from targeting Awlaki when they thought he was only a "dangerous propagandist", and decided to kill him only once they obtained proof that he was an actual Terrorist operative. The NYT says that this proof was obtained in "late January 2010" when Abdulmutallab cooperated with authorities and claimed Awlaki participated in his plot. In order to validate this explanation, the NYT claims that a December, 2009 drone strike in Yemen that was widely reported at the time to have targeted Awlaki - and which media outlets falsely reported killed him - was actually targeting others, and that Awlaki would merely have been oh-so-coincidental (and perfectly legal) "collateral damage". Here is the NYT's effort to insist that the Obama administration targeted Awlaki for death only once it obtained evidence in late January, 2010 that he was more than a mere propagandist:
"[Awlaki's] eloquent, English-language exhortations to jihad turned up repeatedly on the computers of young plotters of violence arrested in Britain, Canada and the United States. "By 2008, said Philip Mudd, then a top F.B.I. counterterrorism official, Mr. Awlaki 'was cropping up as a radicalizer - not in just a few investigations, but in what seemed to be every investigation.' "In November 2009, when Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was charged with opening fire at Fort Hood in Texas and killing 13 people, Mr. Awlaki finally found the global fame he had long appeared to court. Investigators quickly discovered that the major had exchanged e-mails with Mr. Awlaki, though the cleric's replies had been cautious and noncommittal. But four days after the shootings, the cleric removed any doubt about where he stood. "'Nidal Hassan is a hero', he wrote on his widely read blog. 'He is a man of conscience who could not bear living the contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people.' "As chilling as the message was, it was still speech protected by the First Amendment. American intelligence agencies intensified their focus on Mr. Awlaki, intercepting communications that showed the cleric's growing clout in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, a Yemen-based affiliate of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network. "On Dec. 24, 2009, in the second American strike in Yemen in eight days, missiles hit a meeting of leaders of the affiliate group. News accounts said one target was Mr. Awlaki, who was falsely reported to have been killed. "In fact, other top officials of the group were the strike's specific targets, and Mr. Awlaki's death would have been collateral damage - legally defensible as a death incidental to the military aim. As dangerous as Mr. Awlaki seemed, he was proved to be only an inciter; counterterrorism analysts did not yet have incontrovertible evidence that he was, in their language, "operational." "That would soon change. The next day, a 23-year-old Nigerian named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried and failed to blow up an airliner as it approached Detroit. The would-be underwear bomber told FBI agents that after he went to Yemen and tracked down Mr. Awlaki, his online hero, the cleric had discussed'martyrdom and jihad' with him, approved him for a suicide mission, helped him prepare a martyrdom video and directed him to detonate his bomb over United States territory, according to court documents. "In his initial 50-minute interrogation on Dec. 25, 2009, before he stopped speaking for a month, Mr. Abdulmutallab said he had been sent by a terrorist named Abu Tarek, although intelligence agencies quickly found indications that Mr. Awlaki was probably involved. When Mr. Abdulmutallab resumed cooperating with interrogators in late January, an official said, he admitted that 'Abu Tarek' was Mr. Awlaki. With the Nigerian's statements, American officials had witness confirmation that Mr. Awlaki was clearly a direct plotter, no longer just a dangerous propagandist. "'He had been on the radar all along, but it was Abdulmutallab's testimony that really sealed it in my mind that this guy was dangerous and that we needed to go after him,' said Dennis C. Blair, then director of national intelligence."
So that tortured justification for what the Obama administration did, laundered through the NYT, is clear in its claims: (1) we were legally and constitutionally barred from trying to kill Awlaki when we thought he was just a propagandist; (2) the December, 2009 strike wasn't really targeting him, despite what media outlets reported at the time, because we did not yet have evidence that he was a Terrorist plotter; and (3) we acquired that evidence only in late January, 2010, and only then did we start to target Awlaki for execution. Obviously, those claims are necessary to defend themselves from what would clearly be criminal behavior: trying to kill a US citizen because of the government's dislike for his political and religious speech.
But the first journalist to report on the existence of Obama's kill list and the inclusion of US citizens was the Washington Post's Dana Priest. On January 26, 2010, this is what she wrote:
"As part of the operations [in Yemen], Obama approved a Dec. 24 strike against a compound where a US citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, was thought to be meeting with other regional al-Qaeda leaders. Although he was not the focus of the strike and was not killed, he has since been added to a shortlist of US citizens specifically targeted for killing or capture by the JSOC, military officials said... "The Obama administration has adopted the same stance. If a US citizen joins al-Qaeda, 'it doesn't really change anything from the standpoint of whether we can target them', a senior administration official said. 'They are then part of the enemy.' "Both the CIA and the JSOC maintain lists of individuals, called 'High Value Targets' and 'High Value Individuals', whom they seek to kill or capture. The JSOC list includes three Americans, including Aulaqi, whose name was added late last year. As of several months ago, the CIA list included three US citizens, and an intelligence official said that Aulaqi's name has now been added."
According to Priest's reporting back then, the Obama administration was trying to execute Awlaki as early as late 2009 - exactly when the Obama officials who spoke to the NYT admit that they had no evidence that he was anything other than a "propagandist" and this his targeted killing would therefore be unconstitutional and illegal. ( |
during his first campaign reporting period that ended Dec. 31, 2014, according to the district attorney’s office.
In total, 25 donors, most of them family and friends, were allegedly paid back $24,250. The donors’ names were listed on a campaign finance report that was allegedly signed by Rodriguez under the penalty of perjury and submitted to the commission, prosecutors said.
Over a 22-day period in December 2014, nearly half the campaign contributions received by Rodriguez were allegedly fraudulent because Rodriguez and Melendrez reimbursed those who gave them, according to the District Attorney’s Office.
Rodriguez represents Board District 5, an eastern portion of the school district that stretches from Eagle Rock to South Gate.
If convicted on the felony counts, Rodriguez faces a possible maximum sentence of four years and four months in local custody, which could include jail or house arrest. Melendrez, 45, faces up to three years in local custody.
Rodriguez issued a statement early Wednesday evening, saying, “This decision by the District Attorney comes after attempts by my legal team and me to resolve these issues with the Los Angeles Ethics Commission for over two years.
“As the product of an immigrant family, nobody has more respect for the integrity of the American justice system than I do,” Rodriguez said. “I have cooperated with authorities and hope these issues will be resolved expeditiously and fairly.”
Earlier Wednesday, Rodriguez and Melendrez appeared in court in downtown Los Angeles. But their arraignment was continued until Oct. 24, said Greg Risling, spokesman for the LA district attorney’s office.
Both defendants stood with their attorneys as Superior Court Judge Deborah Brazil rejected a prosecution request for bail and allowed them to remain free on their own recognizance. Brazil did order that their passports be surrendered at their next court appearance in October.
At the courthouse, both defendants declined comment, allowing their attorneys to speak for them.
“We’re going to come back to court in a couple of weeks and see where things stand,” Rodriguez’s attorney, Daniel Nixon, said outside court. “My client intends to go back to work for the LAUSD tomorrow and continue to do the job he was elected to do.”
“This is much ado about nothing,” Melendrez’s attorney, Mark Werksman, said outside court. “We are surprised this has risen to the level of a criminal prosecution.” Werksman said it was “mystifying” that county prosecutors would bring a case “over such a small amount of money so long ago.”
The investigation began in March 2015 when the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission received a whistleblower complaint about Rodriguez’s alleged fundraising activities.
The ethics commission is pursuing its own administrative hearing process on the allegations. Rodriguez and Melendrez are each charged with 25 acts of laundering funds into Rodriguez’s primary campaign committee during his 2015 campaign, the commission said. The commission said the maximum penalty it can levy is $5,000 per violation.
During the 2015 election, when Rodriguez was elected to the board, campaign contributions to an LAUSD board candidate couldn’t exceed $1,100 per person, according to the accusations filed by the ethics commission.
The ethics commission said that shortly after starting his campaign in November 2014 for a school board seat, Rodriguez gave $26,000 of his own money to Melendrez, a key campaign volunteer, and told her to funnel the money into his campaign account by asking family members to make contributions.
“Melendrez enticed 25 family members and friends to make campaign contributions by telling them that their contributions would be reimbursed,” according to the ethics commission accusation. Those contributions ranged from $775 to $1,100 each and totaled $24,250. Melendrez paid back all 25 contributions using Rodriguez’s money, according to the commission.
In a Jan. 12, 2015, campaign disclosure statement, Rodriguez certified that he had raised $51,001 in contributions from other people when in fact half of the reported funds were actually his own money, the commission alleged.
“We can’t comment on ongoing investigations,” said David Tristan, deputy executive director of the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, when reached by phone.
The school district quickly issued a statement about the charges against Rodriguez, who was named board president in July.
“L.A. Unified has been made aware of the charges against Dr. Ref Rodriguez. These allegations are not connected to any District business. However, we will cooperate, as needed, with the District Attorney’s Office,” said the district’s General Counsel David Holmquist in a statement.
Generally speaking, the commission’s administrative enforcement process requires it to schedule the item before the 5-member civilian board, which will make a determination on whether to refer it to an administrative law judge or hear the case itself, Tristan of the ethics commission said. If the matter is referred to the judge, he or she will make a recommendation to the board, which has the final authority to determine if violations exist and whether to issue penalties.
Administrative penalties — which are separate from those levied by the courts — can be $5,000 per count, or three times the amount at issue, whichever is greater, he said.
Bob Stern, first general counsel of the Fair Political Practice Commission from 1975 to 1983, said candidates are allowed to donate unlimited amounts to their own campaigns, so the allegations that he chose to funnel his money to the campaign illegally is unusual.
“You see one or two (laundering) cases like that a year where interest groups are trying to influence a candidate,” Stern said, adding that if what prosecutors say is true, “this is one of very few cases I’ve seen where a candidate was money laundering” his own money.
Staff writers Brenda Gazzar, Wes Woods II and Elizabeth Chou and City News Service contributed to this report.Growth in the eurozone halved in the April-to-June period to 0.3 percent, dropping from a far more robust expansion of 0.6 percent in the previous quarter, data released by the Eurostat statistics agency showed on Friday.
The period covered by the gross domestic product (GDP) data largely pre-dates the British vote in late June to leave the European Union which the European Central Bank (ECB) warned last week would negatively influence growth in Europe for years to come.
Signals so far are that economic activity in the eurozone is proving resilient despite the vote after strong initial shocks rocked the financial markets.
Eurostat also released the bloc's unemployment figures for the month of June, which showed that the jobless rate in the region remained stable at 10.1 percent.
The number of people out of work in the eurozone did decrease by 37,000 from May to June, but the drop was not enough to alter the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, the agency said.
While the eurozone has made some progress in reducing the rate of joblessness in recent months, many still view the number of people out of work to be unacceptably high.
A divergence
A total of 16.3 million people were unemployed across the bloc in June, and just under 3 million of them were under the age of 25, leading to a youth unemployment rate of 20.8 percent.
There's a vast divergence among the area's members on this front. Countries like Malta, the Czech Republic and Germany recorded the lowest jobless rate, with overall unemployment at around 4 percent. Malta and Germany also posted the lowest youth unemployment at around 7 percent.
Greece and Spain, on the other hand, continued to report the highest figures, with overall unemployment around 20 percent and youth unemployment above 45 per cent.
But Spain was among the countries that in June posted the largest year-on-year decrease in overall unemployment.
At the same time, Italy - the bloc's third-biggest economy - witnessed a mixed trend. Youth unemployment fell to 36.5 percent, the lowest since October 2012, but the overall jobless rate edged up to 11.6 percent.
Meanwhile, consumer prices across the eurozone rose 0.2 percent in July, after gaining 0.1 percent in June. Nevertheless, the rate is far off the ECB's target of just below 2 percent.
Eurozone inflation has stuck around the 0-percent mark for months, as fears of deflation have dogged the currency area.
European officials, however, have argued that external factors such as oil prices have kept rates low, rather than across-the-board drops in price levels.
sri/hg (dpa, AFP, Reuters)We've discussed how to clean your electronics without ruining them, but if your cleaning job involves taking your case apart and cleaning out your dusty case fans for better airflow, a few dryer sheets (even old ones fresh from the dryer) will do the trick and whisk the dust away.
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Dryer sheets (or fabric softener sheets, depending on where you're from) have tons of great uses outside of the dryer, from polishing fixtures and faucets to cleaning pots and pans. If a can of compressed air isn't enough to fully clean the caked on dust from your PC's case fans, the light abrasiveness of a dryer sheet is enough to do the trick, and if you use ones that have already been through the dryer, they're headed for the trash anyway.
Alternatively, you can use a few microfiber cloths to do the same thing, and then wash them to reuse later. Even so, if you already have dryer sheets, want to get right in to the fan blades, and would rather save your microfiber for other tasks, this is a good option.
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Title image by Jake Sumpter.
5 Basics for a Tech Clean Up Kit | Apartment TherapyI know we’re talking about different churches here, but the juxtaposition is just appalling.
Yesterday, we posted about a Chattanooga church that kicked three people out of the congregation for supporting a family member’s civil rights as a gay woman.
Well, another Chattanooga church is *not* kicking out the pastor’s son… and wait till you hear what he did:
A 21-year-old pastor’s son won’t be allowed to work with children or hold a leadership position at the Vineyard Community Church in Chattanooga after being charged with simple battery, two counts of third-degree cruelty to children and sexual assault in connection with an incident at a church camp. Affidavits in Carroll County, Ga., allege that [Zachary Anderle] climbed on top of a 13-year-old camper and placed his penis on top of the boy’s crotch while other boys were watching. Anderle also slapped the child’s face, the report states. … “Zachary will not be allowed back at any future camp events, as a counselor or otherwise. Also, the church has removed Zachary from the church’s band rotation,” said Bud Winderweedle, a member of the investigative committee the church organized to look into the incident.
It was all just horseplay, they’re saying. Horseplay that led to being charged with sexual assault. That guy will be allowed to stay in his church. He just can’t play in the band or go to church camp.
Meanwhile, the family members who supported a gay woman in their own family can’t go back to theirs.
Remember that the next time a Christian tells you you can’t be ethical if you don’t believe in God.
(Thanks to Jeremy for the link)Have living standards really stopped rising?
‘People drift in and out of all income groups as a result of luck or the life-cycle of a career’
Income inequality is soaring in the US and the UK. The income earned by all but a few has been stagnating for a generation. So I claimed in my column of March 22. But was I right?
Several readers contacted me to suggest alternative interpretations of what look like grim data. Their objections are worth considering: they teach us both about the way numbers can lead us astray, and about the way our economy is evolving.
The first claim is that what looks like stagnation isn’t, because real gains have been mislabelled as mere inflation. The everyday technology of today was the stuff of science fiction in the 1970s when this apparent stagnation began. Perhaps inflation measures haven’t kept up.
There is truth in this argument, although we will never know how much truth unless somebody figures out how many Sinclair ZX81s an iPad is worth. But we should be cautious. In the US, 40 per cent of the consumer price index (CPI) tracks the cost of housing and related costs such as domestic heating; another 30 per cent tracks the cost of food and drink.
If two-thirds of my income goes on basics such as food and shelter, and my income is barely keeping pace with the price of such basics, there is a limit to how ecstatic I am likely to feel about the fact that iPhones exist.
There is a more technical version of the “inflation is lower than we think” argument. Customers can switch between different goods to avoid some price increases: from apples to oranges, from Cox’s Orange Pippin to Granny Smith, from apples at Whole Foods to apples at Tesco. Inflation measures may miss some of that. Or perhaps measured inflation has failed to take full account of quality improvements such as safer, more comfortable, more efficient and more durable cars.
In the US, the Boskin Commission was convened to evaluate such questions and concluded, late in 1996, that the CPI was indeed overstating true inflation by about 1.1 per cent. That’s a shockingly large figure: large enough to matter and large enough to raise questions about whether it can be true. Official statistics have changed as a result, so even if plausible, then the overstatement should be smaller now.
Can it really be that most American families have enjoyed rising incomes which have simply been missed because of errors in measuring inflation? I am not qualified to judge, and the commission became a political football because many government benefits are indexed using variants of CPI.
All this raises the question of whether prices are rising faster for the rich, exaggerating the measured rise in inequality. This is not true in the long run, and recently the opposite has been true: the poor have faced higher inflation than the rich.
Let’s move away from inflation. There are other ways in which things may be cheerier than we think. Russ Roberts, author of econ-novels such as The Invisible Heart, invites us to think harder about flatlining median household income. The “household” has changed over time, getting smaller in the US. So, says Roberts, what looks like stagnation may simply be singledom. If two-person households today make less than four-person households in 1980, that is hardly a problem.
This is a fair point but the effect doesn’t seem large enough to help us much. US household sizes have not shrunk much over the past generation (from 2.63 in 1990 to 2.59 in 2010). Looking not at households but at individuals, real median income for men in the US was higher in 1990 than in 2012. And it was higher in 1978 than in 1990. That is hardly reassuring, even though women have enjoyed strong gains in median income.
A third claim has been made by my colleague Merryn Somerset Webb, among others. It’s that talking about the income share of “the 1 per cent” over time is simply an error, because there is no “1 per cent” over time. People drift in and out of all income groups as a result of luck (being sacked; earning a bonus) or the life-cycle of a career from trainee through the senior ranks to eventual retirement.
...
Merryn has a point, but not a killer argument. I strongly suspect (but cannot prove) that no more than 3 per cent of people spend at least a decade enjoying membership of the “top 1 per cent” – in the UK, the bar is £164,000 a year. The majority of people never reach those heights.
Most of these objections should lead us to conclude that growth is not quite as slow as we fear, and increasing inequality not quite as stark as it first seems. None of them is powerful enough to put my mind at rest.
Yet there is genuine encouragement for optimists from the developing world. While inequality in many countries is increasing, it’s gently falling globally, because the likes of China, India and Indonesia are growing much faster than rich countries. And the situation is better than that. As last year’s UN Human Development Report argued, inequality in health and education is being reduced much faster than inequality in income. For once, that is good news that matters.
Also published at ft.com.In November 2013, Big Finish will be releasing Doctor Who: The Light at the End, a very special 100-minute story to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Doctor Who. Tom Baker (1974-81), Peter Davison (1982-84), Colin Baker (1984-86), Sylvester McCoy (1987-89) and Paul McGann (1996) will all reprise their roles as, respectively, the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Doctors, whose paths suddenly intersect when they face imminent destruction.
“We wanted to do a proper, fully-fledged multi-Doctor story for this very special occasion,” says writer, director and executive producer Nicholas Briggs, “and it’s wonderful that all the surviving classic Doctors threw themselves behind the project so enthusiastically. That’s not to say the first three Doctors don’t appear – we wanted to pay homage to the whole history of the classic series.”
The Doctors will also be joined by a number of their regular companions: Louise Jameson reprises the role of the savage Leela, Sarah Sutton plays the scientist Nyssa, Nicola Bryant is American botany student Peri, Sophie Aldred is streetwise kid Ace and India Fisher returns as Edwardian adventurer Charley Pollard.
“And that’s not all,” says producer David Richardson, “because Geoffrey Beevers is back to create mayhem as the Master, and there will be a number of appearances from some much-cherished old friends from the TV series…”
Doctor Who: The Light at the End will be released in two different versions. A five-disc limited special edition comes with two hour-long documentaries, plus The Revenants, a Companion Chronicles tale which began life as a free Doctor Who Magazine download. It’s performed by William Russell, who starred in the very first TV story as Ian Chesterton. The special edition comes in beautiful special packaging, and will include a number of exclusive professionally photographed images of the cast.
The standard edition comprises two discs, featuring the two hour-long episodes of the story.Toronto mayor John Tory says the city will prepare to host up to 1,000 Syrian refugees in the next two years.
Tory announced he would support the goal set out by Lifeline Syria, an organization that facilitates the sponsorship of Syrian refugees, after meeting with the group and leaders from religious organizations across the city.
He says the city will look at creating a housing registry so that refugees who find themselves in Toronto without somewhere to live can find a place to stay.
The possibility of an insurance fund for privately sponsored refugees whose sponsors can no longer afford the commitment was also discussed.
Tory says the city’s role is to prepare for when refugees come, not to lobby the federal government to speed up the process. But he added that “there’s always a way we can be better and faster.”
International attention on the Syrian refugee crisis has heightened after a widely published photo showed a three-year-old boy who drowned while fleeing the war-torn country with his family.If you’ve been following Kickstarter projects lately, and it seems to be increasingly vital to do so as a fan of retro games, you might have noticed a futuristic racing project called GRIP gaining attention. If not, take a look at the video above. The goal is CAD$657,000 and the campaign runs until 10th September.
If you’re up on your futuristic racers you’ll know that the project is inspired by the Rollcage series, developed by Attention To Detail for Psygnosis in the late Nineties. The first game arrived on the PlayStation and PC in 1999, followed by the sequel Rollcage Stage II in 2000. Later on, Attention To Detail developed the very similar Firebugs for PlayStation in 2002, which released in Europe only.
However, GRIP’s heritage goes beyond simple inspiration – Rob Baker was a coder on the first two games, and David Perryman was a level designer on the first game and producer on the second. Together with Chris Mallinson, the director of GRIP who created its initial demo with Rob, they’re part of the Caged Element team developing the game. They’ve all come together to answer some questions about the new project for us too, so without further ado:
How did this project come together?
David Perryman: Rob Baker and I have been friends from back in the ATD days. We were having a beer one night and reminiscing about how great it was to work on Rollcage and Rollcage Stage II. I recalled a time during development when he’d got all prophetic and said that it was the best project he was ever likely to work on. We looked into our glasses and nodded agreement. It never occurred to us at that point that we might want to make the spiritual successor.
A few months later Rob was banging on the door with his laptop and demanding I have a look at what he’d done with this guy Chris from Canada. I was totally blown away with what they’d managed to come up with and I instantly agreed to lend a hand getting GRIP made.
Rob Baker: Coincidentally, soon after that, I was approached by a group of Rollcage fans who wanted to try and update the game in order to be able to play it well on modern machines. Binary decay had left it with some issues, yet they still loved playing it anyway, even after all these years. Nostalgia hit, and I happily fixed up a few things for them on both the original Rollcage and Stage II – now they’re excitedly kicking seven shades out of each other in their regular network games. Not long thereafter, Chris approached me with the idea of doing a whole new version of the game. Still warm from the glow of working on Rollcage again, how could I say no? It’d been too long; it’d been way too long.
Chris Mallinson: I was browsing the web one day, looking for any morsels of news on a sequel to my favourite racing game of all time. I came across something called Rollcage Redux that Rob had put out for current versions of Windows.
Intrigued by his passion and pushed by my own excitement, I shot him a rather disjointed proposal to make a game – a spiritual successor to our most beloved racer. Miraculously, he said yes! And here we are.
We started off slow, getting a feel for each other’s work ethic and personality, then pretty much exploded into developing the prototype you see in our media. It’s been a lot of work for two guys.
15 years have passed since the Rollcage games came out, and technology has moved on. How is GRIP using that extra power?
RB: Two things really, physics and rendering. Of course many things are better now than they were then, but these two in particular stand out as being far in advance. Rollcage was developed on the original PSX with two 33MHz processors and 3MB of RAM – it was another world. Already the physics and handling in GRIP make Rollcage look like a cartoon by comparison, and it’s only going to get better. As for the rendering, well, we’ve all seen what Unreal Engine 4 can do. Things like ambient occlusion and depth of field blurring were just a dream when we originally wrote Rollcage. It’s been a fulfilling experience, to say the least, to tread that ground again but with so many options in hand.
DP: When we did Rollcage we had to write all the tools and editor ourselves. A large proportion of the time was spent wrestling the editor into submission and pushing it beyond its limits. Now all that work is taken care of with UE4. I’m really looking forward to getting stuck into building some tracks again. From a design perspective this extra power is about having the opportunity to realise all the cool ideas we had when we were making Rollcage, but weren’t possible then. Like, massive skyscrapers falling from the sky and creating alternate routes over the track or a suspension bridge buckling under the barrage of rockets. We want the experience to be epic and every race to tell a unique story.
CM: Rollcage was a technically impressive game for its time: beautiful effects, never-seen-before physics, destructible environments and incredible AI. We want GRIP to be similarly impressive by today’s standards.
UE4 is pretty damn powerful. It allows for a ludicrous amount of polygons, textures and effects on screen at once, and it’s blueprint system is just incredible. I’m no coder, but I’ve built blueprints in Unreal that work, and work properly.
Not only that but it’s integration with other programs like World Machine make a world (ha) of difference, so you can easily dump beautiful landscapes into the engine. And then the spline tools allow you to draw and shape terrain and meshes into a proper track. It’s going to be a lot of fun coming up with tracks for GRIP, I can’t wait.
What else will GRIP do to build on the Rollcage template?
RB: It’s a fine line to tread here. Of course we want to please the original fans of Rollcage, but we also have to write a new game for a modern audience. There’s a core of precious gameplay there that we have to be very careful with. But we’re also adding value in things like weapons, where the Scorpion homing missile has a much more realistic flight path and has a much-evolved intelligent homing ability. We’re also adding new weapons like the Quaker proximity mine to take out any tail-gaters foolish enough to linger behind you. But it’s also in the little things, like possibly being able to destroy pick-up pads to deny your rivals, and in collecting salvage from around the racetrack to upgrade your car after the race. We’re thinking of enumerable ways to improve and enhance the Rollcage recipe. And we’re looking to the community for their input.
DP: It’s been 15 years and Rollcage has always been in the back of my mind. I think for me, it’s about building ‘moments’. One thing that stands out for me are the cool moments Rollcage offered: Rocket jumping off of a hill, hurtling through the air and timing it just right to get a boost off an exploding billboard before some deft movements get you back on track and carrying your speed to overtake your mate on the line. It’s a game that rewarded skill and offering these moments is something I’m keen to build on for GRIP. I know Chris has some great ideas on how to create those moments too.
CM: Rollcage is a great inspiration to us. But GRIP is a new game and a brand new IP. It’s going to be different in many ways.
For one we’d like the track layouts to further take advantage of the car’s design, with interesting ways of navigating. Like having 4-way split tunnels that have you steering onto the wall or ceiling to make it through, or trick jumps that have you going from ground to ceiling or spinning through a tight gap to an alternate route. And every route must be balanced so it’s not the dominant one, but an alternative with the right mix or danger and reward. Whether that means making it shorter but much harder to navigate, or having a pick-up along the way to lure people to take the more dangerous path.
Routes that are only accessible using weapons (like the missile) would be awesome as well. So you’d have to choose whether to use that missile against an opponent or open up another way to get ahead… or even rocket jump into different section of track. Now that would be cool.
This stuff takes a lot of fine-tuning though, and some things may not work in the end. It’s why we’re keen to get the community involved and are offering Alpha access to backers on Kickstarter, it’s not just a gimmick, we really want the community to feed back on how things work in game. David tells me that during development of Rollcage the whole team would play the game in their lunch hour and after work. I think that passion shines through in the quality of the original. We’re humbled to know our fans are passionate about GRIP too and we hope to capture that in the game as well.
Destruction is another big one.
Rollcage touched upon destruction as much as it could for tech era it was released in, but with UE4 and their destructibles system, we want to make it a big part of the game. Blast out a bridge support to bring the sucker down behind you, or ram an opponent into an adjacent pillar, sending them flying in a spray of debris. Again it’s about gameplay balancing, though, so for instance that bridge you brought down needs to have some arches or something that create ways through and not block the player entirely – while still creating a decent obstacle.
We also want to improve upon the feeling of weight with these cars. They’re big, hulking machines that are sometimes 5 times the size of a regular car, so they need to feel that way. You need to feel their tires tearing into the track as well as their mass as they smash into an obstacle or opponent. So far we think we’ve done a great job with this, and the vehicle this time around doesn’t feel as much like a toy, but without taking away that fun arcadey feel.
Pick-ups, as in weapons and power-ups are super important. We’re trying to give them a more tangible feel, adding a bit of realism where it works. Like the standard missile, which deploys out the side of the car and then ignites. Rather than just appearing and shooting forward, it lights up and propels itself at whatever angle it got thrown out of the car. Although it’s deadly accurate, it weaves and twirls as it finds it’s target. This way it just looks and feels a little more… well, cool.
How long did it take to create the one-track prototype that features in your pitch video?
DP: Rob and Chris have been working on that full time, for free, for most of this year. As you can see, from the work so far, they’re incredibly talented. I am so looking forward to having the opportunity to show off what they can achieve, if we’re lucky enough to reach our Kickstarter goal.
RB: The short answer, longer than we planned. But this was a prototype, and we did all the learning that a prototype is meant for. We took most of this year to develop the game and this particular track, but we believe it will take considerably less time for future tracks now that the learning curve has been summited. We’re actually pretty proud that just two devs, one artist and one coder, have produced everything in the game so far. This is testament to the power of UE4, and we’re very excited about getting a few more devs on-board post-Kickstarter to really get things moving. These are exciting times.
CM: Having to handle the art by myself has been pretty difficult at times. There’s been a lot to juggle. But one thing that I’m really pleased about is how the track turned out, all things considered. Truth be told, I was going to completely ditch its landscape and start fresh, but I salvaged it with a revamp on the lighting and textures. Then I took whatever assets I built and threw them into the map as best I could in the time that I had.
UE4’s spline system has been a life saver with creating the track’s tunnel sections. I’ve got a decently complex spline blueprint made (with some tech help from a talented friend) and that allows me to just drag out portions of tunnel to wherever I want, complete with all it’s meshes and lighting. So yeah, the track went through a lot of issues and iterations so it’s kind of a miracle it turned out ok, ha. It’s hard to say how many hours I put into it since I was jumping back and forth from task to task, but I have been working on it since early this year.
All that said, the current track was put together to showcase a decent level of graphical fidelity in our videos, and is not a true representation of tracks that will be in the full game – graphics-wise or design-wise. Those will not only look better, but have more interesting layouts.
How important is it to have original Rollcage team members on board?
RB: I think it’s a big plus. Writing Rollcage wasn’t easy, and neither will writing GRIP be. We’re having to extend and enhance our own version of UE4 to be able to do the things that GRIP needs to do from a physics perspective. In a way, that is testamant to the power of Unreal. Rollcage-style physics brings particular challenges. When there is no right-way-up any more, no real up nor down along with that tremendous speed, all the standard racing physics goes out of the window. This requires some particular experience, and some particular pedigree to be able to get done right. Knowing that our Producer also designed some of the best and most creative tracks in Rollcage is also no small thing, we’ve been very lucky in enticing David back into the scene.
DP: Cheers Rob. I think there are a lot of talented people in the World that I have absolutely no doubt could make a decent spiritual successor to Rollcage. However, to get that ‘feel’ just right and to create those ‘moments’ it needs a deep understanding about what’s at the heart of GRIP. This is not just a spiritual successor, but a heartfelt one too.
CM: Rob and Dave have been integral in this project getting off the ground. Without Rob’s programming skill and previous experience, I’d essentially be lost. There would be no GRIP. I’m sure he’d say the same about me, but all my art means nothing if it doesn’t actually do anything. In such a short time, he’s brought so many gameplay features to life and conquered so many unforeseen obstacles. It’s truly been a privilege.
And although David joined the team somewhat recently, his experience as a Producer has been a giant help to the Kickstarter campaign. Without him, we’d have been asking for an unrealistic level of funding that would not have covered full development, just to reach the goal. He’s identified a ton of pitfalls we would have found ourselves in. Although, some have criticized that our goal as too high, it is a realistic target to make the game we’re promising. Bearing in mind the original Rollcage cost the equivalent of $1,500,000 CAD back in 1997, we think that after years of inflation, $650k is a bargain when games of a similar quality are costing upwards of $5m to make these days. In that light, our goal is pretty low. So, bottom line is, Dave is as level headed and realistic as a Producer can be, and that’s extremely valuable.
And it definitely helps that both Rob and Dave have prior Rollcage experience. These guys know how to make a great combat racer, that much is obvious. We have all the ingredients in place to make this game and make it awesome. It’s really up to the fans to decide if we should have a shot at it or not.
There’s been a few games attempting to revive futuristic racing recently – as well as GRIP, there’s the likes of Formula Fusion and Redout. Why do you think that is?
CM: When people think of their gaming good times, they usually think about the older titles they’d play way back when they’d have sleepovers and sit for hours on the couch with their friends doing things like beating each other to a pulp, exploring exciting new worlds or burning rubber. Having a chance at those feelings again all these years later but with a brand spanking new game is pretty enticing.
The futuristic racing genre specifically needs a revive, since there haven’t been too many titles in the past decade or so that fit the category. We’re glad to be doing our part to bring it back.
RB: They say things move in cycles, and I’m sure they do. People follow fashion and plagiarise each other in every aspect of life, and gaming is no different. Things have their time, then we slowly evolve away from them to make room for the new, only to revisit them again in the future when we crave what once was. Formula Fusion and Wipeout are a little different, as Wipeout never really went away. It was a lone voice for the longest time however, in a world that has been seriously devoid of arcade racers. But that was then. People like to experience something different, and the power of nostalgia is strong. So harking back to that hardcore arcade gameplay that Rollcage sported so well, after having not experienced it for so long, was an easy choice for us.
DP: As a kid I was brought up on futuristic racers like Powerdrome on my Amiga, and then I got a chance to help make Rollcage. And then kids were brought up on that. Quite a bit of feedback is from those kids, who have now grown up, and find there’s something missing in the present day line up of games. I’d say futuristic combat racers are a staple genre that’s been lacking in representation for a decade and the time is ripe to redress the balance. I miss them and I want to play them, and I can absolutely appreciate that the big developers and publishers may consider the market too small to invest in. But, I still want to play them! I can’t be alone in that, surely?TAI’s Key Legislature… the game’s defining moment, it’s critical event, the wildest basketball thing you ever saw, or just stuff that happened. Wizards vs Knicks, Preseason Game 1, Oct. 9, 2015, by Rashad Mobley (@rashad20).
If the first preseason game was proof that Wizards small ball held the key to success for the 2015-16 season, the second game was stronger proof that defense is just as important. In Star Wars terms, the first game was a “New Hope,” and game two was “The Empire Strikes Back.”
The 3-point attempts were still taken in abundance (23 last night, compared to 26 against the Sixers on Tuesday), but that is where the comparisons to the game one romp ended. The Wizards shot 17 percent from the 3-point line, and instead of shooting 50 percent from the field they were only able to muster 43 percent.
The most glaring statistics:
The paltry 17 assists (36 on Tuesday).
The 115 points allowed (including two 30-point quarters) compared to the 95 points the Wizards surrendered to Sixers.
Yes, the Knicks have Carmelo, the unstoppable scoring machine who does not compare to the Sixers’ most reliable scorers in Nerlens Noel, who has yet to adopt a scoring machine-type moniker, and Jahlil Okafor, who is |
the similarity in setting between the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Fallout franchises may lead to if the news is true.
Exit Theatre Mode
Luke Karmali is IGN's UK Editorial Assistant. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on IGN and on Twitter.AP Photo/Charles Dharapak President Barack Obama looks toward reporters shouting questions at him regarding the fiscal cliff as he walks to the White House after attending a holiday party for the National Security Council.
Once again, President Obama seems to be on the verge of folding a winning hand.
Widely leaked reports indicate that the president and House Speaker John Boehner are making a fiscal deal that includes hiking tax rates back to the pre-Bush levels with a threshold of $400,000 rather than the original $250,000, and cutting present Social Security benefits.
Obama, the reports say, will now settle for as little as $1.2 trillion in tax increases on the rich rather than the $1.6 trillion that he had originally sought. The difference, in effect, will come out of the pockets of workers, retirees, the young, and the poor.
Especially foolish is the cut in Social Security benefits, disguised as a change in the cost-of-living adjustment formula. Before getting to the arcane details of the formula, here’s the bottom line. The proposed change will save only $122 billion over ten years, but it will significantly cut benefits for the elderly.
Because the cut is in the form of a change in the Consumer Price Index (CPI), the longer you live, the more is the total cut. On average, the cut is about 3 percent a year, but if you live twenty years after you start drawing benefits (the average), that adds up to over ten thousand dollars.
Put this in the context of the reliance of the elderly on Social Security. More than 70 percent of all recipients depend on Social Security for more than half their income. The average Social Security benefit is less than $15,000 a year, and in recent years all of the cost-of-living adjustments and more have gone to defray the annual increases in Medicare premiums and other health costs.
One interesting detail in Obama’s apparent cave-in on Social Security is the role played by some prominent liberals, notably Robert Greenstein of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).
The proposed change involves a shift to something called the Chained CPI. Supposedly, when the price of something goes up, people substitute cheaper products. The application of the Chained CPI to the elderly (who are already scrimping) is problematic—more on that in a moment—but Greenstein has had kind words for disguised cuts in Social Security via the Chained CPI.
In a piece last February, Greenstein and colleagues wrote that a shift to the Chained CPI would be acceptable if it protected longtime Social Security recipients and those receiving disability benefits via Supplemental Security Assistance. The respected Greenstein’s support provides crucially important political cover for Obama’s cave-in.
Why does the CBPP, which exists to defend social programs, accept this disguised cut?
There seem to be four major reasons. First, Greenstein’s operating principle is that programs for the poor, above all, need to be protected. Second, Greenstein has long been of the belief that making progress on deficit reduction helps safeguard programs for the poor. Third, Greenstein is always eager to remain a player—and providing this support to a beleaguered White House makes him a player par excellence. Finally, Greenstein also likes to stay on good terms with both the budget-balance crowd and the liberals.
But this is one of those times when you need to decide which side you are on.
I have a lot of admiration for the role Greenstein has played over the years. But on this crucial issue, I think his calculation is just plain wrong. Look at budget politics over the past decade. Joining the call for deficit reduction has hardly saved programs for the poor. Discretionary domestic spending, from which programs for the poor come, is at its lowest share of GDP since the Eisenhower years.
The siren call of the austerity lobby is that Social Security spending is “crowding out” other social spending. But that doesn’t hold up either. Even in today’s weak economy, Social Security is in surplus. If we got back to full employment with decent wage growth, increased payroll tax receipts would keep Social Security in surplus indefinitely.
The other tactical error here is to allow the White House and Speaker John Boehner to play off ordinary Social Security recipients, many millions of who are just above the poverty line, against the very poor. Greenstein’s thinking seems to be that it’s okay to sacrifice other near-poor elderly if that conserves money for the poorest.
But it’s unconscionable to cut Social Security at all when then president is proposing to reduce the proposed taxes on the wealthiest by $400 billion—more than three times the savings of the planned cuts in Social Security.
Late yesterday, as the terms of the deal were leaked, Greenstein’s name was widely dropped as a key supporter. I reached Greenstein by e-mail late last night to ask if he really supported the proposed deal, and this was his response:
We don’t have enough info yet. The White House tells me they will be seeking all of the protections we have said are essential, but the White House and Boehner have not gotten yet to this part of the negotiations, and the White House offer does not spell out specific details on the protections. We are withholding judgment until we see what the details of both the chained CPI proposal and the overall package look like.
In other words, if the deal protects the poorest, SSI recipients, and longtime Social Security beneficiaries, Greenstein is on board. Since the austerity lobby has always invoked the need to safeguard the very poorest, this looks like where the deal is heading.
This budget agreement is very dubious politics for Obama and the Democrats on several grounds. For starters, Social Security cuts, disguised or otherwise, should not be in this package at all. Politically, such a deal erases the bright line that is the Democrats’ single strongest distinction from Republicans: We defend Social Security; they are willing to sacrifice it. Further, the politics of allowing the struggling, not-quite-poor elderly to be played off against the very poor are just appalling.
One other set of enablers are those liberals who say that at least a disguised cut in Social Security is not quite as bad as raising the Medicare eligibility age, a Republican demand that Obama has rejected. This chorus includes the sainted Paul Krugman, another resolute liberal who ordinarily earns nothing but our thanks and appreciation.
But saying that cutting Social Security is not quite as bad as cutting Medicare sets a pretty low bar. Neither should be cut.
What happens now? Progressives in and outside Congress need to shoot down this trial balloon. They need to keep the heat on Obama to consent to nothing of the sort.
About that “Chained CPI,” (since you asked):
The premise of the “Chained CPI” is that the standard CPI overstates inflation because people regularly substitute products when they are more expensive. If beef is too pricey, people switch to chicken.
There are two fallacies in this premise as applied to seniors. Most seniors already live so close to the margin of poverty that they have already done all the easy substituting, unless we expect them to further downshift from chicken to cat food, or to choose between filling stomachs and filling prescriptions.
Moreover, the CPI as applied to seniors understates the true impact of inflation, not overstates it. As several studies have shown, the cost of health care has been increasing at more than twice the general rate of inflation, and seniors spend a far larger share of their incomes on medical care than younger Americans do.
To add insult to injury, the current very low-interest environment and the theft of corporate pensions leave the elderly with depleted incomes. If anything, rather than chaining the elderly to reduced annual CPI adjustments, their cost-of-living adjustment should be increased.
This promises to be an epic showdown. We will soon learn what Obama, the progressive community, and congressional Democrats are made of.Phi Sigma Sigma Sorority Sues Member For Revealing Secret Handshake On Penny Arcade Forum
from the didn't-know-barbra-streisand-was-a-member dept
Phi Sigma Sigma secrets are:
Phi Sigma Sigma (PSS) secretly stands for Philanthropic Social Society. However, this is never written down or recorded (until now) because it is so "sacred". The Handshake consists of a series of motions. Member A first begins with the pointer finger and the thumb surrounding Member B's pointer finger and thumb. This is the "Phi". Then Member A wraps the remaining fingers, middle, ring and pinky around the hand as a symbol of the "Sigma". Depending on who is the senior member, the pinky finger is wrapped around the older member's hand. Next is the hand knock. It goes Knock. Pause. Knock. Pause. Knock, knock, knock. The meetings are set up usually with the President, VP and other officers sitting at the front. The President wears a yellow or gold robe and the officers wear royal blue robes. The remaining members sit across from the officers in a pyramid formation with the base closest to the officers and the apex farthest from the officers. Members are seated by class order, then by alphabetical order. The table at which the President and Vice President are seated consists of candles on each side. Two gold candles and one blue at each corner of the table. Members usually recite an oath, "We, the members of Phi Sigma Sigma, promise to keep secret and sacred all of our proceedings." The way to enter the pyramid is by using the hand knock to notify the members you are wanting to enter the room. The President will respond back with her gavel by repeating the knock. The person will enter then travel to the apex of the pyramid formation. The President will say the secret and sacred words "Remove the Veil" and then the member will respond back with the Chapter's name, example, "Zeta Eta." The Gold and King Blue symbolize "Perpetuity" and "Sincerity". At initiation, blue "veils" (tulle from the local fabric store) are placed on the heads of the potential new members and are later removed to symbolize some sort of occult transformation and that they are full-fledged members.
I am legal counsel to the board of directors of Phi Sigma Sigma, Inc. Phi Sigma Sigma was founded on November 26, 1913, and today maintains over 100 active collegiate chapters throughout the United States and Canada. This letter constitutes notification of claims of intellectual property infringement and violation of Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. Section 512 (the “DMCA”).
Phi Sigma Sigma is the owner of certain trade secrets including, but not limited to, certain rituals conducted by members of Phi Sigma Sigma (collectively, the “Trade Secrets”). These Trade Secrets constitute confidential and proprietary information of Phi Sigma Sigma.
We ask that you expeditiously respond to this notice by immediately removing or disabling access to this infringing material including, but not limited to, removing the entire posting and all replies. Please promptly confirm any action that you take within ten (10) business days of receipt of this letter.
Now, attorneys representing the sorority are seeking a court order restraining the former member – “Jane Doe” in the lawsuit – from disclosing confidential information about Phi Sigma Sigma. They’re also seeking financial compensation for harm they claim has been done to the sorority.
“The defendant knew that the information that she was posting had not been publicly disclosed and would damage” the sorority, attorney Karin Jones said in the civil lawsuit. “The defendant admitted in her posting that the confidential information she disclosed is never written down or recorded and that that the organization and its members consider the information ‘sacred.’”
Every time people tell me that lawyers now have a strong enough understanding of "the Streisand Effect" such that it's less likely to happen these days, I laugh. There's always someone new who hasn't figured it out yet. This story was pointed out to us by Chris O'Donnell, who said he never realized that Barbra Streisand had been a member of the Phi Sigma Sigma sorority. You see, back in November of 2011, a former member of Phi Sigma Sigma posted to a thread on the Penny Arcade forums, detailing some of the "secrets" of the sorority, including its silly secret handshake. The overall thread was started by someone asking fraternity and sorority members to reveal various secrets, such as initiation rituals. The thread was actually started in early 2010, but long after it had died out, someone under the name "stepscloser" posted the following:So, yeah. Never having cared much about fraternity/sorority anything, that sounds about as much like I'd expect some random silly initiation ritual/secret handshake to sound like. The kind of thing people make up to make people feel like they're special for joining a group, while it has no real significance.Either way, considering it was on a thread that was long since dead, chances are this would pass on into oblivion. But, no. A year later, the sorority had its lawyers contact Penny Arcade to file a very misguided DMCA notice Of course, trade secrets are not covered by the DMCA, and the information in the post was not covered by copyright, so already this lawyer is on shaky, shaky ground. Penny Arcade's "Gabe" (aka Mike Krahulik) refused to comply, noting that the sorority could just change the damn handshake if it was that important. The lawyer never followed up to sue Penny Arcade, but apparently is now suing the former member in King County Superior Court, though it's not clear the sorority has any idea who "stepscloser" actually is.Yeah, good luck with that one. At least they gave up on the ridiculous idea that this was a copyright violation.Either way, now this long dead thread on an old internet forum post, that no one had been paying much, if any, attention to, is suddenly getting. You would have thought that the sorority would have realized how idiotic this was after the Gabe post from two-and-a-half years ago, but apparently the message didn't get through.
Filed Under: forums, penny arcade, rituals, secret handshake, sorority, streisand effect
Companies: phi sigma sigmaFormer U.S. president Barack Obama in Chicago | Scott Olson/Getty Images Obama warns against divisive social media use Former president tells Prince Harry about the ‘different realities’ of being online.
Former U.S. President Barack Obama said using social media in a harmful way can lead to the "Balkanization of society," in what is seen as a dig at his successor and prolific tweeter Donald Trump.
Obama was speaking to Prince Harry in an interview for the BBC broadcast Wednesday morning.
The former president said technology should be used "in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices, allows a diversity of views, but doesn't lead to a Balkanization of society and allows ways of finding common ground."
He added: "One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities," describing how some people end up only reading media that "reinforces their current biases."
"On the internet, everything is simple," Obama said, but "when you meet face to face, it turns out it is complicated."
While not mentioning Trump by name, the former president's comments feed into the debate about how social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have contributed to the rise of "fake news."
In his 2008 election campaign, Obama was credited with being the first presidential candidate to successfully create an online and social media platform that mobilized younger voters.Introduction with a case
An elderly man was admitted in transfer with methicillin-sensitive staph aureus (MSSA) endocarditis complicated by cerebral infarctions. He had a history of experiencing facial swelling due to penicillin some decades earlier. Due to fear of anaphylaxis from penicillin, he was treated with ceftriaxone (for coverage of MSSA and brain penetration). Unfortunately he continued to deteriorate.
Upon transfer his antibiotic regimen was re-considered. The use of ceftriaxone for MSSA bacteremia is controversial, with some evidence suggesting that ceftriaxone treatment correlates with increased mortality (Lother 2017). Nafcillin would be the ideal antibiotic for his MSSA endocarditis with brain involvement. However, there was fear of possible cross-reaction with penicillin. How dangerous would it be to treat him with nafcillin?
Literature review revealed only one case of nafcillin-induced anaphylaxis or angioedema, of questionable validity (anaphylaxis occurred after the second dose rather than the first; Silverman 1984). His history of penicillin reaction was remote and vague. To test whether he was actually allergic, he was given one dose of nafcillin very slowly under controlled conditions (he happened to be intubated at that point in time). He tolerated that fine and was transitioned to full-dose nafcillin therapy.
Predicting allergy: patient-based vs. population-based approaches
Our current approach to allergy is primarily patient-based. This focuses on the patient’s prior history of reaction: how severe was it, when was it, how certain are we that it was truly allergic? This strategy has been proven to be inaccurate. For example, ~90% of patients who report a penicillin allergy are not allergic when skin-tested.
An alternative strategy is a population-based approach. For example, there don’t appear to be any reports of anaphylaxis to meropenem in the literature. Studies have reported meropenem administration to hundreds of patients without severe allergic reaction (including some with penicillin allergy). Thus, regardless of the patient’s allergy history, it is unlikely that they will have a severe allergic reaction to meropenem.
A population-based strategy has some potential advantages in critical care, where we often don’t have detailed information about our patients. For example, if a crashing septic patient has allergies to every known antibiotic, they could still be treated with meropenem with a low risk of severe reaction. This decision could be made efficiently, without interviewing their family about the details of every one of their allergic reactions.
Ideally, our decision-making should incorporate both patient-based and population-based reasoning. Combining patient-specific factors as well as epidemiologic factors isn’t anything novel – it’s integral to most clinical reasoning. When considering what diagnosis a patient has, we are continuously synthesizing specifics about the patient with the epidemiology of various potential diagnoses.
Theory behind a population-based approach
For a population-based approach to be helpful, the risk of severe allergic reactions must differ substantially between different antibiotics. This will be tested further below, but we could probably agree that it has face validity. Some antibiotics (e.g. penicillin) seem to cause lots of trouble. Other antibiotics (e.g. doxycycline, meropenem) simply don’t.
You may be nodding – experienced practitioners are well aware of these differences, and we already take this into account. The issue is whether we could be more precise and evidence-based about how we do this. To move from our own intuition to a more evidence-based approach, we need accurate information about the relative risk of anaphylaxis from different antibiotics. Unfortunately, such information seems to be lacking. I’ve been unable to find a good reference comparing the relative allergenicity of various antibiotics (1).
My wacky attempt at ordering antibiotics in order of allergenicity
Below is an effort to rank-order antibiotics which I made during a few spare hours in the hospital overnight. I don’t think this list is very reliable, nor that it should be used to make clinical decisions. The goal here is simply to illustrate that creating such a list isn’t necessarily that difficult.
I started by creating two metrics to look at various antibiotics:
Anaphylaxis Hits: Number of articles retrieved from PubMed by searching for the antibiotic name plus either anaphylaxis or angioedema.
Anaphylaxis Index: Number of anaphylaxis hits normalized to the total number of articles about that antibiotic:
Obviously these are blunt tools. For example, an article stating that a certain antibiotic doesn’t cause anaphylaxis would be measured as an “anaphylaxis hit.” However, when leveraged across more than 27 million citations in PubMed, this could potentially find certain signals.
To test the validity of these measurements, I compared them to three large epidemiologic series of patients with anaphylaxis (Faria 2014, Lee 2017, Renaudin 2013). The results are shown below. Antibiotics are sorted in descending order based on the anaphylaxis index.
Although this is a crude approach, it seemed to perform surprisingly well. For example, ten antibiotics were identified as the safest. Among these, none caused any episodes of anaphylaxis among any of the three epidemiologic series (which contained a total of 212 reactions to the drugs listed above).
The algorithm neatly classified all antibiotics from the aminoglycoside and carbapenem classes into the top six safest antibiotics. This is consistent with general opinion and prior research on meropenem, supporting the validity of this algorithm.
Overall, this data supports a population-based strategy for predicting severe antibiotic drug reactions. Only a handful of drugs seem responsible for the vast majority of severe reactions (e.g., penicillin, cefazolin, amoxicillin, ampicillin, and ceftriaxone). Alternatively, some drugs appear very safe, causing life-threatening reaction either rarely or never.
Further work is obviously needed to validate this strategy. Someone with more resources and experience in bioinformatics could do a much better job – and hopefully will. Or maybe a programmer at Google with a supercomputer and a better algorithm.
Convergent information
Ideally patient-based and population-based information could be used synergistically to reach a common truth. One example of this from the above data is the case of cefepime.
For years, we were taught that patients with a penicillin allergy had a 10% rate of cross-reactivity with all cephalosporins. Furthermore, we were taught that many patients had a penicillin allergy with cross-allergy extending across all beta-lactam antibiotics. These concepts are inconsistent with the data shown below, which reveals a huge difference in anaphylaxis rates between cefazolin and cefepime. This population data implies that there is no such thing as a “cephalosporin allergy” or “beta-lactam allergy,” but rather that patients are allergic to specific drugs (e.g. cefazolin but not cefepime).
Over the last few years the concept of 10% cross-reactivity and pan-beta-lactam allergy have finally been debunked using patient-based data (careful studies examined penicillin-allergic patients to determine whether they were cross-allergic to various cephalosporins). It was found that allergy exists to side-chains unique to specific antibiotics, rather than the common beta-lactam core structure (debunking the existence of a pan-beta-lactam allergy). It is notable that this could have been easily predicted from the above population-based data set, which is a coarse amalgam of mostly old data. This illustrates the power of large population datasets to answer specific questions, without requiring much work.
The absolute risk of anaphylaxis varies dramatically between different antibiotics.
The majority of severe reactions may be due to a limited group of antibiotics.
Some antibiotics exist with little or no risk of a severe anaphylaxis.
More precise data regarding the absolute risk of reaction to different antibiotics could help us make more evidence-based decisions about antibiotic selection (especially in patients with vague allergy history).
Related
Notes
(1) Please let me know if you find one. Part of the purpose of this blog is to send a query out into the void regarding whether this exists somewhere.I recently purchased the retail version of the Ouya console. I had some high hopes of using it as a cheap XBMC box and emulator console. Sadly, as soon as I turned it on I noticed a glaring problem, I have about %5 overscan on all sides of my TV.
I’m not the only person with this problem according to the Internet. There are several posts on Reddit and the Ouya forums from others. Ouya originally took the stance that the overscan problem was the TVs fault. Now, I can see where technically it is, but every other device I have plugged into this TV has worked fine. In my opinion, if several other consoles, computers, and DVD players work OK and the Ouya does not, then its the Ouya with the problem.
My TV has no option to turn off overscan, this includes its service menu. Interestingly, I have another, newer, Vizio TV that works OK with the Ouya.
Ouya has made an attempt to recognize the problem. The Ouya has a whole section of the video menu about overscan fixes you can do in your TV. In this menu is also an ‘Overscan Compensation’ setting you can turn on or off that does nothing.
The good news in this situation is that XBMC has its own method for changing the screen size to compensate for overscan. In Settings/System you’ll find Video Calibration. It’ll allow you to move some arrows around on your screen to fit the video to your display. I really wish Ouya had something like this built in. Several game makers have recognized this problem and have made changes to their games to fix (Bomb Squad for instance).
What to do? I really want to like the Ouya. I’ve followed it since the Kickstarter, looking forward to buying it for almost a year. I’m torn between hoping and waiting for a fix or just sending it back to Amazon for a refund.
Ouya Support thread about OverscanUSPSA classification data
I’ve recently started doing a lot of USPSA shooting.
One of the main things that USPSA does for local matches, is provide a classification system. The classification system is used to determine a competitor’s skill level and group competitors of similar skill levels into classes, so competitions have more results and dimensions than just one person who beat everyone else.
Loke from gunbot has a great video showing the difference between shooters in the different classifications
Now, recently I’ve been training hard with a friend, in order to climb up the rankings. The results so far are:
Date Number Club F Percent HF Entered Source 10/08/17 08-03 CENTRAL JERSEY RIFLE & PISTOL CLUB Y 54.6545 6.0120 10/29/17 Stage Score 10/08/17 09-13 CENTRAL JERSEY RIFLE & PISTOL CLUB B 32.0900 2.8881 10/29/17 Stage Score 9/16/17 13-01 WEST SHORE PRACTICAL SHOOTERS D 42.1860 4.7493 9/19/17 Stage Score 9/09/17 03-08 CENTRAL JERSEY RIFLE & PISTOL CLUB Y 51.3491 5.7511 10/02/17 Stage Score 9/09/17 13-01 CENTRAL JERSEY RIFLE & PISTOL CLUB Y 43.4473 4.8913 10/02/17 Stage Score 8/13/17 13-05 CENTRAL JERSEY RIFLE & PISTOL CLUB Y 43.5864 5.2448 9/04/17 Stage Score 8/13/17 99-23 CENTRAL JERSEY RIFLE & PISTOL CLUB Y 41.0794 5.9524 9/04/17 Stage Score
So, the trend has been upward, reflecting all the practice that I’ve put in. Over 8 weeks I’ve increased my percentage by 13% - moving from the bottom of C class, to the top of C class and close to breaking into B class (60%).
The issue is, USPSA’s website is pretty archaic. The above dataset was directly copied and pasted from the USPSA site. Being a software engineer, I wanted to play around with the data and create some visualizations.
Trying to actually scrape the classification data from USPSA’s site however, is AWFUL. USPSA does not offer an API, but they do provide a public web page where you can enter a USPSA identification number and it will pull results. There is a TON OF DATA just waiting to be poked at.
The issue is that USPSA’s site is straight out of the 90’s - with the site using HTML tables to build the layout for the site. Which means I have to write a program that uses an HTML parser to parse the entire webpage, look for specific markers to differentiate between an HTML table that is being used for visual presentation, and an HTML table that contains the actual classification data.
I am currently using BeautifulSoup to parse the webpage, and the code is very brittle, since HTML tables on the page are being used for both the visual presentation of the site, as well as for data.
There’s a parody site called The Feed Ramp that had an article making fun of USPSA’s website, and when I first read it I had not really used USPSA’s website for anything but viewing classification results.
Now that I actually want to pull data from USPSA’s website the Feed Ramp article becomes funnier because it’s so true!
Practiscore, another big scoring system in the shooting sport scene is also hard to pull data from. They also do not publish a developer API, so you’d have to scrape the data from Practiscore via BeautfulSoup. I have not tried to pull data from Practiscore yet, but I assume since Practiscore is newer, it might be a little easier to extract the data since Practiscore uses CSS for presentation, and the only HTML tables on a page are tables that contain data.
A couple people have asked the Practiscore developers about an API on numerous occasions but it doesn’t appear to be high priority for them.
ShootNScoreit does advertise an API, for what it’s worth, but I don’t know if anyone uses their software.Zach Braff once twatted a child, pass it on.
During an episode of Punk'd back in 2005, a 12-year-old actor was hired to pretend to pour paint all over the actor's Porsche.
The problem was, Braff reacted badly to the practical joke. Really badly. He ended up beating the shit out of a child.
The prank was set up by his Scrubs partner in crime, Donald Faison (Turk), but he could never have imagined it would end the way it did.
Zach explained:
"Donald thought this would be the perfect opportunity to have me Punk'd. So we go to a liquor store-keep in mind there are cameras hidden all over the liquor store, so he knows he's on TV.
"(Then) we go outside and these little kids were spray painting the car. I think that my brand new car, with, like, 100 miles on it, has been ruined with spray-paint graffiti.
"They choreographed the whole thing and I wasn't supposed to catch the kid, but I caught him... and I'm not a big fighter or anything, but, with the adrenaline and everything, I just started pummeling him.
"I didn't know and it was so dark... (but) part of the punking was that it was, like, a 12-year-old.
"It turns out it was fake spray paint. They edited (the fight) out, because apparently you're not supposed to punch people on Punk'd."
Is it bad to find this a bit funny?Last month, Austin Stewart gave a rather unique virtual reality demonstration at a storefront in Ames, Iowa. With a wall TV display, an Oculus Rift headset, and yoga ball trackpad, the Iowa State University assistant professor showed how virtual reality could enrich the inner lives of farm animals confined to small spaces. Strap an Oculus Rift headset onto a chicken, and it’s free range, you see. In its mind.
“It’s really pastoral,” Stewart says of the Second Livestock world, inspired by humans’ Second Life, and first reported by the Ames Tribune. “There’s waving grass, a few trees, and some artificial intelligence chickens wandering around as well.”
With the trackpad, participants were able to mimic the pace of chicken feet with their fingers. Stewart’s also very excited about the next version of the Oculus Rift headset, which will allow for positional head tracking, or craning your neck at different angles. “The new version allows you to do that,” he says. “You can look for bugs on the ground, peck to get food, and really get that chicken experience.”
Okay, so Stewart’s not being totally serious, and contrary to his business pitch, Second Livestock will probably not be coming to a farm near you. But if you happened to have attended his straight-faced, TED Talk-y presentations–which, so far, have been delivered to students at Ohio State University and Iowa farmers–you’d likely have trouble telling. And that’s how Stewart likes it. “Don’t you think the chickens will lose something by not being in physical contact with each other?” one participant asked earnestly. Which then brought Stewart, and the room, closer to his true thesis: How technology impacts the lives of humans.
“It’s as much about animal husbandry as it is about human husbandry,” says Stewart. “We live in little boxes, we work in little boxes, and then we’re engaging in these virtual environments more. Why wouldn’t chickens choose the same thing?”
Second Livestock’s online marketing materials echo that sentiment. Part of Second Livestock’s “new distribution model” features something called a Waste Zero facility, in which chickens with VR headsets are housed in giant urban skyscrapers and waste is recycled into fertilizer. Sensors attached to the chickens can also alert producers and consumers to individual chicken activity in digital chicken heaven.
“After all, Second Livestock is modeled on human activities such as the layout of the common corporate office,” the marketing copy reads. “A networked grid of cubicles with Internet access is not far removed from the enclosures we build for our chickens. However, our chickens likely get more exercise while on the job.”ARKANSAS Title 5 - Criminal Offenses
Subtitle 6 - Offenses Against Public Health, Safety, Or Welfare
Chapter 68 - Obscenity
Subchapter 2 - Offenses Generally
§ 5-68-204 - Nudism. (a) As used in this section, "nudism" means the act or acts of a person or persons congregating or gathering with his, her, or their private parts exposed in the presence of one (1) or more persons of the opposite sex as a form of social practice.
(b) The provisions of this section do not apply to the enumerated acts if:
(1) The purpose of the person committing the act or acts is to render medical or surgical treatment or to determine the need for medical or surgical treatment or to cleanse such sexual part, and the person committing the act:
(A) Is a licensed physician, as defined by § 17-80-101, or any such physician of a sister state making a professional call into Arkansas;
(B) Committed the act under the professional direction of any physician described in subdivision (b)(1)(A) of this section; or
(C) Is a nurse duly registered or licensed by the Arkansas State Board of Nursing; or
(2) The persons are married legally one to another.
(c) It is unlawful for any:
(1) Person, club, camp, corporation, partnership, association, or organization to advocate, demonstrate, or promote nudism; or
(2) Person to rent, lease, or otherwise permit his or her land, premises, or buildings to be used for the purpose of advocating, demonstrating, or promoting nudism.
(d) Any person, club, camp, corporation, partnership, association, or organization violating any provision of this section is guilty of a Class A misdemeanor for each offense.
(e) This section does not repeal any existing laws of the State of Arkansas except those in direct conflict with this section but this section is cumulative to the existing laws of the State of Arkansas.
HISTORY: Acts 1957, No. 38, §§ 1-4; A.S.A. 1947, §§ 41-3558 -- 41-3561; Acts 2005, No. 1994, § 351.
________________________ Title 5 Criminal Offenses
Subtitle 2. Offenses Against The Person
Chapter 14 Sexual Offenses
Subchapter 1 -- General Provisions
§ 5-14-112. Indecent exposure.
(a) A person commits indecent exposure if, with the purpose to arouse or gratify a sexual desire of himself or herself or of any other person, the person exposes his or her sex organs:
(1) In a public place or in public view; or
(2) Under circumstances in which the person knows the conduct is likely to cause affront or alarm.
(b) (1) Except as provided in subdivisions (b)(2) and (b)(3) of this section, indecent exposure is a Class A misdemeanor.
(2) For a fourth or fifth conviction within ten (10) years of a previous conviction, indecent exposure is a Class D felony.
(3) For a sixth conviction and each successive conviction within ten (10) years of a previous conviction, indecent exposure is a Class C felony.
(c) A woman is not in violation of this section for breastfeeding a child in a public place or any place where other individuals are present.
HISTORY: Acts 1975, No. 280, § 1812; A.S.A. 1947, § 41-1812; Acts 1997, No. 817, § 1; 2001, No. 1553, § 7; 2001, No. 1665, § 1; 2001, No. 1821, § 2; 2003, No. 862, § 1; 2005, No. 1815, § 1; 2005, No. 1962, § 5; 2007, No. 38, § 1; No. 680, § 1.
______________________________ Title 16 Practice, Procedure, And Courts
Subtitle 6. Criminal Procedure Generally
Chapter 90 Judgment And Sentence Generally
Subchapter 9 -- Expungement and Sealing of Criminal Records
§ 16-90-904. Procedure for sealing of records.
(a) (1) An individual who is eligible to have an offense expunged may file a uniform petition to seal records, as described in § 16-90-905, in the circuit court or district court in the county where the crime |
7 1980 Atlanta 5 26.8.581.600 7.6.6.4 2.8 8.4 1982 Atlanta 2 32.5.333.750 4.0 1.0.0 3.0 3.5 1983 Atlanta 3 39.3.481.333 10.0 1.0.3 3.3 9.7 1984 Atlanta 5 30.4.400.625 6.8.2.4 2.0 5.0 1986 Atlanta 9 9 27.6.553.636 8.7.3.2 1.7 6.6 1987 Atlanta 9 9 24.6.536.714 5.9.3.3 1.8 4.4 1988 Atlanta 12 12 27.8.556.867 5.9.5.8 1.6 4.4 1989 Cleveland 5 0 14.8.750.600 3.2.2.6 1.4 3.0 1990 Cleveland 3 0 12.7.333.750 2.7.3.7.3 2.7 1991 Detroit 6 0 5.3 1.000.5.0.2.2.7 1993 Houston 6 0 2.7.000.000.7.0.3.0.0 1994 Orlando 3 0 9.7.400 1.0.0.3.3 1.3 1995 Orlando 14 0 5.8.600.250.4.0.0.4.5 Career 93 30 19.4.505.000.624 4.6.3.4 1.4 3.9
See also [ edit ]And now, the moment you’ve been waiting for: The moment when we award Muppet toys for being visually unappealing! To kick things off, here’s our special guest, A Freaky Kermit Jack-in-the-Box (submitted by Justin Plank), to reiterate the rules of the pageant.
“SUWPWISE! Over the past few weeks, the Ugly Toy contestants were rated, evaluated, and in some cases hated by the Tough Pigs community at large. People rated each toy on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being “not that ugly” and 5 being “extreeeeemely ugly.” And now we’ll count down the “winners,” starting with the Not That Ugly toys, and working up to the toys that have been voted by our readers as the ugliest toys of the year. Color commentary from the voters is provided for your entertainment. POP GOES THE WEASEL HA HA HA HAHAHAHAHA HA!”
Thanks, Freaky Kermit Jack-in-the-Box! I couldn’t have said it better myself. And now, on with the results.
NOT REALLY THAT UGLY
It is neither prudent nor wise to cloud watch whilst driving.
-Matthew Brink
When this toy was made in 1975, I think the dolls sat up a little straighter and it looked more like they were driving a car, and less like they’re in bed together. Time has not been kind to this toy.
-Danny Horn
Ignore for a moment that a plush toy with plastic wheels is completely pointless. Ignore for a moment that Bert and Ernie have lost all emotion and facial dimension. Let’s instead question why our lovable pals have kidnapped and tied Oscar the Grouch to the front of a car.
-Evan Goldaper
I’m certain this is actually a poorly-constructed shoe that inexplicably has wheels. Hey, it makes more sense than a car with a bucket of water attached to it.
-Samuel B
I feel like I’m always stuck behind cars like this on the interstate.
-Weston Long
What do you even do with this thing?
-Aimee Johnson
The korean manufacturers thought the English “big” meant hypercephalic.
-Mike C
Is that your nose, or did someone glue a banana to your face?
-Matthew Brink
Japanese people love to make toys with huge heads because they’re scientifically designed to be adorable. The toys, not the Japanese people. Well, maybe both.
-Danny Horn
Just think: if that puppet were 8’2″, its head would be as tall as Bob McGrath.
-Evan Goldaper
Wow, Big Bird’s fame has really gone to his head.
-Samuel B
That’s what he gets when he tries eating an entire watermelon in one bite.
-Shane Keating
There were also five Angry Birds jokes.
Man, Doc Hopper would love this guy.
-Joe Hennes
Kermit never WAS good at the YMCA dance.
-Weston Long
If I recall correctly, Kermit’s shoes refuse to ever grow weary. But it’s hard when each of his feet is the size of his nephew.
-Evan Goldaper
His mouth is permanently open because he’s telling you that he just flew in from Hollywood and boy are his arms tired.
-Danny Horn
Someone should’ve told them, Macy’s Parade balloons are dry-clean only.
-Matthew Brink
“AAAAHHH UNNNNSSS CAAUUUUGHT A FEEEEEESH DIIIIIIIIIIIS BEEEEEEGGG!”
-Matthew Soberman
There were also two jokes about gout.
Tip for buying t-shirts for Big Bird: He’s an XXXL.
-Joe Hennes
“Big-Boned Bird”
-Justin Werfel
Why do companies have such a hard time with getting eyes to look normal?
-Herbowski
There’s nothing particularly wrong with this toy that throwing it into the trash
and forgetting about it wouldn’t cure.
-Danny Horn
The bigger one doesn’t look too bad, but the smaller one has a freakishly big nose.
-Michael Wermuth, Jr.
Herry has a huge honker, and it’s hilarious!
-Mike C
Little known fact: a monster’s tongue is between his eyes.
-James Dixon
Inka-dinka-doo! Ha-cha-cha!
-Matthew Brink
Ugly is right; where’s their striped pants?
-Shane Keating
These dolls are really ugly, but they capture the look and feel of the various
non-Herry monsters from Season 1 of Sesame Street, so I can’t possibly
hate them.
-Evan Goldaper
The only appropriate response to these toys is to cuddle them. Little
woojums.
-Danny Horn
I’d comment, but I’ve got a frog on my head.
-Mike C
Nothing like having a “gone with the Schwinn” version of Kermit on your
head to set the party mood!
-Chris Stulz
And now, Kermit and his duplicates practice the little-known yoga
formation, the “flattened frog”, on some unwilling kids’ heads.
-Samuel B
On the one hand, these are ridiculous and laughably awful, but at the same
time I kind of really want to wear one of them on my next birthday. I’m
currently resisting the urge to google where to purchase them.
-Julia Gaskill
I’ve been to gay clubs like this. Never again.
-Peter Savieri
What! Why?
-Isha May
Yes, he still looks like Fozzie’s evil twin, but at least he’s an evil twin in a good mood. He might even be forgiven for the lamb costume. But that tie is not helpful. That is a very bad tie.
-Danny Horn
That isn’t a doll, that’s an old picture from Fozzie’s elementary school play about the farm!
-Samuel B
It’s for his new act – “Rabbit and Costello”
-Shane Keating
Wocka wocka what’s up, Doc?
-Robert Poole
The perfect gift to let your child know that you don’t love them.
-Julia Gaskill
After seeing the results of his haircut, Animal walked around in a stupor for days.
-James Dixon
This is what happened when Animal got plastic surgery so he could go to the Muppaphone reunion.
-Joe Newman-Getzler
This toy makes me very unhappy. It’s Animal so it should make you smile, but to me, it’s just sad.
-Deidre F
I always wondered what it would look like if a Care Bear died of shock.
-Joe Hennes
SEMI-FINALISTS: KIND OF UGLY
Do I focus on the head shape, or the misplaced hair, or the fur texture, or the eye focus, or the 400% too much eyelids?
-Justin Werfel
She’s really sad about her tiny, tiny nose.
-Samuel B
If you hadn’t told me that was Zoe I never would have known.
-Isha May
This is more or less what Zoe looks like anyway.
-Danny Horn
“ermahgerd!”
-Chris Stulz
It looks like Miss Piggy was talking to someone on a tin can and string, but forgot to take off the can.
-Joe Hennes
If I remember correctly, the Henson Stitch is supposed to be between the eyes…
-Robert Poole
It’s like a snowth dressed as golf caddy.
-Isha May
There were also four jokes about this being Miss Piggy before her nose job.
Kermit should probably lay off the flies. Apparently, he is allergic.
-Aimee Johnson
Little do many Muppet fans know that Kermit’s first job was being the gremlin on the plane in The Twilight Zone.
-Joe Newman-Getzler
I mean, it wouldn’t be so bad, if Kermit was furry, or had these proportions, or looked like this at all.
-Justin Werfel
More like Derp-mit the Frog.
-Julia Gaskill
Disney, how many times do we have to tell you? Yosemite Sam is a Warner Brothers property.
-Justin Werfel
If you think about it, this is actually a CUTER version of Animal.
-Aimee Johnson
His eyes are okay and he’s not dressed like a lamb. You have to give him credit for the smashed egg thing. This could have been a good toy if it was bigger, and made by a different company using different materials and a completely different design.
-Danny Horn
Not grumpy enough to even conceivably pass as Sam.
-Julia Gaskill
Is that who that’s supposed to be?
-James Dixon
Birds are supposed to have wings and a beak. This toy has neither.
-Danny Horn
Aww. It’s like baby Sam hatched out of the egg and then someone told him he was in Canada.
-Isha May
This is what happens when Jewel from Rio has a kid with Tweety Bird who then goes and gets severe liposuction before joining the Sleaze Brothers as the Bluebird of Happiness. There. Now you can’t unthink it.
-Joe Newman-Getzler
Poor Sam lost all that weight to play the part of Gandhi. Then they gave it to that hack Kingsley.
-Mike C
He looks like he just saw Wayne and Wanda making out.
-Matthew Brink
The tykes really go for old man dolls.
-Scott Champion
Is he falling….or did he already land?
-Mike C
It looks like The Scream’s grandmother.
-Matthew Brink
I had to go look at a bunch of Statler pictures to check if he ever wears a pinstripe suit like that. Turns out the answers are: yes, he wears a pinstripe suit, and no, he doesn’t wear one like that. This Statler looks like he’s appearing in “Guys and Dolls”, and he’s just found out what a bad review feels like from the other end.
-Danny Horn
The body of Pee-wee Herman, the face of Miracle Max from “The Princess Bride” and backwards feet. Statler in a nutshell really.
-Chandler Jackson
This is Statler when he tried on his childhood Bar Mitzvah suit and his mom’s lipstick.
-Weston Long
I think at least he’s topologically equivalent to the real Statler.
-Justin Werfel
Burt Bacharach awoke from a terrible nightmare.
-Peter Savieri
A Cha Cha Cha Cha, A Dinkda Doo.
-Eric C
Fozzie and Tutter’s love child.
-Weston Long
In case anybody wondered what would happen if Fozzie and Tutter had a
baby…
-Shane Keating
One wrong step, and Fozzie could eat his own nose.
-Matthew Soberman
SECOND RUNNER-UP
Gonzo had to split up with Camilla, because she caught him seeing someone on the side!
-Mike C
You have to wonder what kind of reference material they used over at Toy Factory, if any. Gonzo has never worn an outfit even remotely like that. Are those supposed to be snow boots? Are they platform snow boots? And if it’s snow-boots weather, then why is his collar open like that? If somebody brought that toy into your house then you’d have to move.
-Danny Horn
I’m forced to look away from Gonzo’s eyes and nose, so I’d like to point out that his belt buckle looks kind of like an adorable smiling face. Let’s just focus on that.
-Evan Goldaper
“Gonzo’s COO COO for Cocoa Puffs!”
-Eric C
In the end, it was Gonzo’s lack of facial proportions that got him kicked out of the Jackson 5.
-Matthew Soberman
Buy a nose, get a free Gonzo!
-Joe Hennes
FIRST RUNNER-UP
So crazy looking that it almost goes all the way around past ugly and becomes cute again. He’s wearing little overalls. You can’t hate him.
-Danny Horn
YES! They got the color right! Even Disney couldn’t be bothered to do that! He’s certainly angry about something. Possibly his orthodontia.
-Justin Werfel
Tell it to GO BYE BYE as soon as possible.
-Mat Lippiello
Can you feel the excitement? It was a close race this year, but ultimately one toy won out, and will be awarded the International Trophy of Muppet Toy Ugliness. And here he is…
THE WINNER
This is Fozzie’s hideously deformed cousin, Fozzy. Retailers need to take a good look and stop mislabeling him “Fozzie.”
-Chris Stulz
I definitely saw this Fozzie plush while I was Christmas shopping with my dad back in December. He didn’t understand why I was sitting on the ground, laugh-crying and hunched over this toy.
-Julia Gaskill
This one actually makes me angry. We finally get a Fozzie Bear doll into Toys R Us again and this is what he looks like. The one in this photo is actually better than some of the Fozzies I’ve seen on the shelves. They look like angry little hate demons.
-Danny Horn
There’s literally nothing right about this doll.
-Weston Long
And there it is! For the second time in history, a Fozzie toy wins the dubious crown. Speaking of which, be sure to check out our previous pageants if you haven’t already, or if you want to take a trip down repressed memory lane.
Click here to wear a t-shirt with your name on it, and no pants, on the Tough Pigs forum!
by Ryan Roe – Ryan@ToughPigs.comSenate Democrats are pressing the Trump administration to publicly release logs of visitors to the White House and Mar-a-Lago.
Seven Democratic senators sent a letter on Monday to President Trump and William Callahan, the Secret Service deputy director, asking that they continue the Obama-era practice and extend it to the Florida resort, which Trump has referred to as his "winter White House."
"It is now over one month into your Administration and you have yet to announce whether you will continue a policy of transparency with respect to individuals who visit the White House complex," the senators wrote to the president.
They added that there is "no reason" why the Trump administration couldn't release the visitor logs, adding that he should "extend those policies to address your decision to regularly conduct official business at private properties that also provide access to certain members of the public."
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The White House's visitor access records page is being "updated," according to the White House website.
"It will post records of White House visitors on an ongoing basis, once they become available," it adds
The Democrats note in their letter to Trump that if he's planning to continue the Obama-era policy, they should expect to start seeing visitor logs as soon as April 20. The Obama administration published the logs roughly three to four months after they were created.
Trump has reportedly spent nearly a quarter of his time as president in the Sunshine State, playing host to foreign leaders, including Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, at his resort.
The senators are also asking Callahan to detail how it will conduct background checks for visitors when Trump conducts official business on private property, including Mar-a-Lago, and if any decision has been made about making visitor logs public.
The Democrats note that Whitehouse and Udall previously requested in a February letter that Trump make Mar-a-Lago membership and visitor lists public, but didn't receive a response.
Senators are asking that Trump and Callahan respond to Monday's letters by March 15."Lap times from the race simulation this afternoon. In the last 5 laps came the hammer!!" - Reigning MotoGP champ Jorge Lorenzo fires a warning shot by setting his best race simulation laps at the end of a long run.
"10 laps were enough to understand the M1 is my bike. Today was a big relief" - Seven time MotoGP champion Valentino Rossi back on form after two poor seasons at Ducati.
"I feel confident, not only because of the position but also the feeling with the bike" - 2012 title runner-up Dani Pedrosa tops all three days at Sepang.
"I thought that I would take a little longer to get back 'on it', but right from the opening laps I felt very comfortable on the bike" - Rookie sensation Marc Marquez surprises himself with his speed and consistency.
"I like Marquez's attitude a lot because in his mind, looking at him today, it looks like he wants to win the championship at the first try" - Valentino Rossi praises the reigning Moto2 champion.
"I'll be sore tomorrow and after three days I'll be walking like John Wayne" - Monster Yamaha Tech 3 rookie Bradley Smith puts in the hard yards at Sepang.
"It is clear looking at the top of the timesheets that it is going to be a fantastic season in MotoGP. I think any of us that finished in the top seven today will have a shot at winning a race and I think the fans are going to be treated to some fantastic racing" - Smith's team-mate Cal Crutchlow predicts a tight season after a close first day of testing.
"Nice to get on the bike again! Shoulder quickly reminded me that I got to keep a leash on it tho!" - Ben Spies Tweeting that his return to fitness won't happen overnight.
"We need some help, a couple of clicks of rebound and a bit of pre-load off the front is not going to be two-seconds!" - Nicky Hayden makes clear that set-up changes alone will not make the 2013 Desmosedici competitive.
"Unfortunately, we need time to try something big" - Team-mate Andrea Dovizioso knows new parts won't appear overnight.
"I got some sleeping issues this night so I had to start a little bit later..." - Stefan Bradl makes a late start on day two.
"Hopefully we can get what they've got now, but whether it's going to happen, I really don't know" - Cal Crutchlow has his fingers crossed that some factory parts will be sent Tech 3's way.
"I'm really happy. You always aim high, but to finish as the second CRT is well above expectation. We're coming good, and still improving every time we go out on track. It's perfect!" - PBM's Michael Laverty finishes as second-quickest CRT on the final day of his MotoGP test debut.
"In this moment it's impossible to go fast. Too much chatter" - Hector Barbera getting bad vibrations from his Avintia FTR-Kawasaki.
"What's the next question?" - Forward Racing's Colin Edwards on the below par performance of the new standard ECU package.Men’s football has come a long way in Mizoram. It’s over to the women now.
The Mizoram Football Association (MFA) has admitted that it has not promoted women’s football in the state with the kind of zeal for men’s.
Read more | Aizawl FC, Khalid Jamil and the making of I-League’s greatest underdog story
It now wants to make up for lost time to make the state’s women footballers a force to reckon with. The MFA has thus planned a professional women’s league from the 2018 season. This league is likely to be modelled on the Mizoram Premier League (MPL) that has since birth in 2012 become the player factory for top-rung clubs across India.
Read more | In Mizoram, aspiring footballers love being Mama’s boys
“Women in Mizoram are as passionate about football as men. In fact, they comprise at least half the spectators of a football match on any given day, which is unheard of elsewhere in the country,” MFA secretary Lalnghinglova Hmar told HT.
The MFA hopes local firms and investors will come forward to form women’s football clubs for the professional league to kick-start. It is also banking on support from a local TV channel that has been the fiscal backbone of MPL.
Read more | Aizawl FC can’t afford to let I-League title slip: Coach Khalid Jamil
Unlike the men, Mizoram’s women footballers have lagged behind. The only high was in 2015 when the state team won the sub-junior girls’ national championship.
“We don’t expect much from our senior women’s team simply because they did not have the best of coaching or facilities when they started out 10-15 years ago. But the girls under 18 are shaping up very well,” Peter Lalzawmliana, secretary of MFA’s women’s committee, said.
Read more | Aizawl FC won’t win I-League easily: Thangboi Singto, Shillong Lajong coach
Nine of these girls have been selected for the U-18 for the national camp. They include Offie Lalhmingchhuanpuii and school dropouts Kaptluangi and Ruatfeli.
Offie is considered the best striker in Mizoram while Ruatfeli has been the best player for three consecutive years at a major women’s football league in Mizoram.
“The girls have potential to become some of India’s best footballers,” coach Lalsangzuala Hmar, preparing the women’s team for the senior national football championship from May 15, said.
Lalsangzuala is Mizoram’s leading football coach and had guided two local clubs to MPL wins.
“But to be the best, we have to ensure the girls can focus on their football, not get caught up --- like most tribal girls in the rural areas --- in domestic chores and farming,” Peter said.
First Published: Apr 29, 2017 17:53 ISTWashington (CNN) Mike Huckabee is standing by the Duggar family following the admission by eldest son Joshua Duggar that he committed "inexcusable" actions as a teenager, amid a shocking report outlining multiple allegations of child molestation against him.
"Josh's actions when he was an underage teen are as he described them himself, 'inexcusable,' but that doesn't mean 'unforgivable,'" Huckabee wrote in a Facebook post. "He and his family dealt with it and were honest and open about it with the victims and the authorities. No purpose whatsoever is served by those who are now trying to discredit Josh or his family by sensationalizing the story."
Huckabee said that "good people make mistakes and do regrettable and even disgusting things," and accused those who revealed the allegations of "insensitive bloodthirst," and said Josh Duggar had redeemed himself in living a "responsible and circumspect life as an adult."
A police report published by In Touch magazine on Thursday night outlined multiple allegations of child molestation by Josh Duggar, now 27, against underage girls that happened when he was 14 and 15 years old, and were reported to the Springdale police when he was 18.
"Twelve years ago, as a young teenager, I acted inexcusably for which I am extremely sorry and deeply regret," Josh Duggar said in a statement. "I hurt others, including my family and close friends."
Duggar's statement appears to refer to a 2006 police report in In Touch magazine's story. The police report is heavily redacted and does not include the name of the person accused of "forcible fondling," but the dates listed in the document appear to line up with Duggar's statement Thursday.
His admission could become a significant headache for Republican presidential contenders, many of whom have been outspoken supporters of the Christian conservative family in the past, and have received campaign support from the family.
Late last night, Duggar also resigned as head of the lobbying arm of the conservative Family Research Council, a decision President Tony Perkins said in a statement was the "best decision for Josh and his family at this time." He also emphasized that the molestation allegations were "previously unknown" to the organization.
There's no evidence to suggest any of the candidates who campaigned with the Duggars over the years had any knowledge of the report published this week.
The Duggars' have a long and active history of political advocacy for social conservative causes, and were seen as powerful surrogates for Republican candidates over the years.
As recently as Tuesday of this week, Josh Duggar tweeted a picture of himself with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who's expected to launch his presidential bid next month.
Great meeting today w/ @ScottWalker! He has a very passionate vision for America. #OurAmericanRevival #2016 pic.twitter.com/PiB7MfiSzt — Josh Duggar (@joshduggar) May 19, 2015
Within hours of the news breaking, critics of the Duggars had unearthed shots of him with a veritable panoply of declared and expected GOP presidential candidates, enough to fill a single-service Tumblr page
He's been photographed smiling alongside Sens. Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
The Duggars also appeared in a photograph with former President Bill Clinton, who is also from Arkansas, when both the family and the former president were interviewed on NBC's Today show in 2011
And the Duggar family's political activity doesn't stop there — last cycle Josh Duggar alone campaigned for GOP Senate candidates in Kansas, Virginia and Mississippi. In 2008, they helped drive Huckabee to a win in the Iowa caucuses, where Evangelical Christians are a strong voting force; in 2012 they did the same for Santorum.
Huckabee at one point called the Duggars an "example of something that's wholesome and wonderful."
JUST WATCHED Huckabee compares gay marriage to drinking, swearing Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Huckabee compares gay marriage to drinking, swearing 02:59
The police report also appears to show Josh's parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, were aware of their son's "forcible fondling" — often while the girls were asleep — as early as 2002, but waited at least a year to take any action against him. Jim Bob Duggar initially said upon finding out about his actions, they sent their son to a "Christian ministry" for some "hard physical work and counseling," but Michelle Duggar later revealed they simply sent him to stay with a family friend for a period of time.
A formal police investigation wasn't opened until 2006, when the Duggars were due to make an appearance on Oprah Winfrey's show and a tipster sent along a letter detailing some of the allegations, which the show forwarded to police.
Duggar and his wife live in the Washington, D.C. area and are expecting their fourth child.Share
Using modulated ultrasonic waves, the Sonic Soak promises to “disintegrate dirt and bacteria at a microscopic level.” But how does it work? Apparently, the Sonic Soak sends ultrasound into its surrounding liquid environment, creating microscopic cavitation bubbles. These bubbles hit the surface of what needs to be cleaned (your glasses, your clothes, or even a piece of fruit or a vegetable), and implode. The resulting pressure is said to wash out dirt, grime, oil, and bacteria.
Using the Sonic Soak promises to be a breeze. Just fill your container of choice with water (perhaps contingent upon the size load you have to clean), then plug the Sonic Soak into an outlet. From there, add your detergent or soap, drop in the Sonic Soak, and press “start.” Apparently, even with its impressive cleaning capabilities, the device is quite quiet, and generates sounds no louder, and not much different, than moderate rainfall.
Promising to serve as a perfect travel companion, the Sonic Soak can help you pack lighter, as you can easily wash clothes while you’re away from home. And not only can your clothing benefit from some cleaning, but the Sonic Soak can also clean your jewelry, your toothbrush, and even your kids’ toys. Most other anti-bacterial cleaners rely on harsh chemicals (or harsh washing cycles), but the Sonic Soak promises to be gentle yet effective.
With about a month left in its Indiegogo campaign, the Sonic Soak has raised just under $4,000, about 40 percent of its total funding goal. If you’re interested in chipping in, you can pre-order a Sonic Soak for yourself for $125, with an estimated delivery date of December 2017.liza Rosie
2017-05-27 12:26:20 -0400
Apologists will hang onto the smallest crumb, even if it makes less sense than any. The fear of not being ‘inclusive’ enough, and understanding enough of an ideology that wants to overtake ours is delusional and suicidal.
Poor little Muslims, imagine being taken to task for Islams attacks on the western culture and people who welcomed them and misguidedly took them in.
Islam is supremacist and will never accept western ways and values. They will abuse and offend and act abused and offended until they get their way. Islam’s plan is to devour the west, and it looks as though we are letting them, even helping them do it. Facts mean nothing to an apologist and are taqiyya-ed away by the Islamic devotee.
How many parents are mourning the Manchester massacre as apologists find yet another lame thread to hang their bullshit on.
commentedSen.(R) announcedthat she will not run for governor of Maine next year, ending months of public speculation about her political future.
"I was very touched that many of the residents believed that I could provide our state with thoughtful and effective leadership," Collins said. "The hands-on nature of governor very much appeals to me."
After speaking for more than 20 minutes on health care Friday morning, she joked that she should "address the elephant in the room."
Collins has publicly deliberated for months over whether to jump into the governor's race and remained tight-lipped about what she would ultimately decide.
She added, "I am a congenital optimist and continue to believe that Congress can — and will – be more productive.... I have demonstrated the ability to work across the aisle."
"I want to continue to play a key role in advancing policies that... bring peace and stabilities to a troubled and violent world," Collins said during a speech at a local Chamber of Commerce event in Maine. "And I have concluded that the best way I can contribute to these priorities is to remain a member of the U.S. Senate."
The move is a boost for congressional Republicans, who have seen several moderate members announce they will leave Washington as the party struggles to score legislative wins and deal with a combative White House.
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Collins, who isn’t up for reelection to her Senate seat until 2020, has played an influential role during the Trump administration. With the Republicans' slim 52-seat majority in the upper chamber, Collins's centrist politics have put her in the middle of some of Washington’s biggest fights.
She joined with two other senators — GOP Sens. 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 (Ariz.) and Lisa Murkowski Lisa Ann MurkowskiWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration Pence meets with Senate GOP for 'robust' discussion on Trump declaration House votes to overturn Trump's emergency declaration MORE (Alaska) in July, and McCain and Sen. Rand Paul Randal (Rand) Howard PaulWhite House pleads with Senate GOP on emergency declaration The Hill's Morning Report — Emergency declaration to test GOP loyalty to Trump The Hill's 12:30 Report: Trump escalates fight with NY Times MORE (R-Ky.) last month — to kill the Republican effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare. The move threw one of the largest GOP agenda items into limbo, infuriating conservatives.
Collins took multiple jabs at the GOP ObamaCare repeal effort Friday, noting that the original proposal was "drafted behind close doors. By the way, it was a group of 13 men who did it."
She and Murkowski also teamed up against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos Elizabeth (Betsy) Dee DeVosWest Virginia teachers just struck against a windfall for public schools Students call on DeVos to offer free tampons, pads in schools to address 'period poverty' DeVos recovering from broken pelvis, hip socket after bicycle accident MORE’s nomination, marking the first time a vice president needed to break a tie on a Cabinet secretary.
Collins acknowledged that her influence in Washington and ability to work with Democrats despite the increasingly partisan atmosphere had weighed into her decision to remain in the Senate.
Discussing the need for bipartisanship in Congress, she read a note from a colleague that urged her to remain in the Senate.
"The institution would suffer. While the temptation might be to walk away and leave the problems to others, there are very few who have the ability to bring about positive change," Collins said, reading the note.
Collins was first elected to the Senate in 1996 and ranks 15th in the chamber. She has spots on influential committees including the Appropriations, the Health and the Intelligence committees.
While her bipartisan leanings have at times rankled leadership, it’s also won her respect from colleagues on both sides of the aisle, who pressured her to bypass the governor’s race.
Amid reports that Collins was mulling leaving Washington, Sen. Heidi Heitkamp Mary (Heidi) Kathryn HeitkampOvernight Energy: Trump taps ex-oil lobbyist Bernhardt to lead Interior | Bernhardt slams Obama officials for agency's ethics issues | Head of major green group steps down Trump picks ex-oil lobbyist David Bernhardt for Interior secretary On The Money: Shutdown Day 27 | Trump fires back at Pelosi by canceling her foreign travel | Dems blast 'petty' move | Trump also cancels delegation to Davos | House votes to disapprove of Trump lifting Russia sanction MORE (D-N.D.) — another moderate senator who faces her own 2018 reelection — texted Collins: “Don’t do it.”
And Sen. Bob Corker Robert (Bob) Phillips CorkerBrexit and exit: A transatlantic comparison Sasse’s jabs at Trump spark talk of primary challenger RNC votes to give Trump 'undivided support' ahead of 2020 MORE (R-Tenn.), who is retiring after 2018, told reporters as he walked through the basement in the U.S. Capitol with Collins earlier this month that he had urged her to stay in the Senate.
Collins remains popular in Maine, winning her last election by nearly 70 points, and could help keep the seat in Republican hands for the foreseeable future.
"This decision has not been an easy one. I've been guided by my sense of where I can do the most for the people of Maine and the nation," Collins said Friday.
Democrats were expected to target the state if Collins pivoted to the governor’s race in hopes of a 2012 repeat. Then, when Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) retired, Sen. Angus King Angus Stanley KingSenate Dems seek to turn tables on GOP in climate change fight Cybersecurity threats to US infrastructure warrant'moonshot' response Hillicon Valley: Senators urge Trump to bar Huawei products from electric grid | Ex-security officials condemn Trump emergency declaration | New malicious cyber tool found | Facebook faces questions on treatment of moderators MORE, an Independent who caucuses with Democrats, won her seat.
Friday’s announcement comes after months of hand-wringing by Collins, who offered few hints into which way she was leaning, except to say she wanted to do what is best for the state.
She had been expected to announce her decision by the end of September but delayed amid an eleventh-hour attempt to repeal and replace ObamaCare. Collins also appeared undecided as recently as last week, when she acknowledged that returning to Maine appealed to her.
"Going back and forth each week is difficult, and my family and friends are in Maine. I believe I could make a difference and job creation and economic opportunity in our state," she told KCSH.
She added on Friday that "on a personal note, I love being in Maine."
If Collins had jumped in the race and won, it could have paved the way for GOP Gov. Paul LePage — a Trump ally who has clashed with Collins — to pick her replacement.
Collins previously ran for governor in 1994, losing to King, her future Senate colleague. Though she was considered the likely front-runner in a general election, she could have faced a fight in the Republican primary amid frustration about her ObamaCare repeal vote.
A survey of GOP primary voters conducted in August by the left-leaning Public Policy Polling found that 62 percent would vote for someone else besides Collins. In a head-to-head match up, 44 percent said they would support Mary Mayhew compared to 33 percent |
-against
Good Enough | T-Shirt
Good Enough | T-Shirt
This Is Not A Dream | T-ShirtLockerby Mine workers reportedly turned away at gate Thursday
NorthernLife.ca has received reports that First Nickel's Lockerby Mine in Sudbury has shut down. 0
NorthernLife.ca has received reports that First Nickel's Lockerby Mine in Sudbury has shut down.
A contractor who supplied equipment to the mine confirmed the gates were locked Thursday and security workers told employees they could not enter the property.
The contractor, who asked not to be named, said he was told the company's bank seized its assets after its poor first quarter financial results were announced earlier in the week.
First Nickel lost $33.1 million in the first quarter of 2015.
In early January, First Nickel restructured its operations at the nickel-copper mine, and cut 75 per cent of its contractors and 30 per cent of its permanent workforce – from 164 jobs to 115.
The cuts represented around 45 per cent of First Nickel's Sudbury workforce.
In June 2015 First Nickel announced it would be halting development of an underground ramp at the Lockerby Mine.
“We will now shift our focus to maximizing production of the remaining ore and then transitioning to care and maintenance or closure,” said First Nickel president and CEO Thomas Boehlert at the time.
“The company is currently in discussion with its secured lenders regarding alternatives with respect to its outstanding indebtedness in light of the expected timing of cessation of mining at Lockerby.”
Mine and union officials could not immediately be reached.
NorthernLife.ca will have more on this story as it develops.
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CommentsAt Carrier, Corporate Greed is the Bottom Line
Posted: March 30, 2016
Jeffrey Bonior Researcher/Writer, Alliance for American Manufacturing
Wayne Dale got the call late in the evening on Feb. 9.
A representative from Carrier Corporation in Indianapolis was on the other end, requesting his appearance the following morning at 10 a.m. at Carrier's heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) manufacturing facility.
“They said it was very important that I be there, so I said I will be there,” said Dale, who represents Carrier's employees as the subdirector of the United Steelworkers (USW) District 7.
The next morning, Dale entered a room full of curious first-shift employees. He had no idea about the shocking news he was about to hear.
Carrier employees react as officials announce the 1,400 layoffs. An additional 700 layoffs at another facility were announced on the same day.
Carrier representatives coldly announced the factory would be shut down and moved to Monterrey, Mexico, leaving approximately 1,400 Indiana workers jobless in the near future.
The bad news wasn't over. Later that day, it was disclosed that the United Technologies Electronic Controls factory in nearby Huntington, Indiana would also be closing and moving to Mexico. The Huntington plant, located near Fort Wayne, employs 700 people who work on the electrical and technical components for the popular Carrier HVAC systems.
United Technologies, the parent company of Carrier and United Technologies Electronic Controls, was putting 2,100 people out of work.
“The Carrier workers are just devastated,” Dale said. "They’re disappointed. Some of the employees put their hands over their faces and were crying. It’s just horrible.”
Carrier has manufactured heating and cooling systems for more than 60 years in Indianapolis. And in an instant, Carrier employees were told their jobs were being phased out and they were left to fend for themselves — even though the company promised some job skills retraining.
Juan Martin, a 42-year-old assembler of heating units at Carrier, is a relative newcomer, having only worked 2 1//2 years at the plant.
“Actually, I love working at Carrier,” he said. “It’s a nice atmosphere and for me, coming from 17 years as a mentor and counselor for troubled children, switching to Carrier allowed me to make a little more money than I did. A good manufacturing job is sometimes better than a job with a sociology degree.
“But there was no warning. You know, sometimes you might hear a whisper or a rumor but you didn’t even hear that. It just happened.
“I am very angry. I felt disrespected. I felt like they pulled the rug from under me and that they don’t care about American workers. Corporate greed is the bottom line.”
Martin, who often received overtime hours, used the extra money to pay the bills of his young grandson who just had heart surgery.
Profits Over People
Carrier was founded in 1915 in Farmington, Conn. as an independent, American company manufacturing and distributing HVAC systems. By 2012, Carrier was a $12.5 billion business with more than 43,000 people working in 170 countries.
In 1979, Carrier was acquired by United Technologies Corp., which expanded its growth. United Technologies has sales of $56 billion annually. It earned $7.6 billion last year, and $2.9 billion came from the division that includes Carrier.
United Technologies officials have said the move to Mexico is a pre-emptive necessity to secure the corporation's long-term future and that of its shareholders. But many workers, policymakers, union officials and others cite greed.
The majority of workers at Carrier in Indianapolis earn $20 per hour or more, with ample overtime. Many earn $60,000 to $70,000 per year, with benefits.
When the jobs begin moving to Mexico in April 2017, Carrier profits will certainly rise. In Mexico, temporary workers will earn $9.40 a day while permanent workers will take home $19 a day.
Robert James is the 57-year-old vice president of USW Local 1999 in Indianapolis. He has worked at Carrier for 18 years as a material associate, who drives products to the assembly line.
“I think the way they handled it was not a good way to handle it,” James said. “I also think it was very disrespectful. Quality of product will decrease being made in Mexico.
“I would say there is a large amount of anger, a large amount of hurt. You give your life to the job and then they treat you like nothing and that is the way the majority of employees feel.”
James feels the plant closing will have a major effect on the city of Indianapolis. He knows the Carrier workers spend a lot of money in the city supporting restaurants, gas stations and other small businesses. He also realizes the devastation that will be experienced by Carrier suppliers.
“We’re still in talks with Carrier,” he said. “Right now we are still in the process of trying to convince Carrier to stay in Indianapolis.”
But its highly unlikely Carrier will continue to manufacture in Indiana.
“I think it’s wrong and I think it’s simply the company being greedy,” James said. “And I see our government helping them. These different trade bills and different things of that nature, that’s what’s taking our jobs out of the United States.”
“I am very angry. I felt disrespected. I felt like they pulled the rug from under me and that they don’t care about American workers. Corporate greed is the bottom line.” Juan Martin, Carrier employee
Carrier is a bit rare in that its employees range in age from 18 to 75; the majority of American manufacturing tends to hold a median age in the 50s.
Kelly Ray Hugunin is the business representative for USW Local 1999 and has seen more millennials working at Carrier because of the current cost of a college education and lack of a guaranteed well-paying desk job upon graduation.
“It’s a wide range,” Hugunin said. "But we do have some people working in their 70s. We’ve got a guy out there that been working here for 52 years.”
Hugunin has strong feelings about the move to Mexico.
“I think it’s a betrayal. I think it’s un-American and I’ve said it before, we grow up and we’re taught to go find a good job and work hard and if we come to work like we’re supposed to, we’re going to be rewarded having decent wages and having that job and here Carrier just took that all away from those people," he said.
Also at the expense of the American people is the nearly $1.6 million in tax incentives and training to bring Carrier to a favorable situation in Indianapolis. After meeting with Indiana Gov. Mike Pence, Carrier agreed to return the $1.6 million tax and incentive funds.
But United Technologies will continue to profit from taxpayer dollars. The company is a major United States military contractor that receives an additional $5.6 billion from the federal government each year.
"Moving to Mexico, it’s basically greed," Hugunin said. "It’s simply that everything we’ve heard from the company and what they are telling elected officials, it’s just simply about those wages. They want to go down there and exploit those Mexican workers and make their profits. It’s not like they aren’t making profits now. It’s a way to make more profits at the expense of the American people."
United Technologies did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
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This has been reposted from AAM.CLOSE The victim of continual sign thefts takes matters into her own hands. Dustin Levy, The Evening Sun
Buy Photo Donald Peters and Karen Kocher stand with their Trump sign outside of their home in Abbottstown. (Photo: Clare Becker - The Evening Sun)Buy Photo
A Paradise Township couple might have to consider building a wall.
After four of their lawn signs supporting presidential candidate Donald Trump have been stolen, Karen Kocher and Donald Peters, owners of Sun Auto Sales who are getting married next month, put up two homemade signs saying, “You can steal our signs but you can’t steal our votes.”
“It just kind of ticked us off that they stole our signs to begin with, and that’s just how I felt,” Kocher said.
Four lawn signs, purchased from the Donald J. Trump website, had sat on the couple's property for about a week before they vanished a few weeks ago. The couple was angry at first before deciding to make a striking statement to the neighborhood, according to Kocher’s daughter Elizabeth Mann.
The signs complemented two signs in the windows of the Kocher and Peters’ home: one that reads “Veterans for Trump” and another that claims, “the silent majority stands with Trump.” They also own a golf cart from Trump National Golf Club bought five years ago.
“Who would have known,” Kocher said in a Facebook post regarding Trump’s candidacy.
In true Trump style, Kocher and Peters fought back with their new signs, two 4-by-8 pieces of plywood painted baby blue with the standard "Make America Great Again" lawn sign plastered in the center. When working in the lawn, Kocher said she heard about 50 honks for the signs, which overlook Lincoln Highway.
However, even that didn’t halt the disappearing act. One of the large plywood signs was found in a retention pond last weekend down the road from the couples’ house.
“We fished it out and put it back up,” Mann said.
Peters and Kocher contacted the police on both occasions, and, since they paid for the signs, police said theft charges could be pressed if they found who was responsible, said Mann. According to Mann, police advised using a trail camera that takes photographs when it senses motion as long as they made people aware of its existence, and the couple complied.
“Smile you’re on camera,” reads a sign in between the two homemade plywood ones. The camera was placed among trees by Kocher and Peters' home, aimed down at the sign so it doesn't film another home in the neighborhood.
“If they decided to come back, we will get a nice picture of them,” Mann said. The camera was not functioning the night the plywood sign was taken.
Northern York County Regional Police Department confirmed they received a report from Kocher on April 10 about the theft. However, the department does not get many reports of incidents like this, Lieutenant David Lash said.
People who have their political signs stolen should make sure they continue to report to police, Lash said.
To prevent further thievery, Kocher set up "booby traps," including a cowbell and an alarm that goes off when adjusting the 4-by-8 piece of plywood.
Peters and Kocher's property included four Trump lawn signs, two handmade signs, two window signs and a Trump golf cart. (Photo: Submitted)
Mann guessed the person responsible for the thefts could be someone scared of a Trump presidency or “kids acting up.” She also pointed out the culprits could be Trump supporters stealing the signs to put up in their own yards.
“If they would have stopped and asked, we probably would have gave them one,” Mann said.
Peters, Kocher and Mann refuse to be discouraged by the sign thefts and plan to show their excitement at the polls on Tuesday. Peters and Kocher attended the Trump rally in Harrisburg on Thursday night, where Kocher was planning on bringing a photo of the placards for Trump to sign.
Mann listed many reasons for her family’s Trump support, including his business acumen and lack of funds from political action committees and lobbyists.
“The country needs to be run like a business, and no one can argue Donald Trump is not a wonderful businessman,” Mann said.
Kocher and Peters evidently agree with the sentiment, as their relentless spirit reflects the controversial campaign of the New York businessman.
“I’m still voting for Trump no matter how many signs they steal,” Kocher said.
Read or Share this story: http://evesun.co/1WhQ4zsTake some metal scraps from the junkyard; put them in a glass jar with a common household chemical; and, voilà, you have a high-performance battery
"Imagine that the tons of metal waste discarded every year could be used to provide energy storage for the renewable energy grid of the future, instead of becoming a burden for waste processing plants and the environment," said Cary Pint, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at said Cary Pint, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University
To make such a future possible, Pint headed a research team that used scraps of steel and brass - two of the most commonly discarded materials - to create the world's first steel-brass battery that can store energy at levels comparable to lead-acid batteries while charging and discharging at rates comparable to ultra-fast charging supercapacitors
The research team, which consists of graduates and undergraduates in Vanderbilt's interdisciplinary materials science program and department of mechanical engineering, describe this achievement in a paper titled "From the Junkyard to the Power Grid: Ambient Processing of Scrap Metals into Nanostructured Electrodes for Ultrafast Rechargeable Batteries" published online in the journal ACS Energy Letters.
The secret to unlocking this performance is anodization, a common chemical treatment used to give aluminum a durable and decorative finish. When scraps of steel and brass are anodized using a common household chemical and residential electrical current, the researchers found that the metal surfaces are restructured into nanometer-sized networks of metal oxide that can store and release energy when reacting with a water-based liquid electrolyte.
The team determined that these nanometer domains explain the fast charging behavior that they observed, as well as the battery's exceptional stability. They tested it for 5,000 consecutive charging cycles - the equivalent of over 13 years of daily charging and discharging - and found that it retained more than 90 percent of its capacity.
Unlike the recent bout of exploding lithium-ion cell phone batteries, the steel-brass batteries use non-flammable water electrolytes that contain potassium hydroxide, an inexpensive salt used in laundry detergent.
"When our aim was to produce the materials used in batteries from household supplies in a manner so cheaply that large-scale manufacturing facilities don't make any sense, we had to approach this differently than we normally would in the research lab," Pint said.
The research team is particularly excited about what this breakthrough could mean for how batteries are made in the future.
the day when residents will disconnect from the grid and produce their own batteries. "We're seeing the start of a movement in contemporary society leading to a'maker culture' where large-scale product development and manufacturing is being decentralized and scaled down to individuals or communities. So far, batteries have remained outside of this culture, but I believe we will see the day when residents will disconnect from the grid and produce their own batteries. That's the scale where battery technology began, and I think we will return there," Pint said.
The Vanderbilt team drew inspiration from the "Baghdad Battery," a simple device dating back to the first century BC, which some believe is the world's oldest battery. It consisted of a ceramic terracotta pot, a copper sheet and an iron rod, which were found along with traces of electrolyte. Although this interpretation of the artifacts is controversial, the simple way they were constructed influenced the research team's design.
The team's next step is to build a full-scale prototype battery suitable for use in energy-efficient smart homes. "We're forging new ground with this project, where a positive outcome is not commercialization, but instead a clear set of instructions that can be addressed to the general public. It's a completely new way of thinking about battery research, and it could bypass the barriers holding back innovation in grid scale energy storage," Pint said.
Co-authors on this project include Nitin Muralidharan and Andrew Westover who co-led the project and are graduate students in the interdisciplinary materials science program, Nicholas Galioto and Haotian Sun, who are both Vanderbilt mechanical engineering undergraduate students; Rachel Carter and Adam Cohn, who are graduate students in mechanical engineering; and Landon Oakes, who is a graduate student in the interdisciplinary materials science program.
Source and top image: Vanderbilt UniversityA Professional Lens of Capturing Grand View
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for Mac http://yongnuoebay.com/gw/YnFMToolForMacOS.zipNathan Oduwa and Shayon Harrison secured victory for our Spurs XI against Stevenage in Saturday's friendly at the Lamex Stadium.
It was an eventful afternoon for Oduwa, who scored a sublime opener before being wiped out in a challenge with ex-Spur Charlie Lee and stretchered off unconscious on 35 minutes. Thankfully, he regained consciousness and was able to take his place on the sidelines to watch the second half.
Harrison fired home the second goal from the penalty spot five minutes from time after being clattered by Stevenage's substitute, triallist goalkeeper.
The match against Teddy Sheringham's League Two side again ticked all the pre-season boxes with young goalkeeper Tom Glover producing a commanding performance, a clean sheet, a victory and a physical test ahead of the Barclays Under-21 Premier League opener against Everton on August 10.
We controlled the first half but chances were few and far between with Stevenage happy to sit in and let us try to break them down.
Our best moments came down the flanks with Connor Ogilvie and Kyle Walker-Peters constantly looking to get forward. The full-backs almost combined for the first chance on five minutes as Ismail Azzaoui released Walker-Peters down the right and Ogilvie raced into the box to meet his cross but couldn't direct his attempt on target.
Oduwa did just that though two minutes later with a fine solo goal out of nothing.
The winger looked surrounded as he picked up the ball in the left channel but he picked a gap and sped through, leaving three defenders in his wake. He then side-stepped the fourth before firing past Chris Day from the left angle.
The next chance fell to Cameron Carter-Vickers on 18 minutes as the defender pulled away at the far post to meet Azzaoui's corner, only to head over. At the other end, Glover showed great hands to collect Dean Parrett's dangerous free-kick.
Oduwa's afternoon ended on 27 minutes when he was left motionless by Lee's challenge. The game was held up for seven minutes as he received treatment before being stretchered off.
Cy Goddard replaced Oduwa with Azzaoui switching to the left. We almost opened Stevenage up on 41 minutes when Ogilvie found Harrison who backheeled into the path of Goddard but Dean Wells managed to get back and clear.
The second half started slowly but sparked into life on 55 minutes when Glover claimed a corner and released Azzaoui, who drove forward before letting fly from the edge of the box, his shot blocked. Azzaoui then tried his luck from a central position, this time Stevenage's triallist goalkeeper blocked with his feet.
The game stepped up a gear from there as Stevenage clawed their way back into proceedings. Akinyemi's shot was deflected wide and Tom Conlon looped a header on target from Parrett's corner, cleared by Filip Lesniak.
Williams got away from Dominic Ball on the left before testing Glover at his near post, the keeper blocking with his feet.
Play switched to the other end as Harrison produced another save from the triallist goalkeeper down to his right.
Stevenage's best chance arrived on 73 minutes when Parrett's free-kick found Akinyemi diving in at the far post only to plant his header wide from inside the six-yard box. Akinyemi then hit a dipping volley that sailed a couple of yards wide.
Our second goal arrived five minutes from time. Luke Amos sent Harrison clear and the striker was sent crashing by the goalkeeper. Harrison picked himself up and drilled the spot-kick into the corner.
Stevenage: Day (triallist, 46), Hughes, Okimo (triallist, 46), Gorman (Schumacher, 57), Franks, Wells (triallist, 46), Casey (Conlon, 46), Parrett, Williams, Lee (c) (triallist, 46), Akinyemi. Substitutes (not used): Johnson, Pett, Kerr.
Spurs XI: Glover; Walker-Peters (Walkes, 84), Ball, Carter-Vickers (c), Ogilvie; Lesniak (Amos, 69), Veljkovic; Oduwa (Goddard, 35), Azzaoui, Sonupe (McEvoy, 75); Harrison. Substitutes (not used): Voss (GK), Maghoma.Authorities say father-daughter team flying tandem when Ronald Faoro reportedly slipped from harness and fell; girl hurt in subsequent crash
A man was killed Sunday afternoon when he fell several thousand feet from a paraglider into a rugged canyon in the mountains above Santa Barbara, according to the Santa Barbara County Fire Department.
The accident occurred at about 12:30 p.m. in the area of La Cumbre Peak off the 2900 block of Gibraltar Road, Fire Department spokesman Mike Eliason said.
A father and daughter were flying tandem, Eliason said, and the man, who was not adequately clipped in, became detached from the paraglider and fell an estimated 3,000 feet into upper Rattlesnake Canyon.
(Officials initially said the two were tandem flying a hang-glider, but later updated to say it was a paraglider.)
The daughter, a juvenile who is not an experienced pilot, stayed with the paraglider and crashed into a tree, Eliason said.
He said the man’s body was located, and his remains were recovered.
He was identified Monday as Ronald Faoro, 60, of Santa Barbara.
A local veterinarian and owner of St. Francis Pet Clinic, Faoro was active in the local paragliding community.
Emergency crews located the daughter, who was still strapped into the paraglider and suspended on a rock face, Eliason said.
He said she suffered minor injuries, and was hoisted by a county helicopter and flown to nearby St. Mary’s Seminary at 1964 Las Canoas Road.
From there she was taken by American Medical Response ambulance to Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital.
The daughter's name was not released.
County firefighters were assisted on the incident by crews from the Santa Barbara and Montecito fire departments, the U.S. Forest Service, the sheriff's Search & Rescue Team, and AMR, Eliason said.
A UC Santa Barbara Geology Department field trip group was in the area and witnessed the accident, Eliason said, adding that members of the group were helpful in locating the victims.
Check back with Noozhawk for updates to this story.
— Noozhawk executive editor Tom Bolton can be reached at.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.***
We're almost a month into the NBA season. Which rim-rattling dunks and jaw-dropping shots stuck with us? The Point Forward looks back at the most memorable plays of the 2012-13 season so far.
(Did we miss anything? Let us know in the comment section below.)
Above: Harrison Barnes puts the Wolves' Nikola Pekovic on a poster with this jam. Barnes deserves some ROY consideration based on this dunk alone.
Jeremy Evans does it all for the Jazz, blocking Ronny Turiaf and then taking it to the rim.
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Few attack the rim harder than Rudy Gay, but let's not overlook the crisp bounce pass from Marc Gasol that enables this dunk to happen.
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Andre Iguodala reminds everyone in Philly what he can do on the hardwood.
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Brandon Jennings added an exclamation point to his hot start with this game-winner.
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Welcome to the NBA, Jonas Valanciunas.
Sincerely, Kevin Durant.
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Rudy Gay makes his second appearance on the top plays list with a behind-the-back dribble that leads to an emphatic slam.
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DeMarcus Cousins, 6-foot-11, 270 pounds, goes coast-to-coast with surprising ease for the Kings. He should initiate all of Sacramento's fast breaks!
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Despite this vicious dunk from the Celtics' Jeff Green, Utah's Al Jefferson says he would love to return to Boston one day.
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Blake Griffin denies Deron Williams on this spectacular block.
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Great teamwork from the Jazz here as Randy Foye grabs the rebound and finds DeMarre Carroll, who sets up Alec Burks for the slam.
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Andre Miller, the patron saint of alley-oops, finds Kenneth Faried with another beauty of a pass.Part I
The ‘Odd’ Men Out
Having just described the breadth of membership in the Saudis’ 34-nation “anti-terrorist” coalition, a few words deserve to be said about some of the states that aren’t party to this framework because their absence is indicative of certain political decisions that don’t often meet with scrutiny from the public eye. The sectarian reasons for Iran, Iraq, and Syria’s exclusions are obvious, but less known are the grounds on which Algeria, Eritrea, and Oman didn’t join:
Algeria:
This North African state has one of the most capable militaries on the continent and is routinely threatened by AQIM and other terrorist groups, but despite this, it refused to sign on to the Saudis’ coalition. The cause is actually pretty simple, and it’s that Algeria is a quasi-member of the Resistance Bloc – not being closely aligned enough with Iran to be a constituent member, but also being far away enough from the US and Saudi Arabia to retain a large degree of independence. Algeria’s historical relations with Russia are another added plus, and it could also be said that its 1990s civil war against Islamic terrorists convinced its present leadership of the need to stay as far away from the Saudis as is realistically possible. Another motivating factor for its government’s decision to abstain from the military coalition is because of Morocco’s membership within it. The two neighbors have a heated rivalry and are presently in a cold war with one another, even going as far as keeping the border closed between them. Under these conditions, as well as Morocco’s chummy ties with the US/NATO and Saudi Arabia/GCC, it’s impossible for Algeria to ever entertain the possibility of joining, although if aging and stroke-ridden President Bouteflika passes away soon and the country falls victim to an Islamist coup or Egyptian-style regime change, then all of this could rapidly change.
Eritrea:
The author previously wrote an extensive analysis about the GCC’s expansion to Eritrea, and it would naturally seem probable that Asmara would join the same framework as its new patrons. This didn’t happen, and it can be attributable to Saudi Arabia not wanting to endanger the viability of the militarily critical GCC naval base there. To explain, after the revelation came out that Eritrea had sold its sovereignty to the Gulf, Ethiopian Prime Minister Hailemariam Desalegn firmly declared in an interview that he would not tolerate the facility being used for any aggressive designs against his country. At the moment, it’s widely thought that a type of military parity exists between Ethiopia and Eritrea that has kept the conventional (but not asymmetrical) peace between them since their mutually disastrous war from 1998-2000, but the GCC base could theoretically tip the balance in favor of Eritrea.
Understanding the enormity of the threat that could be facing it, Ethiopia may have signaled to its Gulf counterparts (especially in this case GCC and “anti-terrorist” coalition leader Saudi Arabia) that it would not tolerate Eritrea’s formal incorporation into any military alliance and that it might preemptively act to stop such a development out of defense of its national interests. The GCC places such an importance on the Eritrean facility’s use in assisting in their War on Yemen that they don’t want to put it in any sort of danger at the moment, likely explaining why they didn’t allow Eritrea to join (although it likely would have if offered). Conversely, an alternative but complementary possibility is that Eritrea itself realized that it would probably spark a formal continuation war if it joined the bloc (provided that it was offered an invitation and refused, which is extraordinarily improbable considering its current GCC cooperation but still theoretically possible), and instead wagered against it out of its government’s interest for self-preservation.
Oman:
The GCC member is noticeably absent from the Saudi-led “anti-terrorist” coalition, but regular regional observers shouldn’t be too surprised. It’s a well-established fact that Oman is the most pragmatic and moderate of all of the Gulf States, and Muscat has a deeply entrenched reputation for pursuing a foreign policy that’s largely independent of any unipolar influence. For example, it played the role of neutral meeting ground between the US and Iran prior to the conclusion of the nuclear deal, and it’s also exploring the possibility of having Iran build a gas pipeline to the country. Sultan Qaboos has thus been geopolitically wise in preserving his country’s sovereignty and refraining from membership in the Saudi-led military bloc, knowing full well that joining it would likely put Shiite blood on the Kingdom’s hands sooner or later. Another fact that may have motivated this decision is that most Omanis follow the Ibadi sect of Islam, which might one day make them a target of the Wahhabist hordes if Saudi Arabia and its ilk decided that the geopolitical conditions were ripe for such an offensive (possibly after Qaboos’ passing if a power struggle ensued between pro-GCC and GCC-neutral elements). Therefore, by being in a similar sectarian vulnerability as Iran and others vis-à-vis the Wahhabis, the Ibadi Sultanate was already disinclined to join the alliance as it was.
“Terrorists” Everywhere
It was earlier mentioned that one of the ‘benefits’ that the Saudi-led coalition members can receive from one another is multilateral support in fighting their own “Wars on Terror”, with the label of “terrorist” being subjectively thrown around to any manner of anti-government or anti-establishment group. It’s very probable that the aforementioned support will presumably be dominated by Saudi financial largesse, but it could also potentially see the formation of regional ‘peacekeeping’ deployments in support of the host state’s “anti-terrorist” mission, provided of course that the anticipated strategic and economic benefits were enough to justify the military risk. Saudi Arabia’s forecasted geopolitical application of this strategy will be discussed in the next section, but for now, it’s relevant to briefly address some of the ways in which the coalition members might abuse the “terrorist” label (commonly associated in the current global context with extreme Islamic groups, although by no means exclusive to them) in order to aggressively pursue their own self-interests:
Guinea/Sierra Leone/Ivory Coast/Togo/Benin:
These five countries may likely label any rebel group or anti-government tribe as “terrorists” in order to discredit them and ‘justify’ a harsh community-wide crackdown against them (bordering, if not exceeding, outright ethnic cleansing).
Mali:
It’s foreseeable that separatist and/or autonomy-demanding Tuaregs might fall under this label if they continue to be a nuisance to the UN-led peace efforts in the country.
Sudan:
While the myriad of rebel groups fighting in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states already commit terrorist acts as it is, information about their crimes might become more widely disseminated among the Saudi bloc if Khartoum ties them in with the organization-wide “War on Terror”. There’s a possibility that Riyadh may not support this, however, so long as Washington continues to implicitly encourage the militant dissolution of the unified Sudanese state as a proxy attack against Chinese energy interests.
Turkey:
It’s without a doubt that Erdogan will use his Saudi-granted pedestal to preach about why the bloc should recognize the PKK and supportive Kurds as “terrorists”, hoping that he can gain wider acceptance for his bloody crackdown against them, and any other groups that rise up in defiance of his government (leftists, secular protesters, etc.) will also fall under this umbrella.
Lebanon/Palestine:
The only reason that these two states are part of Riyadh’s “anti-terrorist” coalition is so that the Saudis can ‘justify’ possibly forthcoming material assistance to each of their respective proxies within them (to varying extents, some Hariri-aligned elements in the Lebanese Armed Forces and the most pro-Saudi agents in Hamas) for their fight against Hezbollah. The reader should remember that Hezbollah is a Shiite Resistance organization whose religious identity makes it an irresistible target of the Wahhabist and identity-exterminating Saudis, and that the royal family will stop at nothing in trying to wipe out the group. Any (Saudi-driven) Lebanese Armed Forces and/or Hamas attack against Hezbollah also tacitly serves the interests of Israel, which isn’t at all coincidental because the exceptionalist convergences between Wahhabism and Zionism are an open secret in the Mideast.
Yemen:
The puppet government led by deposed premier Hadi has an existential interest in having the Ansarallah labeled and ‘widely’ recognized as “terrorists” so that an expanded Saudi-coalition-led occupation force (probably euphemistically labeled as “peacekeepers”) can come in and wipe them out completely.
The Contradiction And It’s Anti-Shiite “Solution”
In speaking about the self-serving interests that many members of the Saudi-led coalition are expected to promote through the “terrorist” label, it seems almost inevitable that the Saudis will turn against their Turkish and Qatari ‘partners’ by declaring war against the Muslim Brotherhood. One should bear in mind that the Muslim Brotherhood legitimately is a terrorist group, but that Riyadh is purposely turning somewhat of a temporary blind eye to Turkey and Qatar’s support of it for the moment in order to pursue the broad-based multilateral alliance that it’s constructed. Sooner or later, however, the internal terrorist contradictions between the Wahhabis and Muslim Brotherhood (different for the most part only by their hierarchy, foreign patronage, and slight divergences in religious misinterpretation) might become too strong to ignore, especially |
depression, oh ye of blissful ignorance.
For those who know what it’s like to be enslaved to a mind, only they will get what you through. They will know how desperately you want to be happy again, be normal again. You are exhausted. Time and again you have tried not to be, but you have not been able to help it. The smallest, most insignificant things have plunged you into a fit. You have hated yourself for it and tried to beat it out of yourself.
Have you cried? Are you crying while reading this? Because I am. Because the battles seem so long, so tiring and so, so “unwinnable”. Most of your loved ones probably have no idea that it is happening to you, because you haven’t told them. You are ashamed of it, as am I. What will they think? How long will they be able to take time out of their busy lives and do something about it anyway?
You are scared that you are going to be like this for your entire life, and all you want is for the pain to end. For some mercy from an unknown quarter.
Most people are outraged at the thought of suicide, at the entire idea of people taking their own lives. True, it is cowardly, escapist and utterly selfish. I agree and I am sure you do too.
Here’s a truth. Everybody who commits suicide doesn’t want to die. In fact, some of them are probably very much in love with life and want to experience it. Sounds paradoxical, right? Why end something you love?
Because all you want is for it to stop. The pain. The suffering that knows no reason, knows no bounds. Like a bull blinded with red rage, you are blinded with pain. You love your family, you know your suicide will leave them shattered forever. You, of all people know how selfish your act is going to be.
But, you are helpless, so helpless. You are begging for mercy, pleading for it to stop and you will do anything for a way out.
I am sorry if you are able to identify with this post. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. But if you are, then know that you have my love. I am not saying there is no light, it’s just that our journey to find it is longer and painful.
While I am seeking mine, I hope that you find your light too. :)
AdvertisementsThis is a very simple light switch surround for common Australian HPM light switches.
Printed in glow in the dark filament to help you find that switch in pitch black.
Or can be used purely as an interior decoration with regular coloured filament.
Surround requires a bit of force to press on, internal measurements of the surround are 73mm x 117mm.
Your mileage may vary with glow filament. This is my first functional glow in the dark print, so I'm keen to see whether it will hold enough "charge" from the daytime that it would still be useful in the early hours of the morning.
The first photo was taken with a UV LED torch for a backlight just as an example photo, as glowing alone was nearly impossible to get a photograph. UV torch also does a great job at charging up your 3D printed glow items rather quickly.An upcoming horror movie screening is about to one-up all other showings on the creepiness scale by its choice of venue — a cemetery.
Chicago's historic Bohemian National Cemetery on the North Side will host its first-ever free nighttime movie screening on Aug. 14. The cemetery will show the horror movie "Sinister" in anticipation of the opening of its sequel, "Sinister 2."
The movie screening will take place on cemetery grounds in the picnic area. While there are no gravestones in the picnic area, viewers will still be surrounded by grave sites as they watch the movie.
Gramercy Pictures, the distributor for "Sinister 2," is putting on the movie screening.
Gates open at Bohemian National Cemetery at 8 p.m., and the movie begins at 9 p.m. The cemetery is located at Pulaski and Foster in the North Park neighborhood.
The screening is free and open to the public, and seating is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Guests are encouraged to bring blankets to sit on.
Alcoholic beverages are not allowed in the cemetery.(AP Photo)
(CNSNews.com) -- The labor force participation rate in April 2014 for Americans ages 25 to 29 hit the lowest level recorded since 1982, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) started tracking such data.
The labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the civilian non-institutional population who participated in the labor force by either having a job during the month or actively seeking one, hit a record low in April 2014 of 79.8%.
In January 1982, when the data were first collected, the labor force participation rate for this group was 80.7%.
ype="node" title="labor
The actual number of Americans, ages 25 to 29, not participating in the labor force hit a record high in April 2014 as well, with 4,280,000 not working.
Those classified as not in the labor force means that they are included in the civilian non-institutional population but did not have a job, and they did not actively seek one in the last four weeks.
ype="node" title="labor
When the BLS started tracking these data in January 1982, there were 3,851,000 Americans, ages 25 to 29, who were not in the labor force.
By April 2014, another 429,000 were not participating in the labor force, an increase of 11%.
When Barack Obama took office as president in January 2009, the number of Americans 25 to 29 not in the labor force was 3,769,000. Since then, that number has gone up by 511,000, an increase of 13.6%.
The business and economic reporting of CNSNews.com is funded in part with a gift made in memory of Dr. Keith C. Wold.Here's a story so heart-warming it will probably warm not only your heart but all your other giblets as well.
Artist David Sequeira, of Hughes, has a venerable little dog, Sam, who is more than 13-years-old.
''He's my best buddy ever since I got him from an animal shelter 11 years ago,'' Sequeira explains. ''He's developed a limp and can't get up on to my bed by himself. Yes, I know, he's very spoilt. He sits on the couch and sleeps on the bed. I even cook for him! What can I say?
''Last Thursday I called Bunnings' Fyshwick store and asked if there was such a thing as a small set of steps that I could buy to enable Sam to climb up on to the bed.During the last TPAC meetings (October 2015, Sapporo), Google convened during the unconference about AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages), their new project. Jeremy Keith has a very good blog post about it.
Rather than creating a proprietary format from scratch, it mandates a subset of HTML …with some proprietary elements thrown in (or, to use the more diplomatic parlance of the extensible web, custom elements).
I have a similar feeling about it than Jeremy. Based on a nascent technology, custom elements, Google will probably have the leverage for forcing people into these new elements.
AMP markup
Basically Google is trying to get Publishers to have a set of limited elements for increasing performances on the Web and more specifically on mobile. A way to promote the static Web, but more on that later. Alex made a demo page on his Web site.
You can discover the list of scripts to create the elements on the fly.
< script async custom-element = "amp-audio" src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-audio-0.1.js" ></ script > < script async custom-element = "amp-anim" src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-anim-0.1.js" ></ script > < script async custom-element = "amp-carousel" src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-carousel-0.1.js" ></ script > < script async custom-element = "amp-iframe" src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-iframe-0.1.js" ></ script > < script async custom-element = "amp-image-lightbox" src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-image-lightbox-0.1.js" ></ script > < script async custom-element = "amp-instagram" src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-instagram-0.1.js" ></ script > < script async custom-element = "amp-fit-text" src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-fit-text-0.1.js" ></ script > < script async custom-element = "amp-twitter" src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-twitter-0.1.js" ></ script > < script async custom-element = "amp-youtube" src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-youtube-0.1.js" ></ script > < style > body { opacity : 0 }</ style > < noscript >< style > body { opacity : 1 }</ style ></ noscript > < script async src = "https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js" ></ script >
And in the HTML Markup we can see things like:
< amp-img src = "https://www.ampproject.org/how-it-works/malte.jpg" id = "author-avatar" placeholder height = "50" width = "50" alt = "Malte Ubl" > </ amp-img >
Pull Requests and Governance
In return, it raises a lot of questions about the freedom for other people outside of Google of creating more elements. The answer given about the governance of what goes in and out of the list of elements has been avoided or more exactly Chris Wilson said:
Like any other project. Pull requests.
To the credits of Chris Wilson, Alex Russel and Dan Brickley (poor them), the project is not coming from them but from the Google Search team who was not here to defend their own project. I feel their pain in having to deal with this hot potato. You can read the archived minutes of the meeting.
Pull Requests are not governance. It's a geek curtain to avoid talking about the real issues. The governance comes into play when you know who decides to merge (or deny) the pull request and why it was done based on which criteria. So that would be very cool to clarify these aspects of the project. From the current governance rules:
In the event there are no Core Committers, Google Inc. will appoint one.
Interesting question here. What's happening if Chrome team starts to implement natively the elements sanctified by the Google's AMP Project? What does it mean for other browsers in forcing them to adopt the same elements? Vendor extensions circa 1995.
Blocking Everything and Web Readability
I asked:
What's in it for Google.
To which Chris replied:
Google wants the web to be fast.
This is true for everyone, every player on the Web. So I tried to ask again the question. This time, Dan Brickly answered:
When the web sucks we suck
Yeah… still true for everyone. So it's not really an answer. They said at the beginning it was coming from the Google Search team and they were targeting publishers. They also said during the meeting that it was not hard to convince Web developers about the performance issues, but Web developers didn't have enough power to change the mind of business people on not adding yet another tracker. As someone else said during the meeting, this is more of psychological event to help people move forward with optimization. This is indeed a possibility. What I foresee is that business people once they learn custom elements == performance, they will go back to their old habits and ask the developers to add custom elements trackers. And we go round again about the governance and the impact that Google has potentially on the project through deciding what is valid AMPed pages and how it affects their SEO.
And here maybe is the start of an answer. For the last couple of weeks, I have started to browse blocking everything by default with uBlock origin. Here is the rendering of the same page with blocking everything and not blocking anything in Firefox. An article in Fortune Magazine that Jeremy Keith talked about recently.
The main difference is not that much about the style, but about the content. Without JavaScript the content is simply not loaded and some links do not exist at all. It means that the content is very hard to both:
index browse
Remember AMP is coming from Google Search team. Heavy pages in JavaScript requires more CPU, more time, and a JS enabled bot to index pages. The more time you spend on one page, the less time for other pages and being able to index the full Web. The core business of Google is to know everything about everything so they can sell relevant ads. I imagine the decrease in performances of Web pages directly hinders the business model of Google.
This is all supposition. Nothing in the meeting minutes or discussions says so. So to take with a grain of salt.
Future of AMP
After the meeting, I was still confused and I was wondering why the project was not brought to the W3C WebPlatform, so if there was really an issue to solve about Web Performance (and there is), the idea of doing that in cooperation with other people would be better.
Improving the performance of the Web is a good goal, but I still don't have the feeling that AMP, as it is proposed today, is a good way to achieve this in a collegial and cooperative way. Google has too much power already (IBM or Microsoft of the past). So any projects of this nature should be carefully handled.
Thanks to Alex, Chris and Dan for answering the question to the best they could.
Otsukare!Bannon: McConnell, Ryan 'Trying to Nullify the 2016 Election'
Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told CBS this week that Washington’s “Republican establishment,” including the top GOP leaders in both houses of Congress, “is trying to nullify the 2016 election.”
That more traditional Republicans are looking to undermine President Donald Trump, Bannon said, is as “obvious as night follows day.”
“The Republican establishment is trying to nullify the 2016 election. That's a brutal fact we have to face,” Bannon said in an interview with CBS’ “60 Minutes” that will air on Sunday. Bannon’s interviewer, CBS anchor Charlie Rose, responded by asking the former White House adviser to name names.
“I think Mitch McConnell, and to a degree, Paul Ryan. They do not want Donald Trump's populist, economic nationalist agenda to be implemented,” Bannon replied. “It's obvious as night follows day is what they're trying to do.”
Pressed further by Rose, Bannon recalled an early meeting between McConnell, the Senate majority leader, and Trump inside the president’s Manhattan skyscraper. McConnell, Bannon recalled, told Trump that “I don't want to hear anymore of this 'drain the swamp' talk,” a reference to the president’s anti-corruption catchphrase on the campaign trail. “McConnell was, Day One, did not want to go there. Wanted us to back off,” Bannon said.
At another point in his “60 Minutes” interview, Bannon explained that Trump’s infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, on which he can be heard describing to co-host Billy Bush in vulgar terms how his celebrity allowed him to sexually assault women without consequence, proved to be a “litmus test” for those around the president.
Bannon recalled the early October Saturday during last year’s presidential campaign after The Washington Post first published the tape, prompting the Trump campaign to hold a meeting on what to do. The former White House strategist said Reince Priebus, Trump’s former chief of staff who was then the chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the president “you have two choices. You either drop out right now, or you lose by the biggest landslide in American political history."
And while that negative forecast did not wind up costing Priebus a job in the White House, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was not so lucky. Bannon recalled that the governor, a top surrogate for Trump during last year’s campaign, offered a similarly dim outlook that ultimately cost him a Cabinet position.
“You know, I'm Irish. I gotta get my black book and I got 'em,” Bannon said. “Christie, because of Billy Bush weekend was not looked at for a Cabinet position.”
“He wasn't there for you on Billy Bush weekend so therefore he doesn't get a Cabinet position?” Rose asked.
“I told him, ‘The plane leaves at 11 o'clock in the morning. If you're on the plane, you're on the team.’ Didn't make the plane,” Bannon said.
By contrast, Bannon said he had told Trump at the post-Access Hollywood tape meeting that he had a “100 percent probability of winning.” It was a forecast so rosy that even Trump would not believe it, Bannon said.
“Appealing to the American people and to the working-class people in this country, absolutely. You know why? 'Cause – it was a winner. That's why I told him 'double down' every time,” the former chief strategist said. “And on that day, that's the first time and only time he ever got upset with me. He goes, ‘Come on, it's not 100 percent.’ I go, ‘It's absolutely 100 percent.’ And I told him why: They don’t care.”Few are as qualified to tackle the massive topic of money in politics as Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman. Their new book,Nation on the Take: How Big Money Corrupts Our Democracy (read an excerpt), is a comprehensive and important examination of the many ways our lives are affected by the stranglehold corporations have on our government and society. And it’s a look at how we can fight back.
Wendell Potter is senior analyst at the Center for Public Integrity, an ex-newspaperman and a former executive with the health insurance industry who dared to come in from the cold and become one of our most knowledgeable and forthright champions of health care reform. Regulars here at BillMoyers.com will remember his 2009 appearance on Bill Moyers Journal, when he first told his remarkable story.
Nick Penniman, a former journalist, was co-founder and director of The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, publisher of Washington Monthly and founder of the American News Project. He is executive director of Issue One, a bipartisan group working to reduce the influence of money in politics and to put everyday citizens back in control of our country.
Our conversation began with Wendell and Nick talking about how their book Nation on the Take came to be. Listen using the streaming audio above, or read the transcript, slightly edited for clarity, below.
TRANSCRIPT
Wendell Potter Nation on the Take Credit: Emily Potter
Wendell Potter: I guess I’m known most for leaving my job in the insurance industry and becoming an advocate for health care reform. And it became pretty clear to me toward the end of that health care reform debate that nothing would really get done that really benefits consumers in the way that it should until we do something about money in politics.
My first book, Deadly Spin, began to explain why we didn’t get the health care reform that we needed and so this book that Nick and I have written goes a bit beyond that and also looks at other industries and it attempts to connect the dots to show how big money in politics affects us on a daily basis.
Nick Penniman Nation on the Take Credit: Erin Scott
Nick Penniman: I came to this because I had spent more than a decade in Washington doing long form reporting and investigative reporting as a publisher and magazine editor. And most of the good stories that we did ultimately led back to some policy dysfunction, which ultimately led back to money in politics. It was a combination of that and watching the sausage making around Obamacare and around the attempt at financial reform that made me realize that we’ve reached a point in this country in which the money power is so significant that it’s hard to truly fix anything. So Wendell and I, after many soulful discussions about this, decided to team up and do this book.
Michael Winship: It’s a stunning indictment of the corrosive influence of money in politics. In the introduction, you have a sentence, “We the people are losing our faith in the dream of democracy as our collective power is increasingly eclipsed by a rigged system of politics and governance dominated by a handful of billionaires and a phalanx of well-financed special interests.” Which is quite a statement.
Potter: It is quite a statement. In fact, for a while, our working title for the book was Rigged. The system is rigged against regular people, and as we write in the book the system largely has been taken over by a few very, very wealthy individuals and families, and how public policy is so influenced by rich and entrenched special interests that in a sense we’ve lost our ability to self-govern.
Penniman: We also make the point that this is not something that is just newly upon our democracy. This problem has been metastasizing for more than 30 years quietly in Washington. You know, the number of lobbyists has gone through the roof, the amount of dark money in the system has gone through the roof, the number of billionaires who are writing bigger checks has gone through the roof. The amount of time members of Congress spend fundraising, same thing. Every single index that you could look at that defines the problem of money in politics has grown exponentially in the last thirty years. But it’s occurred kind of quietly. Some reporters cover it, but they don’t really cover the big picture writ large. It’s no longer just that irksome thing that all Americans hate, right? It’s really reached the point of stage IV cancer, where it’s shutting down the body politic, it’s shutting down our ability to self-govern.
One of the things you talk about is the impact of Citizens United and some of the other Court decisions that have crippled campaign finance reform. You describe it as “crop spraying gasoline onto a wildfire.”
Penniman: Yes, it was a terrible and misguided decision in many ways, and what it’s done is it’s created a real permissiveness within primarily the billionaire community to play much bigger and harder in politics than ever before. So it’s almost more of the mentality and psychology that the decision created than the legal reality that it created. And what I mean by that is that it’s not as if wealthy individuals weren’t already pumping a lot of money into politics before 2010, before Citizens United. But they feel as if they have every right to do it and have no limits to it in the wake of Citizens United.
You have a great line in the book where you say that “even if the donor has no expectation of bending legislation, pressuring a government official for a favor, the process of raising it marinates the minds of politicians and the concerns of the wealthiest among us.”
The people that they see day in and day out are the lobbyists, not regular folks back home and Capitol Hill is just overrun with lobbyists now compared to what it was just a few years ago. — Wendell Potter
Potter: Yes, exactly. And we’re not talking necessarily about the quid pro quo transactions. That really doesn’t take place very much at all. It is the knowledge that an elected official has of who is writing the check, who’s going to be there if and when this person decides to run for reelection, that they can expect another campaign check if they have demonstrated that they are voting the way the donor wants. So it is something that has really begun to influence the system in ways that it didn’t when Nick and I were reporters covering politics many years ago. And as Nick said, it has happened largely without very much media scrutiny. The reporters who are covering government, covering politics in Washington pretty much ignore what’s going on as they’re writing stories about what politician said this or that or which politician is saying this or that on the campaign trail.
Penniman: I would add that anyone who really loves fishing will tell you that the key to good fishing is to think like the fish. And that’s what our politicians are required to do every day and the fish that they’re trying to get to are — there are really two of them — wealthy individuals who can max out at $2,700 to their campaigns and lobbyists who can do the same. So what ends up happening is they end up thinking like those fish and they’re not thinking like the folks back home in district who are working multiple jobs and who have a lot of needs.
Potter: The people that they see day in and day out are the lobbyists, not regular folks back home and Capitol Hill is just overrun with lobbyists now compared to what it was just a few years ago.
You make mention of the townhouses on Capitol Hill, which are either run by lobbyists now or are call centers for party fundraising.
Potter: That’s right, both the Democratic and Republican congressional committees have offices a few doors away or a few feet away from the Capitol. Members of Congress leave their offices and go to these buildings, go to the cubicles and dial for dollars there. And the townhouses that we wrote about, they look at just first glance like someone actually lives there, but many of the townhouses around the Capitol and other buildings have been bought and are operated by special interests, whether it’s a big corporation or a labor union or a lobbying firm. They just ring the Capitol.
You also make an excellent point that all the time spent fundraising is also time that could be spent crafting or better understanding legislation. Not to mention time spent with colleagues on the business of governance, and even just getting to know each other, which is no small thing.
Penniman: What’s amazing is that in this era of extraordinary political polarization, there is so little talk about whether or not our politicians even have the time to get together to sit down and talk and to go through legislation and to build common ground. When you’re spending four to five hours a day just dialing for dollars or trying to recruit money from the lobbyists that you’re supposed to be regulating, it’s hard to find the time. And that’s what Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa said when he left the Senate. He said there just isn’t enough time for us as senators to work together anymore because we’re all out there trying to raise the money.
You write in the book about how AT&T, for example, has 88 percent Hill coverage, meaning that 88 percent of all the members of Congress have gotten campaign contributions from AT&T. Same with Honeywell International, 87 percent from UPS, 80 percent from Lockheed Martin and on and on. What does that tell you?
The big corporations and entities are…very bipartisan in their check writing. — Wendell Potter
Potter: It tells you that they’re very generous with the check writing. The big corporations and entities are able to do that and they’re very bipartisan in their check writing. They in many cases write just as many checks to Democrats as they do to Republicans and they certainly pay a great deal of attention to who is a committee chair or ranking member of a committee or is in some other leadership capacity. They’re very strategic. One of the things I used to do in my job in the insurance industry was administer the political action committee and there’s a lot of thought that goes into who you write checks to, and you want to make sure that you’re writing checks to people who can be persuaded to see things from your perspective and vote for the things that you want them to or vote against things you are not supporting when the time comes.
Penniman: How many regular Americans have that kind of Hill coverage? You know, Bob Dole once quipped that there is no poor people’s political action committee in Washington. So when you’re underrepresented with the financial resources of politics, as most Americans are, then you’re underrepresented with the lawmaking too.
You use the metaphor of a newborn baby named Eve, and all that child is going to be put up against as a result of lobbying and campaign contributions.
Potter: We use that to just drive home the point of how we and those we love, our children and everyone that we know, including ourselves, are affected by this from cradle to grave. In the middle part of the book, we look at five different industries and show how these industries in one way or another are able to impact so much of Eve’s life and her parents’ life, whether it’s their mortgage or the air that we breathe or the college debts that Eve’s parents might have, everything is affected in one way or another because of public policy and public policy is so heavily influenced now by special interests.
Penniman: We also are using that to take on the argument about government, the size of government. Our point is that in a country with 330 million people, a pretty significantly sized government will exist in a country as big as ours and as powerful as ours. And therefore, it is either going to be working for the best interest of the common good or it’s not. So let’s get over this kind of abstract argument about the size of government and realize that it exists and it’s either going to be controlled by the special interests on behalf of the narrow interests of a few or it’s going to be controlled by all of us on behalf of our common interests.
Potter: And we use the term “the system.” Big money has created its own system and we note that Eve can’t escape the system, her parents can’t, you can’t, we can’t collectively escape the system that has been created and that so many people see as being rigged against them.
When you talk about that size of government and the necessity of that national government, you also talk about how all this influence has also trickled down to state and local governments.
Potter: We do. We’ve looked a lot at state and local governments and in the chapter in particular on fossil fuel. We looked at my state of Pennsylvania. I live in Pennsylvania and the lawmakers in Harrisburg and the previous governor were very, very close to the fossil fuel industry, the fracking companies, to the point that we’ve seen a lot of communities just really affected adversely by the way that those companies were able to operate and influence lawmakers in Harrisburg, including the previous governor and even Governor Ed Rendell, Democratic governor, after he left office. So we look at not just what’s going on in Washington but also how this is pervasive as well almost at any state capital and many municipalities as well.
You just used the energy industry as an example. Another is the banks and the too big to fail bailout of 2008. Since 1998, nearly $4 billion in contributions to federal candidates and super PACs have been made by the banks and the real estate interests and financial interests.
Potter: Their contributions have been extensive and continue to be so and certainly the legislation that was finally approved by Congress, the Dodd-Frank Act, and other pieces of legislation that have been proposed to regulate the financial industry were written to a large extent by the lobbyists for financial institutions. And we point out in the book how the interest of the banks and mortgage companies were served first, and the challenges and the difficulties that a lot of average homeowners are having even yet today to keep their homes out of foreclosure.
Penniman: The House Finance Committee in Washington, the nickname for it is the Cash Committee, not because they deal with finance but because it’s such a lucrative perch to collect campaign contributions from. It’s like winning the lottery ticket. Of the 435 members of the House, 60 of them are members of the finance committee because you just can rake in money from bank executives and bank lobbyists when you’re on the committee. I remember watching Bill Moyers’ show a number of years ago when he had Gretchen Morgenson on, the chief financial reporter for The New York Times, and when she was asked whether or not Dodd-Frank had tackled the big stuff, she said, “No, absolutely not. It hasn’t and we could likely have another financial crisis as a result.” And when asked why, she said, “Because the banks have hundreds of lobbyists in Washington and the American people have none.”
The two of you go back even further from before the meltdown and talk about the repeal of Glass-Steagall during the Bill Clinton years.
Potter: Yes, we need to remember that this is not an affliction that leans more toward the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. Both parties are very afflicted by this and when Bill Clinton and other Democrats in the 1980s saw the potential decline of union money and unionization, they realized that that would create a decline in income for the Democratic Party, so they went out and started actively recruiting money that they hadn’t sought previously, corporate money. And a lot of that money came directly from Wall Street. They also went to the pharmaceutical companies and the health care companies and they went harder at Hollywood. But an active marriage occurred between Wall Street and the Democratic Party in the ‘80s and ‘90s and it culminated in 1999 in the repeal of Glass-Steagall with the Gramm-Leach-Bliley legislation. Bill Clinton signed it and a lot of the people who worked in the White House and worked for him helped manufacture it.
Another one of your chapters is specifically about the pharmaceutical industry. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about the saga of Billy Tauzin.
Potter: Billy Tauzin was a congressman from Louisiana. He rose to leadership initially in the Democratic party but during the Republican revolution, the Gingrich years, he came to the conclusion that he needed to change parties. So he became a Republican, was reelected and soon became a leader in the Republican party as well. And the leadership roles included a very influential role on a committee that wrote the legislation that pertains to health care and in particular the pharmaceutical industry. He became a favorite of the pharmaceutical industry and was there for them on a couple of very important occasions, in particular during the debate on the Medicare Part D prescription drug benefit in 2003.
He was very instrumental in making sure the pharmaceutical industry’s interests were protected and the legislation was written largely by lobbyists for the industry who worked with him and a few other congressional leaders to shape the legislation in ways that led to huge profitability in the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry and the manufacturing companies have among the highest profit margins in the world of any companies and people in the US pay far more for medications, including people who are Medicare beneficiaries, than anywhere else in the world.
Penniman: Right after Medicare Part D got passed, Tauzin quit his job as a member of Congress early, left his office early and took a job as the head of PhRMA, which is the lobbying wing of the pharmaceutical industry, making $2 million a year. It’s just despicable.
Potter: And soon after taking that job, he went back to Capitol Hill and was there representing the industry during the debate on health care reform and once again was wearing a different hat but he was still inordinately influential in helping to draft the legislation that became Obamacare. Despite the promises that Barack Obama had made when he was running for president that at the very least Medicare should have the ability to negotiate with drug companies to lower prices for Medicare beneficiaries — and he also campaigned on making it lawful for Americans to reimport medications from Canada where drugs are a lot cheaper — despite those campaign promises, President Obama gave both of those up under intense pressure from the pharmaceutical industry to be able to get something passed.
It was clear from the many meetings that Tauzin had in the White House and on Capitol Hill that if the administration and Congress didn’t go along with what the pharmaceutical industry needed, then of course they would pull out all the stops and whatever it took to kill the legislation, to keep it from ever getting passed. So it was almost essentially blackmail. And once again, Tauzin was right there leading the effort for the pharmaceutical industry.
There’s a section in that chapter on the pharmaceutical industry that’s titled “Public Research, Private Profits.”
Potter: Yes, few people realize that even though the pharmaceutical industry talks a great deal about how much they spend on research and development, the companies spend far more on sales and marketing than research. In fact, most of the research is done at taxpayers’ expense by governmental or quasigovernmental entities like the National Institutes of Health and universities that get funding from the government. So much of the research is done at the taxpayers’ expense, and rightfully so. But the companies themselves spend relatively little on research. They take the research typically and invest in the development of medications but most of the prescription medications are developed at publicly funded institutions. And in a sense we pay twice as a consequence. We pay for the research as taxpayers and of course we pay dearly whenever we need the medication.
There’s another chapter in the book about Big Food. And I was fascinated by your account of the fight against certain nutritional changes in the school lunch menu and the lobbying of “the lunch ladies.”
Potter: Yes, the lunch ladies, that was a nickname for cafeteria managers around the country. We write about how they essentially were coopted by Big Food to affect any regulations that pertained to school lunch programs. This chapter in particular is one that shows that the influence certainly is ever-present on Capitol Hill but also in the regulatory system, the executive branch, the agencies that supposedly regulate the companies like big food and beverage makers. But in many cases we have what’s referred to as regulatory capture, in which the regulatory agencies are very influenced by the very companies that they’re supposedly regulating.
Penniman: We want our kids to eat healthy, period. That should just be a no-brainer, a fait accompli in a good society. But instead, because of the power of money in politics, it becomes hyperpoliticized, a massive battle with all kinds of very powerful people who make a lot of money trying to manipulate the food items that show up on our kids’ plates at their school cafeteria.
You might want to talk a little bit about school pizza, Schwan’s Food company and Minnesota’s two Democratic senators.
Potter: The regulations that would have made school lunches much more nutritious were challenged by the food manufacturers. One in particular, based in Minnesota, was very upset because there was this concern that pizza would not be as prevalent on the school lunch menus as it had been in the past. They were able to get the senators from Minnesota to intervene and so consequently, for all practical purposes, pizza is now considered a vegetable for school lunches.
I’m stunned that the whole sugar subsidy continues to be an issue and that the industry continues to hold such a grip on Congress.
Penniman: This is one of the many places in the book where we were able to connect the problem to cronyism and to a dysfunctional economy. A lot of people when they think about the issue of money in politics think that it’s just people trying to regulate more. Well, in fact, there are a lot of people who understand that the fight for reform is also an attempt to |
violently killed now and then, and sometimes now and then and then and then, because otherwise the threats are false.
(It's worth mentioning that the violence is not the only thing many of these shows have in common. They're also very heavy, though less uniformly so, on the question of what it means to be a morally conflicted 40-ish white guy in modern America, or '60s America, or Prohibition-era America, or Westeros. This is also the theme of the highly decorated Louie, which is sort of a comedy, but only sort of. As much as it's failed to reach many kinds of stories, the revolution has also failed to reach many kinds of people with any regularity.)
There have been exceptions to all these rules, certainly: Treme is less about violence, mostly. Big Love was — mostly. Perhaps ironically, Six Feet Under was — mostly.
Still, there are vast expanses of stories that have largely been ignored unless they're mixed in with people being shot in the face. It's said over and over again that The Sopranos is not a mob show but a family show, and there's great truth in that. But it was still a family show where people are terrorized and shot and garroted to death. Breaking Bad may be, to me, the most compelling tragedy I've ever seen on television, and it deserves every breathless accolade it's received. But to access it, you have to belly up for more bleeding out, more spatter, and — this last season — an innocent kid being shot and killed.
Enjoying or not enjoying scenes where people are brutalized is no different from anything else: It is an element of your taste, of what you want to watch. For some people, a show that features murders and rapes and beatings is no harder to watch than one that doesn't. But for some, including me, there simply is only so much of this I care to watch, even as someone who watches television as part of my job. I could not possibly watch Homeland and Breaking Bad and Game Of Thrones and Sons Of Anarchy and Boardwalk Empire and The Walking Dead, because watching one season of each in a calendar year would mean spending almost 80 hours — the equivalent of two full work weeks out of every year — staring at an amount of violence that would make me miserable. I don't want to watch that many people bleed to death, no matter how good the shows are where it's happening. I just don't.
This is not inevitable. This is not the simple operation of physics, where eliminating cornball sentimentality leads without exception to zombies having their armbones pulled out. There was, after all, Friday Night Lights. Why has this revolution not produced more family dramas? More stories about marriages where nobody shoots anybody? More workplace dramas not set in environments where you're likely to get killed? You can say they've failed, but I don't remember a whole huge lot of them being put on offer on the cable outlets that are leading this whole business.
The "television versus film" debate is absurd and always has been; there's no way to attain a weighted average of all of television and all of film, nobody sees all of either one, and comparing best versus best ignores everything else. But at some point, if dramatic television wants to be considered as vibrant and exciting as film can be, it needs a better mix. It needs love stories and family stories, workplace stories and friendship stories, and they can't all be soaked in blood. Inevitably, there is a portion of the audience that is — as Alyssa pointed out — eventually exhausted by that. Not offended; exhausted.
It's a tough thing to talk about, because expressing that exhaustion gets you pegged as a sissy or a prude, when it's really just the operation of your particular taste and a desire for variety. The Sopranos was revolutionary and violent; Oz was revolutionary and violent, The Wire was revolutionary and violent. But they weren't revolutionary primarily because they were violent. They were revolutionary primarily because of the investment in character and story, and because they were so heavily serialized and required such commitment from both creators and viewers, and because they had shorter seasons, and for plenty of other reasons. It's a red herring to suggest that being fatigued from violence means being over quality or realism or gritty truth-telling. We will all face gritty truths, and very few of them will involve bloody violence. Those stories are perfectly worth watching as well.
Let me put it this way: If the dramatic television revolution were almost entirely focused on musicals — funny ones, dramatic ones, great ones, but most of them musicals — how quickly would critics say that no matter how good those musicals are, and no matter how brilliantly talented the people who make them may be, they've had enough musicals?
Your brilliant musical is my brilliant gore-spattering drama. I don't have any more carrying capacity. Every year, I watch plenty of films that rely on the creation of high stakes simply forged from the fact that human beings are complicated and fallible and break each other's hearts and want things they will never have. I will watch Walter White kill and perhaps even be killed, and I'm certainly grateful to have him. But I long for more brilliant television with the same vibrancy and creativity and talent that gives me those personal stories without the part where I have to watch people shot, stabbed, raped, eaten, beaten, and dissolved in acid.
Please do not make The Grey into a series, is what I'm saying.On Friday night, Tucker Carlson expressed how he was torn about The Washington Post bombshell on Roy Moore.
Speaking with radio talk show host Tammy Bruce, Carlson said that some of the accusations made against the GOP Senate candidate “sounds true” to him, nothing they went on the record and have no “political animus.”
“The problem is that I, and I think a lot of other people, so distrust the media that even when maybe what they’re reporting is correct, it’s hard to know exactly,” the Fox News host stated. “And maybe that’s one of the cost of the press just abandoning objectivity completely. Nobody believes anything any more.”
Bruce agreed with his sentiment, noting that many voters in Alabama believe this is an “establishment hit job” and many have dismissed the molestation allegations.
“The Washington Post has been really exclusively political,” she continued. “They endorsed of course the Democrat. They are obviously very against the president and Republicans. So they’ve been very politically active. They don’t have I think the credibility of being just reporters and people who report the news. It’s very much like a political blog.”
“It’s a shame!” Carlson reacted. “I thought their story sounded credible to me. I don’t have any other information, but if you took ‘The Washington Post‘ off- you’ve got women on the record. I take that seriously. And I think that’s horrible, disqualifying behavior if true. The fact The Post printed it- it just shows when you devalue your credibility over time, there’s a cost to that.”
Watch the clip above, via Fox News.
[image via screengrab]
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comMIAMI (WSVN) - As Hurricane Irma tore through Miami, some thieves used the storm as an opportunity to commit up to 25 incidences of looting around the city.
“The criminals took advantage of the situation, and they basically terrorized our businesses during the most vulnerable stage. This is not acceptable,” said Miami Police Deputy Chief Luis Cabrera.
Numerous arrests were made at shops around Midtown and Mayor Tomas Regalado hopes the arrests will deter potential crooks.
“It sends a clear message to the bad people. You will be caught,” said Regalado.
Miami wasn’t the only target of looters.
In Miami Beach, a market was also broken into during the height of the storm.
Copyright 2018 Sunbeam Television Corp. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Bill to deny birthright in AZ comes to vote next week
A bill in Arizona that puts a stop to automatic birthright to children of illegal parents, will come to a vote next week. And chances are that the bill will be defeated, but the plan, according to bill sponsor Rep Sen Ron Gould, says he plans to force a vote, so people will see how lawmakers voted on the bill.
The state’s legislation would define a U.S. citizen as someone who has been naturalized, or someone born in this country who has at least one parent who has no allegiance to a foreign country.
Supporters of the bill say guaranteed citizenship results in taxpayers covering the costs of services provided to illegal immigrants and their children. And opponents once again are saying that it’s unconstitutional.
Sen. Russell Pearce, the architect of Arizona’s well-known, controversial immigration measure, SB 1070 — which, among other things, allows police to enforce immigration laws — is a sponsor of the citizenship legislation.
Last fall, Pearce said that the U.S. Constitution’s 14th Amendment, which addresses citizenship, was not meant to apply to the children of people who live in the United States illegally. “This is a battle of epic proportions,” Pearce, Republican, said at a press conference in Arizona. “We’ve allowed the hijacking of the 14th Amendment.”
Fox News
AdvertisementsA village panchayat in Bihar ordered a rape accused to pay a fine of Rs 1,000 and perform 51 squats, after he was found guilty of committing sexually assaulting a minor Dalit girl.
The diktat was pronounced two days ago by Sidhpur panchayat in Imamganj in Gaya district.
According to sources, the Dalit girl, a resident of Baseta village, was repeatedly raped by a youth named Akash for nearly six months. The class 7 victim was first raped while she was returning home from school. The accused thereafter repeatedly raped her by threatening to disclose the matter to the her parents.
It was only after the girl became pregnant that she informed her family about it. Fearing public shame and humiliation, the girl's parents approached the accused and his family. At first, the accused's family asked the girl to abort the child and promised to get her married to their son thereafter. However, after doing so, the accused's family refused to tie the knot.
The girl's family protested and took the matter to the panchayat.
"The accused's parents told us to get the child aborted and they will pay for the same. They even promised to get my sister married to their son later. When we approached the accused after the abortion, his parents asked what proof we had that their son raped my sister", Sanjay, brother of the girl, said.
After listening to both sides, the panchayat concluded that the physical relation between the accused and the victim was consensual. The panchayat ordered the accused to perform squats 51 times and pay a fine of Rs 1,000 to the victim.
Outraged by the panchayat's diktat, the girl's family reported the matter to the police. A medical examination on the girl was conducted on Friday; an FIR was registered and the accused has now been registered.
The victim will also register her statement in the court, under Section 164 of Criminal Procedure Code, on Saturday.
"An FIR has been lodged in the case and accused has been arrested. Action will also be taken against the panchayat members", Garima Malik, Gaya SSP, said.This photo provided by Affirm shows PayPal co-founder Max Levchin. Levchin thinks the pace of innovation is progressing well, considering the banking industry is the most regulated this side of health care. But he considers the speculation around bitcoin to be “the elephant in the room.” He also thinks massive computer hacking attacks are threatening to reduce society’s trust in technology. (Affirm via AP)
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Max Levchin helped introduce the masses to the concept of a digital wallet when he co-founded PayPal in the late 1990s.
These days, he’s still trying to use online services to reshape the world of finance. He is currently CEO of Affirm, a San Francisco startup that offers fixed-payment loans through the internet. It’s an alternative to traditional credit cards, which can get consumers into trouble because small minimum payments they make each month can keep them in debt for decades.
Levchin, now 42, recently connected with The Associated Press to discuss the state of digital payments, computer security and bitcoin, a cryptocurrency whose value has ranged from about $1,000 to more than $19,000 this year as investors have bet on its future prospects. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
___
Q: Are digital payments progressing as quickly as you hoped since you started PayPal?
A: They are moving at a good pace, adjusted for just how large and complicated the market is. It’s highly regulated and there are a lot of things to be careful about. The elephant in the room for the last seven or eight years has been cryptocurrency. A big “what if” and “when if” has been surrounding bitcoin and its ilk.
Q: Why so?
A: The asset generally appreciated at such a blistering pace. Any time you acquire it, why not hang on to it? Because you just don’t want to spend it yet. On the whole, it’s a kind of transaction tool that is locked into areas where credit and cash don’t really service the purpose. So you wind up finding it in somewhat darker corners.
Q: Do you invest in bitcoin?
A: I wound up with a lot of bitcoin as an early investor in one of the early bitcoin startups. But it wasn’t a conscious decision to go buy a bunch of bitcoin.
I generally don’t speculate. I am very old school in that sense. I try to understand how value is traded and what is going to happen to it in the very long term, not because I am a stranger to speculative investing. It’s because I don’t have time to time the market. So what I end up doing is committing to a stock or committing to a company.
Q: What are some of the most interesting areas of digital payments?
A: A good example is international remittances, where companies can pop up and do well. They’re the guys who figured out how to do it much cheaper and much more transparently with much lower friction to both the recipient and the sender.
Q: Should we be concerned about hackers wreaking havoc with our financial system?
A: We should be worried broadly about our cybersecurity preparedness. I don’t think it’s specific to payments. It is just generally increasing the cost of doing business and reduces societal trust. And this is the first time in history where it’s scary. Everything has got a chip. We are going to have to learn how to secure keys (secret codes for unlocking digital files and services).Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/3/2016 (1064 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
sWINNIPEG - Manitoba New Democrats are accusing a Liberal candidate in the upcoming provincial election of breaking the law by working as an enumerator while she was engaged in partisan political activity.
Joanne Levy went door to door for Elections Manitoba to help compile the voters list in February. A few weeks later, she was nominated as the Liberal candidate in Gimli for the April 19 election.
The NDP alleges in a complaint filed this week with the provincial elections commissioner that Levy contravened Section 53 of the Elections Act, which says enumerators cannot be nominated as candidates.
The NDP said she attending a Liberal fundraiser Feb. 11 — one week after enumeration started. The party also filed screen shots of pro-Liberal social media posts by Levy during the enumeration period.On Friday, US President Donald Trump said that Washington has a menu of options for dealing with the crisis in Venezuela, noting that "a military option is certainly something we could pursue."
"The people are suffering and they're dying" there, Trump said.
"We have many options for Venezuela including a possible military option if necessary."
Trump has so far not discussed the possibility of using the wide range of Pentagon powers to resolve the current situation of unrest in the South American nation. Still, the US administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro of being a "dictator." On Wednesday, the US Treasury Department issued yet more sanctions on Venezuela, which Moscow said posed an obstacle to normalizing and stabilizing the situation there.
The formation of the Venezuelan National Constituent Assembly, which describes itself as the country's main governing body, on July 30 was condemned by Washington. The new legislative body has the power to change Venezuela's constitution, a step critics have called undemocratic and supporters say will help further socialist reforms.
While the US public waited for Trump to explicate next steps regarding North Korea, he said plainly "I think you know what that means" when asked about his Friday morning tweet that the US is "locked and loaded" and ready for battle.
Carlos Ron, charge d'affaires at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington, said of Florida Senator Marco Rubio and CIA Director Mike Pompeo, what "this group is trying to do with Venezuela is basically divide the government, recognize other leaders and foment a conflict with the Venezuelans," the Miami Herald reported July 25.
"I'm always careful when we talk about South and Central America and the CIA, but suffice to say, we're very hopeful there can be a transition in Venezuela and we [are] doing [our] best to understand the dynamic there, so that we can communicate to our State Department and to others," Pompeo said on July 26 during a Q&A session at the Aspen Institute.
The Pentagon "has received no orders" to initiate any new actions in Venezuela as of Friday night, according to a spokesman.Recorded in the summer of 1976, Wings Over America arrived on Dec. 10 of that year feeling like a triumphant musical summation for Paul McCartney and Wings.
In stark contrast to his modern-day globe-trotting ways, McCartney hadn’t at this point toured the U.S. in 10 years — and those concerts dated to his time in the Beatles. Only one of his former bandmates had even attempted such a thing in the interim, and George Harrison ’s 1974 stateside jaunt (staggered as it was by his throat problems) had been sadly underwhelming.
Highlights of this tour included not just the American concert debuts of a number of '70s hits with Wings but also – and this was of particular interest at the time – Beatles favorites like “Blackbird,” “The Long and Winding Road” and “Lady Madonna” — all of which were recorded after Paul's former band had stopped touring. McCartney finally seemed ready to put both parts of his musical life in context.
“I’m a Beatles fan,” he told Rolling Stone in 1976. “When John [Lennon] was saying a couple of years ago that it was all crap, it was all a dream, I know what he was talking about – but at the same time I was sitting there thinking, ‘No it wasn’t.’ It was as much a dream as anything else is; as much crap as anything else is. In fact, it was less crap than a lot of other stuff.”
Of course, after so many successive McCartney tours (and so many concurrent live albums ) in the years since he retook the road in 1989, much of what made Wings Over America so exciting then seems like quaint nostalgia today. It’s much easier, decades later, to separate the music from the moment. This multi-disc set can come off like the sum of its weakest parts.
That’s a big mistake. Sure, the second half of Wings Over America was far weaker than the first — as McCartney and company delve into some of the most lightweight (but biggest selling, mind you) songs from their polyester-era oeuvre, including the smash “My Love” from 1973’s Red Rose Speedway, the 1975 Venus and Mars hit “Listen to What the Man Said,” and “Silly Love Songs” from their then just-released Wings at the Speed of Sound.
Too often, it seems, Wings Over America threatens to run out of gas as it couples throwaways like “You Gave Me the Answer” and “Magneto and Titanium Man” or “Hi Hi Hi” and “Soily” with stronger material.
Listen to Wings Perform 'Venus And Mars / Rock Show / Jet'
Later, the project's reputation took a hit when it was revealed that no small amount of post-production fixes had been employed before release.
"While everybody's parts were spot-on musically – maybe not the harmonies, maybe not every note was exactly right – but the general feel was pretty good," Wings stalwart Denny Laine said in Luca Perasi's Paul McCartney: Recording Sessions (1969-2013). "But I had the feeling it could have been a better feeling, a fuller sound, so I double-tracked the guitars, just to fill it out [and] added little bits when you get an obvious mistake. We kept most of the solos, and most of the bass parts as it was." Drummer Joe English put a finer point on which elements most needed to be retouched, telling Beatlefan magazine in 1979 that overdubs were necessary because of "people singing out of tune – and I don't mean Paul."
So, maybe Wings Over America wasn’t the career exclamation point that it once seemed. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t much to recommend here.
This fizzy rush of anticipation still surrounds the album’s initial trio of songs — “Venus and Mars/Rock Show” combined with incandescent take on “Jet,” even now the best opening Paul McCartney’s ever constructed. Then there’s this set’s definitive version of “Maybe I’m Amazed.” And a remarkable take on “Call Me Back Again,” from Venus and Mars — with Jimmy McCulloch’s blistering guitar matched stride for stride by a tough trio of horn players led by saxophonist Thaddeus Richard.
Along the way, McCartney came to feel the Wings had finally come into their own, that fans were ready to accept them on their own terms. "I don’t know for sure, but I’ve got a feeling that they go away thinking, 'Oh, well, it’s a band,'" he told Rolling Stone. "It lets them catch up. I think the press, the media is a bit behind the times, thinking about the Beatles a lot. And I think the kids go away from the show a lot hipper than even the review they’re going to read the next day."
Wings Over America also stands as the pinnacle of Denny Laine’s often-overlooked career with Wings, from his featured vocals on “Spirits of Ancient Egypt” and “Picasso’s Last Words,” to a vital take of his Moody Blues -era hit “Go Now” and an admittedly less interesting cover of Simon & Garfunkel ’s “Richard Cory.” But check out “Time to Hide,” a deep cut from Speed of Sound, where we find Laine brilliantly recapturing the raw emotion of his early R&B-sides with the Moodies.
Then, just as the mawkish distractions of “Let ‘Em In” threaten to sink the whole thing, Wings unleashes the feverish “Beware My Love” — another Speed of Sound track which, though tissue thin lyrically, begins a run of three muscular tracks that secure this album's enduring legacy: The Venus and Mars cut “Letting Go,” which is shot through with this jagged sexuality, and then the ageless “Band on the Run.”
See Paul McCartney in Rock’s Craziest Conspiracy TheoriesA series of late-stage drug trials are showing great promise for a completely new generation of migraine prevention drugs, which could hit the market as early as next year.
For the millions of migraine sufferers around the world, this is the most welcome news in decades, as current treatment options are limited and no migraine-specific prevention drugs even existed - until now.
These new drugs are monoclonal antibodies - lab-made proteins of the kind that our immune system deploys to target various substances in the body. In the case of migraine, these antibodies target CGRP (calcitonin gene-related peptide), a molecule known to play a role in migraines.
Although people sometimes think of migraines as a type of bad headache, the debilitating condition actually comes with a host of symptoms including nausea, vomiting, light and noise sensitivity, and fatigue.
A migraine attack can last from a few hours to several days, and the vast majority of sufferers - over 90 percent - have episodic migraine, which means fewer than 15 days per month. Chronic migraine can be more than 15 days per month, and can have severe effects on one's wellbeing.
Anyone who's struggled with migraines will know there's a bunch of medications out there to try. For example, there are a few migraine-specific drugs people can take as'rescue' medicine when a migraine attack happens.
Additionally, for more frequent migraines a patient can try to take one or more medications to prevent the attacks. But none of those drugs were actually developed specifically for migraines - instead, they are things like anti-depressants, blood pressure medication or anti-epilepsy drugs, often with serious side-effects.
Which is why this new class of CGRP-targeting drugs is such a big deal. And two high-quality studies published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine show that pharmaceutical companies are on the right path.
One of these trials called STRIVE tested injections of the drug erenumab as a preventative for episodic migraine in 955 patients across 121 study sites over the span of six months.
The team found that in their study population of episodic migraines with a baseline of 8.3 attack days per month, erenumab could reduce that number by 3.2 days at a 70-mg dose and by 3.7 days at a higher, 140-mg dose.
In the higher-dose group, half of the patients experienced a 50 percent or greater reduction of the mean number of migraine days, which means that from all the days they'd lose to a migraine every month, they got at least half of that precious time back.
"The results of STRIVE represent a real transition for migraine patients from poorly understood, repurposed treatments, to a specific migraine-designed therapy," says lead researcher Peter Goadsby from King's College Hospital in London and NIHR-Wellcome Trust King's Clinical Research Facility.
Erenumab works by blocking the receptor of CGRP in the brain, and is the only drug to do so. It's being developed by Amgen and Novartis who sponsored the study, and the companies have announced that the FDA has accepted their drug filing earlier this year.
But there are other pharmaceuticals in that race as well. Trial results for a different drug called fremanezumab (developed by Teva Pharmaceuticals) were also published last week - this one was tested in 1,130 chronic migraine patients.
When injected quarterly for 12 weeks, the drug achieved a 4.3 day reduction of average headache days from a whopping 13.2 days each month. Unlike erenumab, this drug targets the CGRP molecule itself.
The important takeaway from these trials is that the drugs are definitely performing better than placebo, but researchers acknowledge that more research will be needed to determine whether the medications continue to work and remain safe in the long term.
One thing is for sure, we'll be hearing more and more about CGRP monoclonal antibodies, since two other companies - Eli Lilly and Amgen - also have their own version in the pipeline and there's talk that at least one of these four meds will end up on pharmacy shelves next year.
Unfortunately, the one big catch might be the cost. While it's too soon to tell about the final pricing ahead of actual drug administration approvals, there are some predictions that injections of these new drugs could end up costing at least US$8,500 a year.
We can only hope that the fierce competition in this area might bring the price down somewhat.
"STRIVE, as with the monoclonal antibody developments generally, represents an incredibly important step forward for migraine understanding and migraine treatment," says Goadsby, who also co-authored the fremanezumab study last week.
"Migraine is too often trivialised as just a headache when, in reality, it can be a debilitating, chronic condition that can destroy lives," says Simon Evans from the UK-based charity Migraine Action.
"We hope that this marks the start of real change in how this condition is treated and perceived."
The latest trials were published in the New England Journal of Medicine here and here.Official Transcript: Nexus-Aya Defense Communication 027
Present: Tiran Kandros (Nexus Militia / APEX Leadership), Evfra de Tershaav (Angaran Resistance Leader, Operations Director)
Evfra de Tershaav: The information your APEX teams retrieved from the kett is… disturbing. If it’s accurate.
Tiran Kandros: My people are the best. We can trust their intel.
Evfra: From what we’ve translated, these… krogan? Is that how it’s said? The krogan scouts were taken by the kett—
Kandros: Like we suspected. Damn it.
Evfra: But these records show that after the usual tests, the krogan were picked as potential “khesorai.” A kett word that crops up in their comms. It usually signals that some senior kett thinks a prisoner is… worthy.
Kandros: Worthy for what? More of their experiments?
Evfra: For a process that—hmm. Better not discuss it over these channels. For now, just know the kett call it “Exaltation.” Those who endure this process are never the same.
Kandros: Well, if we don’t know exactly what the kett are doing, we might know where. I have reports that a massive kett ship has suddenly changed course. She’s skirting systems close to our Nexus—might even be heading for the station itself.
Evfra: Likely testing your defenses. It could be a coincidence.
Kandros: A coincidence too far. My scouts picked up evidence that krogan were taken onto that ship. That’s enough for me: I’m sending APEX teams to board it and deal with the kett before they get within a parsec of the Nexus.
Evfra: Pledge to share your findings, and I’ll commit Resistance assets to their mission. What do you expect them to find?
Kandros: Trouble. But trouble is where APEX are at their best.Queen Elizabeth II welcomes Theresa May to Buckingham Palace, where she invited the former home secretary to become the new prime minister of Britain and form a new government, on July 13. (Dominic Lipinski/European Pressphoto Agency)
In becoming Britain’s second female prime minister, Theresa May has made the country just the sixth in Europe (and 17th in the world) to have had more than one female leader.
May, like her female predecessor Margaret Thatcher, is a Conservative. Her party’s main rival, the Labour Party, has had a parade of white male leaders. Although Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman served as interim Labour Party leaders, neither was elected to that post.
[Here’s why Theresa May became Britain’s first female leader since Thatcher]
Which party has better female representation: Conservative or Labour?
So is the Conservative Party beating Labour 2 to 0 in representing women in politics, as former prime minister David Cameron quipped in his final Prime Minister’s Questions? Is it true that the Conservative Party, as Boris Johnson said last week, is “the most progressive party in Britain” when it comes to representing women? No, in at least two important ways.
First, on the benches of the House of Commons, only 21 percent of Conservative Party MPs are women — less than half that of the Labour Party, whose MPS are now 43 percent women. In fact, for almost two decades, Labour has consistently had about twice the proportion of women as has the Conservative Party, as the graph below shows.
[Where do African women have more power? Surprise: in countries emerging from war]
(House of Commons Library)
Second, unlike the Conservatives, Labour has consistently used robust policies in selecting candidates to guarantee healthy female representation on their slate.
Here’s how Britain’s Labour Party boosted female representation in Parliament
More than 100 political parties around the world — including Labour — use what are called “gender quota.” Labour’s gender quota policy, called all-women shortlists, was first used for the 1997 election. It commits the party to considering only female candidates in at least half of all “winnable” seats that come open.
The policy’s results were dramatic. That year, the proportion of women in the Parliamentary Labour Party went from 14 percent to 24 percent, and the number of women in parliament overall doubled from 60 to 120. Labour has continued to use all-women shortlists in selecting its candidates for general elections ever since, with one exception. During the 2001 election, a legal challenge made the practice illegal. But a Labour-dominated Parliament amended the Equality Act to accommodate the provision.
Here’s how the British Conservative Party tried to boost female representation in Parliament
By contrast, the Conservative Party’s attempts to increase the number of female MPs have been significantly less effective. From the mid-2000s, Conservative gender-equality activists pressured party leaders to pay more attention to the underrepresentation of women. May, now prime minister, co-founded one key effort: Women2win, an organization to encourage and support women entering into Conservative Party politics. As Sarah Childs, Paul Webb and Sally Marthaler argued in the journal Political Quarterly, these efforts were important in changing party attitudes.
In fact, after being selected party leader in 2005, David Cameron spent much of his acceptance speech promising that the party will “change the scandalous under-representation of women in the Conservative Party.” Within the year, the party introduced what it called priority candidate list — or the “A-List,” of about 150 aspiring candidates, from which local party organizers were encouraged to select. The party promised that the A-List would be at least 50 percent women and that a “significant” proportion would be nonwhite, and also introduced rules for gender-balanced shortlisting during the candidate-selection process.
[There’s much less gender bias in U.S. elections than you think. Here’s why.]
In Political Quarterly, Rosie Campbell, Joni Lovenduski and Childs argued that Cameron’s increased emphasis on getting more women into Parliament was an important evolution of the Conservative Party, raising awareness within the party of the need to “modernize” and appeal to female voters. But relatively few local party constituencies (equivalent to, in the United States, a district party organization) selected women from the A-List, and it was abandoned altogether in 2012. While Conservative Party leaders encouraged them to voluntarily select all-female shortlists themselves, no local party chose to do so. Although more Conservative women were elected in 2010, they still made up only a modest 16 percent of Conservative MPs, a bit more than half of Labour’s 31 percent.
So what kinds of policies actually lead to gender equality in politics?
Lovenduski in her book “Feminizing Politics” puts attempts to tackle women’s political underrepresentation into three categories: equality rhetoric, equality promotion and equality guarantees. While the Conservative Party in the past decade has had plenty of equality rhetoric and promotion — which Lovenduski considers important steps toward “feminizing politics” — it has stopped short of guaranteeing equality. Labour, by contrast, took steps to guarantee equal representation. Political scientists, such as Mona Lena Krook, have consistently found that robust equality guarantees in the form of gender quotas are the surest route to increasing women’s representation at all levels in politics. The results can be counted.
[In Hillary Clinton’s run, the ‘woman card’ works in surprising ways]
Of course, only the Conservative Party has put women into the top spot
It’s true that the Conservative Party has now put women in the most exceptional position in Britain: that of prime minister. But it has not gone far in diversifying its gender composition. As Diana O’Brien and Karen Beckwith wrote here earlier this week, both Thatcher and May came to power after political crises, which is often the way women become political leaders. That might soon happen in the Labour Party as well; if Angela Eagle succeeds in challenging Jeremy Corbyn for leader, she too may take over at a time of organizational disaster.
In other words, even women’s rise to the top of the party may not indicate a commitment to institutional change; rather, it’s a product of political convenience and circumstance.
Nugent is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University at New Brunswick, studying women and politics. Follow her on Twitter @marynugent1.MRC Vice President of Business and Culture Dan Gainor scolded the liberal media’s coverage of good economic news under the Trump administration.
“They are giving no coverage to the good news except when they absolutely have to,” Gainor declared during a March 10, appearance on Intelligence Report with Trish Regan.
Gainor explained that just two days ago ADP reported 100,000 more jobs than predicted but “ABC, CBS, and NBC didn't cover it at all.”
During a recent span of 12 consecutive sessions of record highs for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, “we looked and there were only seven NBC, CBS, or NBC evening news stories” Gainor told Regan and Fox Business Network viewers.
“The American people want to talk about jobs. They want to talk about their retirement accounts. They want to talk about the stock market because they care about pocketbook issues,” Gainor said. But the media want “to talk about everything else.”
Regan agreed and concluded that economic issues may be “a little too sophisticated” for the liberal news media.By now, everyone knows the script on the great debt-ceiling “crisis” that befalls us every two or three years. It happens like clockwork.
First, the Republicans say that they’re not going to vote to lift the ceiling unless their demands are met. This time the demand is a repeal of Obamacare.
Second, the mainstream press goes on the offensive, attacking the Republicans for their reckless, dangerous, irresponsible conduct. If the Republicans don’t give in, the editorials and op-eds exclaim, the government will have to shut down, causing the United States to fall into an economic crisis that would be a thousand times worse than the Great Depression.
Third, the Republicans give in and vote to lift the debt ceiling. Statists go out and celebrate, knowing that they’ve bought another two or three years of out-of-control spending and debt for their favorite welfare-warfare state programs.
Actually, the best thing that could ever happen to the American people is for the debt ceiling not to be lifted.
What is the debt ceiling? It is an acknowledgement by federal officials that too much government debt is a bad thing, even a dangerous thing for society. It is a declaration by the Congress itself, and ratified by the president, that says |
, which serves as the parish for local residents and students.[18] One of the oratory's most distinctive characteristics is its steel structure, much of which is exposed internally and externally. The landmark church received an architectural award from the American Institute of Steel Construction in 2008.[19] Monaghan has had a significant interest in architecture for more than 50 years and has been one of the world's largest collectors of the works and memorabilia of Frank Lloyd Wright.[20] He drew the oratory's first sketches himself on a napkin.[19][better source needed]
Ecology [ edit ]
Ave Maria has a severe mosquito problem and has been sprayed more than 30 times via airplane with pesticides by the Collier Mosquito Control District in 2015 with organophosphates and pyrethroids,[21] making it the most sprayed area in Southwest Florida.[22] The Collier Mosquito Control District spokesman, stated in 2012 to the Ave Maria Herald, "The chemical used in the spraying is Naled, an organophosphate that the EPA has determined to be extremely safe".[23] EPA's 2006 re-registration document for Naled requires a 48-hour re-entry interval for farm workers as "Naled can cause cholinesterase inhibition in humans".[24]
References [ edit ]
Media related to Ave Maria, Florida at Wikimedia CommonsAlbum Title: Triple H Anime Title: Mawaru Penguindrum Artist: Hisashi Shirahama, Ryo Ishibashi, Ichiro Tanaka, Yukari Hashimoto,
Triple H: Marie Miyake, Yui Watanabe, Miho Arakawa Catalog Number: KICA-3168 Release Type: Vocal Collection Release Date: December 21, 2011 Purchase at: CDJapan
Tracklist
Show »
Track Title Artist Time 01. ROCK OVER JAPAN Triple H 4:42 02. Everyone Went Crazy!! Triple H 2:28 03. BAD NEWS (Kuroi Yokan) Triple H 4:30 04. Scorching Soul Triple H 3:43 05. Daddy’s Shoes Triple H 3:21 06. Private Girl Triple H 4:02 07. HIDE and SEEK Triple H 4:50 08. In the Shadows of Tomorrow Triple H 4:08 09. Ash Wednesday Triple H 4:04 10. HEROES~Eiyuutachi Triple H 5:51
Review: HHH is a playful but serious album that reflects all of Mawaru Penguindrum’s themes in musical form, ranging from thundering rock to smoother jazz to melancholic ballads. A simple title betrays the complexity that lies within: three voice actresses cover songs by 80s/90s Japanese rock band ARB, with each one of the actresses’ character names taking a nod to famous female singers of Japan using the consonant ‘H’ in their names. Furthermore, the reference to the word ‘ecchi’ can’t be forgotten here; the original album is written and sung by an all-male rock band, creating traces of sexual tension in the remake. Painting a story through its track ordering, this album is enjoyable both intellectually and emotionally thanks to its excellent blend of present and past in its music.
Starting with the insert song from the anime, “ROCK OVER JAPAN,” the album leads its listeners into its electric world with every bit the impact that the animated segment for Himari’s “Seizon senryaku!” did for the anime’s viewers. Slightly faster and more hurried than the original ARB song, this remix has kept the thundering bass that was a hallmark in its prior incarnation. It’s a fantastic remake, though sometimes you can’t help but wish the girls were more rock — they don’t have the same umph behind the screaming parts.
ROCK OVER JAPAN
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Signs of trouble begin brewing with the third track “Bad News (Kuroi Yokan)”, which was first released in 1980 and came at a time where Japan’s economic development propelled it to status. A piece that draws from crazy times during which it was composed, the HHH version inserts it own personality by trading a pulsing bass guitar for a more lyrical feel. Most surprisingly, the whistling in this piece almost seems to speak out on its own, melodic but solitary in a way that captures the problems soon to come in the anime’s plot.
Bad News (Kuroi Yokan)
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The next piece is my absolute favorite on the entire album, and I can’t help but tear up when I listen to it. Championing the notion of nostalgia instilled within the entire album, “Daddy’s Shoes” in particular brings to memory that feeling almost everyone is familiar with: filling in the shoes of someone that you respect, look up to, and came before you. A gentle piano introduction is joined by a light, airy drum beat, both of which combine together with vocals to create a wonderful jazz piece that critically differs from other songs on the soundtrack. Placed right in the middle of the album at track #5, “Daddy’s Shoes” is the song that glues the entire thing together.
Daddy’s Shoes
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Even though most of the songs on HHH are used as ending themes, none are more hauntingly beautiful than “Ash Wednesday” (“Haiiro no Suiyoubi”) which implores the listener to “come on, remember / the time when we loved each other / the time when we looked at each other with serious gazes.” Starting in A-minor, this song instills a sense of melancholy between the melody, which floats and sinks in oscillation, and the steady yet dramatic piano that shapes the rest the piece. The song reaches climax toward the end when the refrain gains increasing urgency as the piano crescendos along with vocals. A final brighter, happier C major chord brings an end to the track by capturing musically the idea of hope, another crucial theme of the show.
Ash Wednesday
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Finally, the album returns to its rock origins in the final song “HEROES ~Eiyuutachi~.” A song of parting, this piece shifts from its innocuously balladic opener that depicts the state of a wonderful, utopian world. This image is shattered as the song picks up pace, morphing into what can be called a tone of celebration after the first verse. This dynamism that appears adds a layer of contrast between the subject of the lyrics and the musical mood; despite knowing fully that the current world is illusory, the girls are happy to urge along the burying of past visionaries. Rounding out the ten-track album, this last song symbolizes a sense of complacency and a willingness to put things in the past, echoing the situation of the characters in the anime, further reflecting on how quickly the world buries its heroes.
HEROES ~Eiyuutachi~
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HHH is a masterpiece that succeeds in integrating the serious themes of the anime with a modern flavor, extending the original rock influence into something broader. One huge problem with this is that the complexity of the album — and the anime — is not immediately obvious; a naïve listener may hear this CD and think nothing of its intricate musical play and complicated network of references to modern Japanese history. Thus, where the album succeeds in its delivery, it hurts itself in another sense: HHH is a character soundtrack designed for a Japanese audience familiar with the anime it was composed for. It is a masterpiece of a character song album, but unfortunately, it may not be the most perfect album on its own. Also, not everyone may find the remaking of classic rock songs to be a good thing. However, for fans of the anime, this is an album that cannot be missed.
Rating: Excellent
Like this: Like Loading...RED HAT is continuing its slew of announcements from its Boston Summit with the reveal of a preview edition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM processors (RHELA).
RHELA isn't up for grabs generally just yet, but it is expected to be ready later this year or early 2016, cementing the company's commitment to enterprise cloud on tiny chips.
Already there are over 40 OEMs and vendors working with Red Hat on the Early Access programme since it was first launched in July 2014 with the goal of "enhancing partner collaboration and facilitating partner-initiated system designs based on the 64-bit capable ARMv8-A architecture".
It's these members that will be soak testing the beta ready for final release.
RHELA will be a relation of, but not identical to, the x86 version, with most features intact and working on 64-bit ARMv8-A chips, most importantly to a common standard, which as ever with Red Hat is the goal.
The company says that "it also brings a familiar environment and tooling to our existing customers, thus offering a seamless user experience across architectures and simplifying porting and development efforts for our partners, ISVs and enterprise developers".
Red Hat has, as you would expect, had a busy week, with announcements of tie-ups with Samsung for the mobile space, OpenShift Enterprise 3, which brings Docker closer to RHEL 7. This news is particularly timely, with the creation earlier this week of the Open Container Project (OCP), to be overseen by the Linux Foundation, which will bring a common standard for containerisation.
Linus Torvalds announced that Linux 4.1 has been committed this week, and the current release cycle should see it incorporated in the next releases from Red Hat in October 2015. µAccording to a tweet by @OurTwoBits, it appears the Florida Gators are on the verge of starting the process to add an indoor practice facility for the football team as the University Athletic Association is currently accepting bids for the construction project.
The GREAT Jeremy Foley to bring an indoor @GatorZoneFB practice facility to @UF‘s campus… pic.twitter.com/Dvi1POkx7I — Gator Content from (@OurTwoBits) October 6, 2014
The addition of an indoor practice facility would be welcomed news for the Gators’ football program. Not only is Florida the lone SEC team without an indoor practice facility (other than Vanderbilt), but the Gators’ in-state rival Florida State Seminoles recently finished construction on a $15 million indoor facility.
With facilities around college football seeing major upgrades, a brand new indoor practice facility for the Gators would be a huge recruiting pitch moving forward. It also would certainly help when dealing with the summer weather in Gainesville, which is notorious for summer storms in the afternoon that constantly interfere with summer and fall practices.
RELATED: Arms Race: Photos of top indoor practice facilities in college football
Based off the proposal attached in the tweet above, the budget for the indoor practice facility would be $11.9 million and the proposed location for the facility would be directly north of McKethan Stadium (Florida’s baseball field).This article is about the astronaut. For the baseball player, see Joe Engel
Joe Henry Engle (born August 26, 1932) (Maj Gen USAF, Ret.) is an American pilot, aeronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut. He was the commander of two Space Shuttle missions including STS-2, the program's second orbital flight. He also participated in the Shuttle program's Approach and Landing Tests. Engle is one of twelve pilots who flew the North American X-15, an experimental spaceplane jointly operated by the Air Force and NASA.
As an X-15 pilot, Engle made three flights above 50 miles, thus qualifying for astronaut wings per the American convention for the boundary of space. In 1966 he was selected for NASA's fifth Astronaut Group, joining the Apollo program. He was the backup Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 14 and originally scheduled as LMP for Apollo 17. However cancellation of later flights prompted NASA to select geologist-astronaut Harrison Schmitt as LMP, displacing Engle.
Engle is an experienced spaceplane operator and the last living X-15 pilot.
Biography [ edit ]
Personal life and education [ edit ]
Engle was born on August 26, 1932, in Chapman, Kansas.[1] He attended primary and secondary schools in Chapman, Kansas, and he graduated from Dickinson County High School in 1950.[2] He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Kansas in 1955, where he was a member of the Theta Tau Professional Engineering Fraternity.[3][4]
Engle was active as a Boy Scout and earned the rank of First Class.[5]
He was married to the late Mary Catherine Lawrence of Mission Hills, Kansas and has two grown children and one stepchild. He is currently married to Jeanie Carter Engle of Houston, Texas. Engle's recreational interests include flying (including World War II fighter aircraft), big game hunting, backpacking, and athletics.[4]
He was a member of the Society of Experimental Test Pilots and became a Fellow in 2009.[6]
Flight experience [ edit ]
Engle with the X-15A-2 aircraft in 1965
Engle received his commission in the U.S. Air Force through the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps at the University of Kansas. While in school he was a member of the Professional Engineering Fraternity Theta Tau, and decided to become a test pilot. While working at Cessna Aircraft during the summer, he learned how to fly from a fellow draftsman, Henry Dittmer[7].[8]
Engle entered flying school in 1957, and received his pilot wings in 1958. He flew the F-100 Super Sabre with the 474th Fighter Day Squadron and the 309th Tactical Fighter Squadron at George Air Force Base, California. Chuck Yeager recommended Engle for USAF Test Pilot School, from which he graduated in 1961, and he was later assigned to the second class of the Aerospace Research Pilot School, despite his reluctance to leave "stick and rudder" flying for a space capsule.[8]
After serving as a test pilot in the Fighter Test Group at Edwards Air Force Base, California, Engle was a test pilot in the X-15 research program at Edwards from June 1963 until his assignment to the Manned Spacecraft Center (now the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center). Engle had applied with fellow ARPS student Michael Collins to the third NASA astronaut group, but the Air Force withdrew Engle's NASA application and instead chose him to replace Robert M. White in the X-15 program, which pleased Engle.[8]
Engle's parents witnessed his flight of 29 June 1965, which exceeded an altitude of 50 miles (80 km) and qualified him for astronaut wings; he again exceeded 50 miles twice[8] during his career of 16 flights. On his final X-15 mission, free flight 153 (1-61-101), which took place on 14th October 1965, he became the first of only two pilots to accomplish a sub-orbital space flight in an X-15 without the benefit of the assistance provided by the MH-96 adaptive flight control system[9]. Despite what he later called "the best flying job in the world", Engle decided to apply again to NASA as he expected to be rotated to another Air Force assignment within a year and hoped to go to the Moon.[8]
Engle has flown over 185 different types of aircraft (25 different fighters) during his career: logging more than 15,400 hours flight time; 9,000 in jet aircraft.[1]
NASA career [ edit ]
Engle, commander of the STS-2 mission, with Truly, pilot
Engle was one of 19 astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966.[10] He served on the support crew for Apollo 10. Following this assignment, he was backup Lunar Module Pilot for the Apollo 14 mission and was due to land on the Moon as Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 17, but was replaced by geologist Harrison Schmitt after Apollo 18 was cancelled with pressure from the scientific community to have a scientist explore the Moon, and not just test pilots who had been given geology training. In response to getting bumped from the mission, he said "When you think about it, the lunar missions were geology-oriented."[4]
According to Engle, Deke Slayton asked him whether he would prefer to fly on Skylab, Apollo-Soyuz, or the Space Shuttle; Engle responded that he would prefer the Shuttle as it was an airplane.[8]
The crew of the STS-51-I mission. Engle is at the lower left
Engle was Commander of one of the two crews that flew the Space Shuttle Approach and Landing Test Flights from June through October 1977. The Space Shuttle Enterprise was carried to 25,000 feet on top of the Boeing 747 carrier aircraft, and then released for its two-minute glide flight to landing. In this series of flight tests, Engle evaluated the Orbiter handling qualities and landing characteristics, and obtained the stability and control, and performance data in the subsonic flight envelope for the space shuttle. He was the backup Commander for STS-1, the first orbital test flight of Space Shuttle Columbia. Together with pilot Richard Truly he flew as Commander on the second flight of the Space Shuttle, STS-2. He was also mission commander on STS-51-I and logged over 225 hours in space.[8]
Engle is the only human being to have flown two different types of winged vehicles in space, the X-15 and the Space Shuttle. In Engle's June 2004 oral history interview the interviewer (Rebecca Wright) states that he is the only astronaut to have manually flown the Shuttle through reentry and landing, [8] but this is an oversimplification. Periods of hand flying flight test manoeuvres were interspersed with periods of computer control.[11]
He served as Deputy Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight at NASA Headquarters from March 1982 to December 1982.[1] He retained his astronaut flight status and returned to the Johnson Space Center in January 1983.[1] He also participated in the Challenger disaster investigation in 1986, and did other consulting work on the Shuttle well into the 1990s.[12]
Post-NASA career [ edit ]
In his last active duty military assignment, Engle was the Air National Guard Assistant to the Commander in Chief, United States Space Command and North American Air Defense Command (NORAD), with Headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. Joe Engle retired from NASA on November 28, 1986[13] and the USAF on November 30, 1986. On December 1, he was subsequently promoted to the rank of Major General. In 1986 he was appointed to the Kansas Air National Guard and 1992, he was inducted into the Aerospace Walk of Honor. On July 21, 2001, Engle was enshrined at Dayton, Ohio, in the National Aviation Hall of Fame class of 2001, along with USAF ace Robin Olds, U.S. Marine Corps ace Marion Carl, and Albert Ueltschi. In November, 2001, he was inducted into the U.S. Astronaut Hall of Fame in Florida.[14]
Awards and honors [ edit ]
Joe Engle as backup Lunar Module Pilot for Apollo 14
References [ edit ]
Bibliography [ edit ]If you’re a regular Ars reader, the concept of "astroturf organizations”—fake grassroots movements backed by large corporations—won’t be new. In the past, we’ve covered astroturfing by AT&T, cable companies, and even the Chinese government. But we haven't really addressed a key question: does astroturfing actually work?
The question hasn't been studied much, but new research in the Journal of Business Ethics says that yes, astroturf does work; however, some of the details in the results did surprise the paper's authors.
A case study
The researchers used the issue of climate change to examine just how effective astroturfing can be in changing people's perceptions. Under the guise of a marketing survey, the authors asked 278 Canadian undergraduates to participate in their experiment. The students were first polled on their knowledge and concern regarding issues such as fair trade, racism, and global warming, then told they would be viewing a website related to one of these issues in order to assess its functionality.
They were then randomly assigned to view one of eight websites focusing on climate change; these were either astroturf or grassroots websites,and were either not labeled with a funding source or were labeled with: “Funded from donations by people like you,” “Funded by Exxon-Mobil,” or “Funded by grants from the Conservation Heritage Fund.”
The websites were all created for this experiment, but they employed arguments from actual grassroots and astroturf organizations. The design, structure, and length of the websites were all kept constant.
Once the participants had perused the sites, they were again asked how they felt about the issue, as well as how credible the website was. Of course, to keep up appearances, they were also asked about the site’s functionality and design. One group of 78 participants served as a control group and did not view any website.
How effective is astroturfing?
The main finding: astroturfing works. Students who had viewed a website with astroturf arguments were not only less certain about the cause of global warming than they had been before; they also believed that the issue was less important than they had previously thought.
This effect was stronger for those who were not as involved or as knowledgeable about climate change. However, even students who had indicated that they were deeply involved and highly knowledgeable about the issue were significantly affected by the astroturf claims.
This shift came despite the fact that the students didn't find the material very convincing. Those who viewed the astroturf sites didn’t tend to trust the organization behind it and didn’t believe the information provided was particularly credible. Nevertheless, they still felt more uncertain about the causes and importance of climate change after reading the claims than they had before.
Listing the organization's source of funding on the website had no discernable effect on the students’ perceptions, either. The responses of participants who had viewed sites "Funded by Exxon-Mobil" were not different than those who had viewed sites funded by the "Conservation Heritage Fund," by "donations by people like you," or sites that did not list the source of funding at all.
What does it all mean?
The research has definite drawbacks. First, a group of Canadian undergrads might not be the most representative population. Furthermore, climate change is only one of many controversial issues tackled by astroturfers, so there are questions about whether the results are applicable across issues.
However, it’s clear that, under some circumstances, astroturf organizations work quite well. While the websites in this study weren’t created by the organizations themselves, this methodology did allow the researchers to keep many variables constant and show that the effect is probably due to the rhetoric of uncertainty and doubt used by each type of organization.
Journal of Business Ethics, 2011. DOI: 10.1007/s10551-011-0950-6 (About DOIs).One could perhaps forgive the oilmen of the past. In their pursuit of black gold, they simply burnt off the natural gas that was extracted from the rocks alongside their precious oil. It was a time when Earth’s bounty seemed to expand without consequence in the face of human ingenuity and technological prowess. The incentive to invest in the infrastructure to capture the gas and bring it to market simply did not exist.
But that is no longer true. There is no justification for the large-scale burning off, or flaring, of natural gas by today’s oil industry, particularly in the United States, which is home to the most mature and advanced oil and gas industry in the world. Nearly one-third of the raw gas that is pumped out of the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota — a prime target of the new hydrofracturing and horizontal drilling technologies — is burned in situ.
True, flaring is preferable to venting gases such as methane, butane and propane directly into the atmosphere, but it still has a detrimental effect on both the global climate and the local air quality. And because companies are exempt from paying taxes or royalties on vented gas for the first year, at least, it is also bad for the public purse. As a result, the public gets a smaller return on the environmental price being paid to recover this oil — the inevitable impacts on public infrastructure, air and water resources, and on the landscape itself.
At a conservative estimate, this North Dakota flaring meant some 3.9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted last year, the equivalent of the annual emissions from 750,000 vehicles. Worse, research into flaring has begun to find evidence of potentially widespread methane leakage from shale operations, if not outright venting of the gas (see page 290). Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, so the environmental price is likely to be even higher.
There are solutions. In North Dakota, the state could halt the practice of flaring except when necessary for safety reasons, or it could discourage companies from flaring by making them pay regular taxes and royalties on flared gas. This could delay the development of shale deposits, but that might be a good thing because it would give landowners and government agencies more time to work out how to regulate the environmental and social challenges that accompany energy booms such as shale exploitation. The companies have plenty of motivation to get shale resources out of the ground, and there can be little doubt that they would find ways to exploit the gas currently being flared, perhaps by exporting it. And methane emissions could be better controlled if the US Environmental Protection Agency regulated it as a greenhouse gas and instituted stricter rules across the oil and gas industry.
“The public gets a smaller return on the environmental price being paid to recover this oil.”
The US shale boom has been a boon to the struggling economy, providing jobs and government revenue in many far-flung places. The resulting oil production has allowed the United States to reduce foreign imports, and the plentiful shale-gas resources have lowered demand for coal, thereby curbing greenhouse-gas emissions in the power sector. But it will be up to scientists to pin down the full suite of impacts from the new oil and gas developments and to help policy-makers better understand the choices that they are making.
On 15 March, President Barack Obama proposed creating a US$2-billion Energy Security Trust to advance research and development into low-carbon transport alternatives. It would be funded over a decade by diverting a portion of the proceeds from federal oil and gas development, which are poised to grow thanks to the shale bonanza in North Dakota and beyond. It is a good idea as far as it goes, although once again it is hard not to despair at the general lack of ambition on climate issues in Washington. Improbable as it may be, a federal carbon tax would raise more money and would send an important signal to the energy industry that it needs to control its greenhouse-gas emissions.
The US economy is already benefiting from shale developments, and the country might even be able to lock in a one-time emissions reduction as part of a broader shift from coal to cleaner-burning natural gas in the coming years. A logical part of that equation is to kill off the current fashion for flares.My Home Library will help close the 'book gap' Wade Smith helps kick off program for Houston kids
Former NFL player Wade Smith reads from his book, "Smitty Hits The Play Books," to a group of third graders at Browning Elementary Tuesday. Smith helped launch the My Home Library program, created by the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation. less Former NFL player Wade Smith reads from his book, "Smitty Hits The Play Books," to a group of third graders at Browning Elementary Tuesday. Smith helped launch the My Home Library program, created by the... more Photo: Melissa Phillip, Houston Chronicle Photo: Melissa Phillip, Houston Chronicle Image 1 of / 9 Caption Close My Home Library will help close the 'book gap' 1 / 9 Back to Gallery
Wade Smith knows that books are important.
The former Texans player leveled with a crowd of first-, second- and third-graders at Browning Elementary Tuesday morning.
"When I was a little kid, my mom and my dad and my sister, we just lived in an apartment and we didn't have a lot of money," he told them. "We couldn't go to Europe or any of those fantastic places. But I could pick up a book and open it up, and it could take me wherever I wanted to go."
Smith was there to help launch My Home Library, a new program designed to give disadvantaged kids in Houston the same chance to escape into a book.
Developed by the Barbara Bush Houston Literacy Foundation, My Home Library is a web app that will help pair donors with low-income kids. Each child will make a wishlist of six book titles; each donor, then, can browse the wishlists and make a $30 donation to sponsor a specific child's personal library.
Kids at Browning are part of the pilot program. They'll be making their wishlists next week, and those lists will appear online soon at myhomelibraryhouston.org.
"You're going to be able to pick six brand-new books," foundation president Julie Baker Finck told the kids at Browning, who were lined up on the auditorium floor. "It's going to be like going to a book fair and not having to pay for them. It's going to be like going to the library and checking out six books and not having to return them."
By helping kids build home libraries, the foundation wants to help close the "book gap."
In Houston, about 80 percent of public school kids are economically disadvantaged - and for low-income families, books are often an out-of-reach luxury. My Home Library will help kids be able to keep reading during spring break, summer and other times they don't have access to the school library.
The Barbara Bush Houston foundation negotiated prices to offer books from Scholastic and three Houston publishers: Arte Publico Press, Bright Sky Press and LongTale Publishing. Some of the titles were on display in the Browning auditorium Tuesday: "The Night Before First Grade," "If You Give a Moose a Muffin," "Family, Familia," "Mama Miti."
Smith wrote his own children's book last year, "Smitty Hits the Play Books." He knows what to say to pique kids' interest in reading.
"Who here likes football?" Smith asked Tuesday. Most of the students waved their hands. "Who here likes soccer? Who here likes Pokemon?"
At the word Pokemon, the squirming crowd went wild.
"Do you know that they have books about every last thing I just mentioned?" Smith said. "Whatever topic you can think of that you like, they have books about that stuff.... If you have trouble reading or don't like it all that much, think of something that you like and read about that."
Later Tuesday morning, a group of celebrities read these some of these books to the students - a group tha included Herb Taylor, the former Kansas City Chiefs player who owns Ray's Real Pit BBQ Shack, Chantelle Anderson, a former WNBA player for the San Antonio Stars, and DJ Supastar from 93.7 The Beat
"All of these people love to read," Smith told the kids, "and all of them are successes - all of them have lived out their dreams in some fashion."Donald Trump often rails against U.S. intervention in the Middle East that topples dictators whose exits lead to unstable regional consequences like the rise of ISIS and other terrorist groups.
But one intervention he has subsequently come to pan — the 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya, which led to the toppling of longtime leader Muammar al-Qaddafi — Trump once very loudly called for on humanitarian grounds.
"I mean, look at Libya," Trump said on CNN's State of the Union last year. "Look at Iraq. Iraq used to be no terrorists. He [Saddam Hussein] would kill the terrorists immediately, which is like, now it's the Harvard of terrorism. If you look at Iraq from years ago, I'm not saying he was a nice guy — he was a horrible guy — but it was a lot better than it is right now. Right now, Iraq is a training ground for terrorists. Right now, Libya, nobody even knows Libya, frankly there is no Iraq and there is no Libya. It's all broken up. They have no control. Nobody knows what's going on."
When asked if the world would be better with Qaddafi in power, Trump said, "100%."
Trump made similar comments on Meet the Press this year as well.
"You wouldn't have had your Benghazi situation," said Trump. "It's not even a country."
The comments are a sharp contrast for Trump from 2011, when, on his video blog, he pushed hard for the United States to intervene in Libya.
"I can't believe what our country is doing," said Trump on his video blog. "Qaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we're sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we're not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that's what it is: It's a carnage."
Trump said Libya could end up one of the worst massacres in history, and it would be very easy to topple Qaddafi.
"You talk about things that have happened in history; this could be one of the worst," he said. "Now we should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick. We could do it surgically, stop him from doing it, and save these lives. This is absolutely nuts. We don't want to get involved and you're gonna end up with something like you've never seen before."
Trump said the people would take over from Qaddafi eventually and then "they should pay us back" out of appreciation.
"But we have go in to save these lives; these people are being slaughtered like animals," he said. "It's horrible what's going on; it has to be stopped. We should do on a humanitarian basis, immediately go into Libya, knock this guy out very quickly, very surgically, very effectively, and save the lives."
Then, "After it's all done," Trump said, the protesters who took over the country would reimburse the U.S. through oil.Hi all,
I currently have 3 devices at home that I have just updated to the latest Windows 10 Build 10586, the dreaded November update that many are having issues with.
My devices are as such:
Desktop PC - i7, 8GB, 64-bit, 2 GB Nvidia GTX 750 Ti, 256 GB SSD
Laptop - emachines E732Z (Piece of **** that is some 4 years old)
Laptop 2 in 1 - acer Aspire R3-13IT-P73T (2 days old)
Now the PC works fine as you would expect with those stats, the emachines thing, that also works fine, both of them have no issues, **** the emachines is even faster now with Windows 10 than it was with Windows 7, for a four year old paper weight that is a good effort from Microsoft to be able to reduce the OS to the point it can run on much older devices, something past versions of Windows would not have been able to do.
The real problem is the new 2 in 1 acer Aspire. Before the update I had zero issues, it ran fine for the first few hours before I decided to do the November update. The update worked fine, albeit it took some time, it did work without issues. Now that it is up and running I am experiencing lag on everything, and when I say everything, I mean everything. Even just having the PC running with NO open programs you can see the mouse lag.
I open Task Manager, all stats are in the low %, only the memory is around 40%, the rest are as low as zero and up to 10% at most, very similar to my PC. Lag still.
I have tested this with any number or variety of programs open, still get the lag. So I tested to ensure it was not just the mouse, opening Google and going into View Source so I can get a long **** page of plain text, press the down arrow and... lag. No matter what I do and how I use it, I get computer lag, not mouse lag, computer lag.
I went through and updated ALL the windows drivers through Device Manager, tried to enable and disable everything I could think of except the default applications that came with the Laptop, I read through every forum I could locate since the update was released to the public that had anything to do with Windows in any form or variety that had others in a similar situation, start up issues, computer lag, video lag, general lag, anything that could be attributed to anything Windows from November onwards, I still face the issue.
Now here is the kicker, I removed something I though to be useless from Device Manager, it was a Trusted Security something, I did not take much issue as to what it was and ran the device Safe Mode. I removed that as it looked to be the only thing I did not actually need, never have I ever had any issues with any of my PC's over the last 25 years that was not directly attributed to my own doing. Lo and behold, no lag. Although nothing really works in Safe Mode, I am happy I don't get the annoying lag.
So far upon restart on the login screen not in Safe Mode, no lag. So either it is that security thing I disabled, or it is a start up program that comes with new fan dangled laptops. Since my emachines is a piece of **** that should be flushed down the toilet, and every time I have decided to take notice of anyone else having any issues with the latest update it was always fancy laptops, touch screens, gaming machines and so on, I attribute it to something that new laptops have which old ones do not.
Now upon starting in normal mode, that Security Device - Trusted Platform Module 2.0 is back. Windows asked me to turn |
means getting in contact with the companies and meeting with them and negotiation or at launching campaigns, pressure campaigns.
Natalie Cargill: So you’ve got certain positions available now?
Jose Valle: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Natalie Cargill: I wonder, more broadly, is that a trend of the animal activist community needing a certain type of person to look for the certain role and somebody who’s perhaps thinking of studying before they go into work? What kind of things would you recommend they looking into if they want to work in animal advocacy?
Sharon Núñez: One of the things that we look for, very specifically, is passion. And the reason for this is because we find that if someone has the passion and they want to work for animals, and they have some basic, like for personal characteristics. Like for example, they’re proactive, they’re hardworking, and they’re problem solvers. What we find is that, I would say, 70 to 80% of our positions could be filled.
In the case of other positions, I think that … We find that we’re needing more and more technical positions. A very very good example of this is people in IT, data analysts, programmers, people who are familiar with things like big data. We really want to be an organization that can spearhead. We already have I Animal, so we are seen as an organizational … Sorry … that’s very technology savvy. We want to continue it being perceived that way, but at the same time, we think it’s very effective to be aware of what’s happening in technology, what’s happening in different companies and trying to think how we can apply it to our organization.
I would say that in the near … We already need technical schools like programmers and data analysts, but as we continue to grow, this is an area that we definitely want to explore more.
Jose Valle: And another very important area, I think, where it’s very very difficult to find the right people, is in the developmental fundraising. So yeah. If there is people listening to this that might be interested into pursuing that type of career, they will be very very welcome because that is definitely one of the areas where we lack more talent and more people.
Sharon Núñez: And it also requires some technical skills. There’s several careers in fundraising like prospect searching. It really is looking at data and comparing different … and the parameters to try to come out with which are the people we would better target when fundraising.
Natalie Cargill: If somebody doesn’t suit one of the roles you have at the moment, but really wants to work in effective animal advocacy, are there some other organizations that you would recommend that they check out?
Sharon Núñez: Absolutely. I think definitely Animal Charity Evaluators’ top charities. We think they’re probably the most, or some of the most, effective organizations in the world, so that’s the Humane League, Good Food Institute, and Mercy for Animals. Those are definitely organizations I would recommend people apply to. Also look at the list of stand-out charities. A lot of them are international charities or charities that are not necessarily in the US. So there’s Albert Schweitzer, for example. It’s in Germany and Poland and in some other countries.
I think that if someone really wants to have an impact and they want to help animals, I think that Animal Charity Evaluators’ website is probably one of the best places to visit, and they’ll be able to understand why the charities they’ve selected are so impactful. And also visit those websites and see what kind of jobs organizations are looking for.
Robert Wiblin: I imagine there’s gonna be quite a lot of people listening who would like to make a really big contribution to animal-focused organization in future, but they’re quite young. Maybe they’re still doing their undergraduate degree, or they’re early in their career, kind of getting their first few roles.
Do you have any advice for what majors people should choose to study or where they should go to work early on, where they can get kind of the mentorship and skill-gaining that they need in order to get into a position to do the kind of work that you are doing now?
Jose Valle: I would recommend like … For example, I’m very excited about all the innovation related to clean meat and culture of cells. So if they are interested in biology, I think that will be very very important. If they can contribute on that. Then international business, that will also be very helpful for corporate outreach type of campaigns.
Natalie Cargill: That’s interesting, ’cause you tend to assume people who want to animal advocacy issues, sociology or psychology, and it seems like it’s really changing to be more science-focused and business-focused.
Jose Valle: Yeah, I agree.
Robert Wiblin: I’m gonna be talking to Bruce Friedrich tomorrow, so he’s the head of Good Food Institute, so I’ll find out a bit more about the clean meat side of things and then-
Natalie Cargill: And I’m sure, Mrs. [Wilts 01:03:40] would be interested to know how they could build a professional network within effective animal advocacy and sort of experiment early on with these kind of ideas in order to aid or prepare for a career of it, kind of like you do.
Sharon Núñez: Sure. So I think that one of the most important things is to be informed of [inaudible 01:04:00]. Why do we think that this is a priority cause? And it’s because of the amount of suffering. The reason why, personally, I think some things are wrong and some things are right are because, in the case of things are wrong, there’s an amount of suffering they cause or if they cause suffering at all.
What we see is that farm animal suffering is one of the biggest kind of suffering or causes of suffering in the world of farm … So I think that it’s important just to be informed, and then I would start out volunteering in one of these organizations or working as an intern. And also understanding what are the organization’s needs, because as you were saying before, we did use to need sociologists and psychologists, and we still need them, but we are also finding, at least in Animal Equality, that we need programmers and we need people who also have the business side of things, or have an experience in marketing.
So I think it’s very important to be in contact with the different organizations, with Animal Equality, GFI, Mercy for Animals, and try to understand what their needs may be now and in the future, and maybe if we really want to have an impact, maybe study career paths that kind of lead us there.
Robert Wiblin: Do you know any organizations that offer large numbers of volunteer roles, where people can skill up?
Sharon Núñez: We offer different forms of volunteering in a lot of our different countries. Not specifically in the US at the moment, but we do have … are looking for interns for social media and to support with our educational initiatives. But I know that organizations like The Humane League and Mercy for Animals, again, are also looking for volunteers.
Robert Wiblin: Often different problems that you can work on tend to attract different kinds of people disproportionately, so are there any particular skills that you feel like you’re flooded with, where people who maybe shouldn’t try to be cultivating this because there’s already so many of them?
Sharon Núñez: That’s a difficult question.
Robert Wiblin: That’s a, “Probably not.”
Sharon Núñez: Yeah. No, I would not say so. I think that it’s also very important for people to understand what their natural talents are, right? I think if someone’s going to work in fundraising and they’re going to be working with donors and prospects, well, it is important that they have certain people skills and, to a certain extent, they can be developed, but to another extent, they can’t, so I think it’s very important for people to understand what they’re naturally skilled at, and then what their passion is and there, somewhere in the middle, it will probably figure out what they’re best at. But, at the moment, I think there’s no skills that we’re lacking.
Robert Wiblin: Okay. Are there any other options that you wanna highlight to people if they’re thinking a little bit more broadly, like how … You talked about going into clean meats, so that’s kind of research. Maybe, are there any start-ups that you’d like to see started? Or do you think it would be useful to have animal advocates go and try to get elected in politics? Are there any other like, just different approaches that you’d like to discuss?
Jose Valle: I think what you just mentioned on … Yeah, get into politics and being able to cleanse political parties from within. That can be very effective, but it will also depend so much on the country, and on the particularities of that, so it will have to be analyzed very carefully before deciding that. And then other aspects will be like, earning to give. I think that is also very very effective.
Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Let’s talking about earning to give. Across lots of different problems, sometimes it’s better to go and make money and donate it, because that’s kind of a limiting factor. With other problems, it can be that there’s a lot of money available but there’s no one to spend it in a useful way.
What do you feel animal advocacy is here? Do you think it’s more that we need, relative to other problems, do you need more people to go earning to give and providing funding?
Jose Valle: I think we will all … the effective factor is animal charities will benefit greatly from that, yes.
Sharon Núñez: Especially, I think, if people don’t have the skills that we need the most immediately, I think it’s probably best for you to give, yes.
Robert Wiblin: Yeah. Hypothetically, would you rather have a very good staff member who has maybe like five years experience in relevant areas, or … So one of them applies to you to come and work to you. Would you prefer that or say, $100,000 in extra funding a year?
Sharon Núñez: It’s very, again, it’s a common expression, ’cause it also depends on the department they’d be working in, so if they’re working on fundraising, probably a staff member. Trying to isolate it, I would probably say the staff member, because the value they can bring to the organization is probably several times higher than $100,000. If it were a higher amount, then I would think about that.
Robert Wiblin: So if it were $200,000-
Sharon Núñez: If it were $500,000, I would definitely-
Robert Wiblin: Interesting.
Sharon Núñez: … reconsider it. Yes.
Robert Wiblin: Okay, so if something like-
Sharon Núñez: It’s a very very rough estimate.
Robert Wiblin: Sounds then like many people are not going to be able to earn a half a million, or donate half a million a year, so you’d probably rather have them apply. But if someone’s in a position to earn a lot of money, you know, in finance or high-end law or something like that, they’re able to make more than half a million a year, then they should think about the funding side of things.
Sharon Núñez: I would say so, yes. What are your thoughts?
Jose Valle: Now I think I will put the amount of … And this is like, so difficult to estimate, right? But in abstract, I will lower that amount, maybe to half of that? Or even lower than that. There are some positions that we are really lacking talent or good candidates and where the impact that they can have is so big, but in majority of our positions, we can find other people who can do a great job still. We also see that the number of years of experience is not really that important. It will be more like the type of skills, and how they fit into the culture of the organization, and team work. So I would definitely lower that amount. Like if someone can, yeah, donate about $100,000 a year or even less than that, that whole thing can be very significant, the difference that they make, especially when we transfer those funds to India or some other countries.
Robert Wiblin: It’s possible you have different people in mind, because it’s-
Sharon Núñez: Yes.
Robert Wiblin: … it’s very possible-
Jose Valle: Yeah.
Robert Wiblin: It’s very-
Sharon Núñez: Yeah.
Robert Wiblin: … different from a hypothetical question like-
Jose Valle: True.
Robert Wiblin: … “How good would they be at their job?”
Sharon Núñez: It depends on the skills-
Robert Wiblin: Yeah, exactly.
Sharon Núñez: … too, that they bring to the organization.
Robert Wiblin: Exactly. Just one question that we scanned over it a bit quickly was, what conferences can people go to, either in Europe or the US, or potentially, India as well, where they can really network and meet people like you, and potentially find mentors who might be able to help them out with their career?
Sharon Núñez: Sure. There’s the Animal Rights Conference that happens in the US every year, and it was just a week ago on the east coast. There’s the Sanctions Politics Conference. That happened last year in Europe, and I think it’s gonna happen again this year in Europe. I think it’s going to be in November. So there’s a number of conferences that I would recommend. Those two I can think of.
Jose Valle: Yeah, there is Care. That is in November in Austria. It is a conference of animal rights in Europe. And then every two years, there is Taking Action for Animals in Washington, DC. So next year it will be time when … It’s organized in the east coast.
Natalie Cargill: How risky is it to go into a career in proactive animal advocacy? So if somebody went to work for AE or a similar organization and it didn’t work out for whatever reason, would they be sort of stranded with these skills they couldn’t apply elsewhere? Or would there be other areas they could transfer into relatively easily?
Sharon Núñez: I can’t imagine that there would be a position in an animal rights organization or an animal protection organization at the moment, where they wouldn’t learn transferable skills. We’re seeing that very clearly with the people we’re hiring. We’re hiring people for … We just hired a few people for our Development Department, and they’re learning so many skills that are transferable to other positions. Social media. You’re not only learning the social media, but you’re also learning about communication and all these are transferable skills.
I can’t think at the moment of any position where skills wouldn’t be transferable.
Robert Wiblin: Do you think it’s really important for young people in animal advocacy to kind of find someone who’s older who can show them the ropes and help to support their career looking forward? Should people really be really prioritizing finding mentors? Or is that something that’s not strictly necessary?
Jose Valle: I find that like, very very helpful. I think that it will be … Yeah, very good for them to identify some mentors who can advise them and guide them. Yeah. I wish like, we had those when we started in Spain, and I think it can save a lot of time and a lot of despair, a lot of frustrations.
Robert Wiblin: I suppose … Yeah, the typical ways that, kind of, people find mentors is going to conferences and getting a job, and then like, speaking to people who are more senior.
Another one, if you find those difficult, is potentially just to write content online. Like, write things that are interesting and do some original analysis, and kind of impress people with your capability to think about things, and then you’ll get … potentially find supporters.
Sharon Núñez: Yeah. Absolutely.
Robert Wiblin: What do you think is the biggest downside of going into this career?
Sharon Núñez: I think that one of the biggest downsides is the, to a certain extent, the emotional implications of some of it for some areas of work. To a certain extent, we are exposed to very shocking footage, and sometimes the footage is difficult to watch, so there can be some kind of emotional challenges to dealing with that kind of footage, or just the kind of reality that animals are subjected to.
So that’s definitely, I think, something that could be a downside. I think that that small downside is very much … is very small in comparison with the focus on impact. And I think the great thing about effective altruism, and something that has been really really meaningful in my life, is really understanding that, as individuals, we can have an impact. We can measure that impact and we can know, to a certain extent, how much we’re doing in the world.
So I think that, even though it’s a challenge, it’s also very important to have an impact-oriented organization or to have impact-oriented individuals that are focusing and reminding people constantly about the good they’re doing in the world. And that’s something we do at Animal Equality, not only with our metrics but, for example, at the beginning of most of our meetings, we start with successes, and we remind people in our organization, “What are the things that we’ve achieved in the past month, or in the past two weeks?” just to make sure that we keep morale high, and people focused on the bigger picture and what we’re achieving.
Natalie Cargill: So if somebody who would like to work with your, or a similar, organization, how do you think they could tell if they would be a good fit for that kind of work?
Sharon Núñez: I think to a certain extent, a lot of the positions are going to be very similar to positions they would find in any other field, right? So, I don’t know, social media or working in marketing, or working even in development. They’re going to kind of know if they’re suitable for those positions.
Regarding, I think that one of … As I said before, one of the most important things, for us at least, is not only have the skills and the talent and the experience, but most importantly the passion, really wanting to make a difference in the world. I would say that someone is suited if they have the passion, if they have the desire to really help animals and to make a difference in the world. Once they have that, and I invite anyone who has, to contact us. Once they have that, I think that there’s always kind of skills they can develop, that they can bring into the animal rights movement. Maybe it’s not as a full-time person in an organization. Maybe it’s as an intern, or maybe it’s just as a volunteer, or maybe it’s working and earning to give. But I think once a person has a passion, I think that they probably need to start thinking about, “Okay. How can I really use my skills and use my talents to impact animals?”
Jose Valle: Another of the character is [inaudible 01:15:36] mention, that indicate whether that person will be a good fit, I think, for us. Like both that it will work for, well, the candidate and Animal Equality is that they are flexible and willing to change based on evidence or in arguments. Like we are constantly changing and living out or stopping some of the work that we were doing before modifying it. I think it will be very difficult to work with if someone is not willing to accept those changes and the day-to-day realities of running an organization in multiple countries and all their complexities that it brings.
Robert Wiblin: People who are so passionate about the area, how often do you get people burning out, just because it’s so distressing, the issues that they’re dealing with?
Sharon Núñez: Of course, that’s definitely a challenge, I think, for anyone who is working in kind of, I don’t know, for something that’s distressing or may cause distress, be it human issues or non-human issues. I think that it’s very important for organizations … I think it’s important for individuals to understand self-care and really take care of themselves, but I think it’s also important for organizations to put systems into place to make sure that people are taking care of themselves.
So I said, one of the things I mentioned before is just reminding people … Having, for example, a great office environment. That’s something we work very hard in having at Animal Equality in all our offices, having a great organizational culture. We have, I think, a very good organizational culture and we work very very hard to maintain it. Celebrating our successes, as I said, at the beginning of all of our meetings.
It’s definitely a challenge, but I think it’s very important for organizations and individuals to recognize it and put the systems in place to be able to avoid it. We have 60 people on staff at the moment. We have 14 directors, and a big percentage of our directors have been with us for over five years or seven years.
Jose Valle: Yeah. I think also it is important for us to limit the exposure of the stuff to images and the cruelties of factory farming. If they don’t need to watch it like, there’s, you know, what’s the point in it, right? But there’s some other positions that, because of the nature of the work, require that exposure, but there are also ways of reducing the emotional impact that it has. So we take that into account very very much.
Robert Wiblin: Are you hiring in countries like India or China? If someone happens to be listening from Beijing-
Sharon Núñez: We are. We’re hiring for almost seven positions in India. We’re not hiring in China at the moment. We are looking for volunteers or people who are willing to contact us and maybe translate some of our work. But we are hiring for seven positions in India, so we’re hiring for a lawyer, a general counsel. We’re hiring for a food policy manager. We’re hiring for two corporate outreach positions. We’re hiring for a video editor and a few administrative associate, and I think there’s one or two other positions we’re hiring for at the moment. So, yeah, if someone’s listening, we would be more than welcome to interview them.
Robert Wiblin: I didn’t tell you guys I was going to ask this, but it’s just occurred to me there’s almost so many roles that you’re offering, so many potential skills that you could absorb that it’s a little bit, like people might not know which one to actually try to specialize in.
So would it be possible for you to describe like, if you could just have three ideal people that would like appear and apply to work at Animal Equality, like what kinds of skills and qualities would they have, if you had to just pick, you know, just the most important ones?
Sharon Núñez: Okay. Would you do that?
Jose Valle: Yeah. I think like … operations manager is someone very oriented at processes, how to define those processes and optimize them, and have a very analytical mind and approach to this. That will be very beneficial for us I think. Then another one will be careers-related or with development, as we mentioned earlier. That in itself ranges from having some personal skills like, to deal with or meet with donors or major donors, but it can also imply analyzing a database and looking for some of the … analyzing those data and identify some interesting prospects.
I think those are some of the key ones, including also online marketing and the possibilities that technology’s offering us, and on websites, and with artificial intelligence, and some other feature advancements that our companies are already looking into or applying, and that I think the animal movement is not … It’s lagging behind. It’s not yet applying.
Sharon Núñez: No, my answer is going to be very similar, so I would say like, raw skills. We want people who are organized, who of course, I’ve already said several times, who have the passion. Those who are organized, who are flexible, and who are proactive and who are willing to, as Jose said, who are comfortable with change, and who are comfortable with the complexities and challenges of an international organization.
And then career paths? So I would differentiate like, technical skills. So some of the things Jose’s been mentioning like a data analyst, programmer, people who are very good with numbers and with data. But also we need people from a creative side. So, again, we need video editors. We need designers. We need people to really be good at making our organization communicate better and be more creative. So I would say those are kind of the raw skills, and then the two past technical and creative.
Jose Valle: There is also another one, which will be investigators. We are always looking for undercover investigators who are willing to go into these places and document what happens to these animals. It’s extremely difficult to find the right people. And also, for us, we provide the training. We provide all the … everything, but we need them to be working on this for a number of years and be able to do it sustainably.
Natalie Cargill: So, Sharon, Jose. Is there anything you’d like to say in the final minute to really inspire people?
Sharon Núñez: Yeah. I think that most of the people who are listening to this are probably interested in helping and in making the world a better place, and I think that there is probably one of the most important things they can do is to focus on animals. And more specifically on farmed animals, and this is because of the incredible amount of suffering it can reduce, and the incredible amount of impact they can have.
So I just want to encourage anyone who is interested, and who wants to help animals, and who wants to just have a greater impact in the world, to visit our website, animalequality.org and contact us at any point about how they can help and we would be more than happy and welcoming.
Robert Wiblin: Our guests today have been Sharon and Jose. Thanks so much for coming on The 80,000 Hours Podcast.
Sharon Núñez: Thank you so much.
Jose Valle: Thank you.
Sharon Núñez: Thank you.
Robert Wiblin: Thanks for joining – if you’d like to help me out, let a friend who wants to improve the world know that they should subscribe to the show.
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Last year, Mark Williams was tossed out of the Tea Party Express for his racially insensitive NAACP parody. (Three weeks later, he took the helm of an upstart tea party group.) Now, he wants to sow mayhem among “the union goons in Wisconsin” and elsewhere. According to a post on his blog today, Williams is seeking volunteers to pose with him as members of the Service Employees International Union at a Sacramento, California, rally, to act like angry fools and get the union workers bad publicity from “lazy reporters”:
we are going to target the many TV cameras and reporters looking for comments from the members there (5) we will approach the cameras to make good pictures… signs under our shirts that say things like “screw the taxpayer!” and “you OWE me!” to be pulled out for the camera (timing is important because the signs will be taken away from us) (6) we will echo those slogans in angry sounding tones to the cameras and the reporters.
Williams later updated the post to report that tea partiers in multiple states, including Iowa, Colorado, and Massachusetts, were calling in to plan “their own creative ruses” for embarrasing the union demonstrators. “Several have also reminded me that we have a distinct advantage in that the SEIU primarily represents non-English speaking illegal aliens so we will be the ones whose comments will make air!!!!” he wrote:
Our goal is to make the gathering look as greedy and goonish as we know that it is, ding their credibility with the media and exploit the lazy reporters who just want dramatic shots and outrageous quotes for headlines. Even if it becomes known that we are plants the quotes and pictures will linger as defacto truth.
Thus far, demonstrations and counterdemonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin, have been peaceful, according to reporting by MJ‘s own Andy Kroll. Anti-union protesters, led by media mogul Andrew Breitbart, GOP presidential candidate Herman Cain, and “Joe the Plumber,” largely fizzled after a rally on Saturday. And the image of union workers that Williams seeks to portray seems to run uphill against the images of the employees’ leaders seen thus far. But as labor disputes spread to other states, it remains to be seen whether tactics like those proposed by Williams will be effective in embarassing the public employees…or embarrasing the tea party “plants” themselves.The industrious rodents can offer a range of benefits for California water supplies and habitats. But they’re still officially considered a pest.
On California’s central coast, a region that usually receives drenching rainfall or fog for most of the year, some forests are now as arid as a desert. Streams that once ran at least at a trickle through summer have vanished in the ongoing drought, and environmentalists and fishermen fear that local salmon will disappear if climate conditions don’t improve.
The landscape desperately needs rain.
It could also use beavers, according to ecologists who say the near eradication of Castor canadensis from parts of the West in the 19th century has magnified the effects of California’s worst dry spell in history.
“Beavers create shock absorption against drought,” says Brock Dolman, a scientist in Sonoma County who wants to repopulate coastal California with the big lumberjacking rodents.
Beavers are a hated pest and a nuisance in the eyes of many landowners and developers, and the animals are regularly killed with depredation permits and by fur trappers. However, they are also a keystone species whose participation in the ecosystem creates benefits for almost all other flora and fauna, Dolman says. This is because of the way beavers’ hydro-engineering work affects the movement of water.
“Beavers aren’t actually creating more water, but they are altering how it flows, which creates benefits through the ecosystem,” says Michael Pollock, an ecosystems analyst and beaver specialist at the National Marine Fisheries Service Northwest Science Center.
A beaver snacks on a leaf in front of its pond on Tolucay Creek in Napa, Calif., on Oct. 4, 2015. (Rusty Cohn)
By gnawing down trees and building dams, beavers create small reservoirs. What follows, scientists say, is a series of trickle-down benefits: The water that might otherwise have raced downstream to the sea, tearing apart creek gullies and washing away fish, instead gets holed up for months behind the jumbles of twigs and branches. In this cool, calm water, fish — like juvenile salmon — thrive.
Meanwhile, the water percolates slowly into the ground, recharging near-surface aquifers and keeping soils hydrated through the dry season. Entire streamside meadows, Dolman says, may remain green all summer if beavers are at work nearby. Downstream of a beaver pond, some of the percolated water may eventually resurface, helping keep small streams flowing and fish alive.
Dolman, co-founder of the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center in Sonoma County, says this water banking process could even, in theory, partially offset the worrying shrinkage of mountain snowpack, historically California’s most important water source.
Dolman and his colleague Kate Lundquist, who are leading their organization’s “Bring Back the Beaver Campaign,” would like reintroduction of beavers from other regions to begin now as a measure for restoring salmon populations and building general drought resilience into the landscape.
In Oregon, something along these lines is happening. Here, a newly proposed Coho recovery plan would make it illegal to kill or harm beavers within the geographical range of the imperiled fish.
But in California, there is a problem: Government biologists aren’t entirely sold on the virtues of beavers. Kevin Shaffer, a fisheries biologist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, believes that beavers can have benefits for a watershed that is temporarily deprived of rainfall. Eventually, though, even beavers cannot cancel out the effects of long-term drought or climate change.
“As the drought gets worse, their ponds will dry up and the animals will just move somewhere else,” he says. “They won’t stay because there is no more water.”
Shaffer adds that introducing beavers into an environment that has been seriously stressed by drought may benefit nothing — not fish, not plant life and not the beavers themselves.
Releasing beavers can also create conflicts with people, especially in heavily populated watersheds like the Russian River, just north of San Francisco.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife classifies beavers as a “nuisance” species. That’s because, Shaffer explains, the animals’ activity can have direct negative impacts on people. Dams can inundate properties, and falling trees could potentially land in roadways.
In spite of agency uncertainty, the benefits of beavers on a landscape are considered fact by scientists in California’s North Coast region. Sarah Beesley, a fisheries biologist with the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Program, has been running a habitat restoration effort on the lower Klamath River system, where a small beaver population currently resides. Her goal is to increase the presence of year-round water, especially in slow-moving wetlands, by building stick dams that closely mimic those built by beavers. In the future, her project hopes to reintroduce beavers themselves to streams that the animals don’t frequent.
In several stream systems in the region, says Beesley, the only places where salmon — especially endangered Coho — have survived after four years of below-average rainfall are beaver ponds.
“Wetland features, whether built by people or by beavers, are definitely what’s getting the salmon here through the drought,” says Beesley.
Beavers still live in the Klamath drainage system. They also occur, among other places, in the Central Valley, near the Mexican border and in parts of the Sierra Nevada.
A beaver eats the bark off a twig at its pond on Tulocay Creek in Napa, Calif. on May 12, 2014. (Rusty Cohn)
However, there is ongoing debate about where beavers historically lived — a debate that could hinder progress in any reintroduction campaign.
Dolman and Lundquist contributed to a report published in 2013 in the journal California Fish and Game that revealed evidence of beavers having inhabited regions of coastal California where they don’t live today. The evidence included beaver remains and accounts from early explorers. Similar literature has been produced making the case that beavers lived throughout the Sierra Nevada. As a prelude to reintroducing the animals, they hope to establish as fact that beavers once played key ecological roles in many watersheds.
Beaver reintroduction has seen success in Washington, where the Methow Conservancy has identified beavers as a valuable tool for restoring damaged watersheds. The organization has participated in relocating more than 300 beavers into the headwaters of the Methow River system, which feeds the Columbia River.
Heide Andersen, stewardship director at the conservancy, believes the ongoing decline of salmon on the West Coast began partly as a result of losing beavers.
“Beavers impact almost every aspect of the watershed,” says Andersen. “They lower stream temperatures, retain sediment, create refuge for fish, and create groundwater percolation that reappears downstream later in the year. When beavers disappeared, streams became channelized, we lost our flows earlier in the summer, and temperatures went up.”
While rain is sorely needed throughout California, the absence of beaver infrastructure could make the landscape less able to rebound should a more generous hydrological period resume. Dolman explains that, without woody debris in the creek gullies to slow water down, the land has less opportunity to soak it up when rain does fall. The result is raging floods in the winter and, once summer comes, a watershed that rapidly goes dry again.
“Losing beavers is a double whammy for a watershed,” Dolman explains. “You get exacerbated flooding, erosion and sediment, and reduced groundwater recharge, in the winter. Then, in the summer, you have land that dries up faster because you didn’t get that winter recharge. We’ve created a landscape much less resilient to drought.”
Alastair Bland is a freelance writer based in San Francisco. He can be reached at allybland79@gmail.com or via Twitter at @allybland.
Top image: A beaver adds a stick to its lodge on Tolucay Creek in Napa, Calif., on July 23, 2015. ( Rusty Cohn)Remember Walmart’s very own HDMI streaming stick, which I spotted in the FCC’s online database two months ago? Turns out Walmart already started selling it for just $24.95, and is now getting ready to make it more widely available.
Walmart’s Vudu video streaming service just added a dedicated section for the Vudu Spark, as the streaming stick is called, to its website that includes lots of details about the device. Vudu’s website states that the is “available only at Walmart.com and select Walmart locations.” I wasn’t able to find it on Walmart’s website just yet, but I would expect it to make an appearance shortly. A Walmart spokesperson told me that the company actually started selling it “in about 2400 Walmart stores” last month already.
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Here are a few more details about the Spark, straight from Vudu.com: It’s a HDMI streaming stick that is controlled with a dedicated remote control and powered via USB. It looks like Walmart is only putting a USB cable but no power adapter in the box, so Spark owners will either have to use their TV’s USB port to power the device, or supply their own adapter. Connectivity is provided via 802.11 b/g/n 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, and it supports video resolutions of up to 1080p, and 7.1 surround sound.
As I predicted back in November, Vudu Spark is very much a one-trick pony. The user manual reveals that it only comes with Vudu’s app preloaded, and there is no mention of any way to load any additional apps. In fact, Vudu’s app launches automatically as soon as the device successfully connects to a Wifi network.
I’m honestly not sure how big of a market there is for a single-purpose streaming stick |
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A fool and his head are soon parted.
The wind does not respect a fool. Klingon (CSUR): tlhIngan Hol: qoH vuvbe' SuS Kahless, Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Rightful Heir" Klingon language source: The Klingon Way, Marc Okrand
The wind does not respect a fool.
Destroying an Empire to win a war is no victory. And ending a battle to save an Empire is no defeat. Klingon (CSUR): tlhIngan Hol: noH QapmeH wo' Qaw'lu'chugh yay chavbe'lu', 'ej wo' choqmeH may' DoHlu'chugh lujbe'lu' Literal translation: Victory is not achieved if an Empire is destroyed in order to win a war, and it is not failure if a battle is backed away from in order to preserve an Empire Kahless (quoted), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Way of the Warrior" Klingon language source: The Klingon Way, Marc Okrand
Destroying an Empire to win a war is no victory. And ending a battle to save an Empire is no defeat.
A leader is judged not by the length of his reign but by the decisions he makes. Kahless (quoted), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, " Tacking into the Wind"
A leader is judged not by the length of his reign but by the decisions he makes.
Great men do not seek power; it is thrust upon them. Kahless (quoted), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, " Tacking into the Wind"
Great men do not seek power; it is thrust upon them.
If you cannot control yourself, you cannot command others Klingon (CSUR): tlhIngan Hol: bISeH'eghlaH'be'chugh latlh Dara'laH'be' Literal translation: If you cannot control yourself, you cannot command others. Klingon Honor Guard manual, page 16 Klingon language source: Unknown
If you cannot control yourself, you cannot command others
Death is an experience best shared. Klingon (CSUR): tlhIngan Hol: Heghlu'DI' mobbe'lu'chugh QaQpu' Hegh wanI' Literal translation: When someone dies not alone the death event is good. Klingon Honor Guard manual, page 29 Klingon language source: The Klingon Way, Marc Okrand
Death is an experience best shared.
Pity the warrior who slays all his foes. Klingon (CSUR): tlhIngan Hol: Hoch jaghpu'Daj HoHbogh SuvwI' yIvup Literal translation: Pity the warrior that kills all his enemies! Klingon Honor Guard manual, page 39
Pity the warrior who slays all his foes.
A sharp knife is nothing without a sharp eye. Klingon (CSUR): tlhIngan Hol: leghlaHchu'be'chugh mIn lo'laHbe' taj jej Literal translation: A sharp knife is useless if the eye is unable to clearly see. Klingon Honor Guard manual, page 47 Klingon language source: The Klingon Way, Marc Okrand
A sharp knife is nothing without a sharp eye.
Brute strength is not the most important asset in a fight. Klingon (CSUR): tlhIngan Hol: Suvlu'taHvIS yapbe' HoS neH Literal translation: While fighting, only power is not enough. Klingon Honor Guard manual, page 55 Klingon language source: The Klingon Way, Marc Okrand
Brute strength is not the most important asset in a fight.
Yet if my line should die,
It dies with its teeth in the enemy's throat,
It dies with its name on the enemy's tongue.
For just as mere life is not victory,
Mere death is not defeat;
And in the next world I shall kill the foe a thousand times,
Laughing,
Undefeated. A Klingon ritualistic song The Hand of Kahless: The Final Reflection and Kahless By John M. Ford, Michael Jan Friedman
Yet if my line should die, It dies with its teeth in the enemy's throat, It dies with its name on the enemy's tongue. For just as mere life is not victory, Mere death is not defeat; And in the next world I shall kill the foe a thousand times, Laughing, Undefeated.
If winning is not important, why keep score? Klingon (CSUR): tlhIngan Hol: potlhbe’chugh yay qatlh pe’’eghlu’. ( The Klingon way, p.135) Worf, Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 1, episode 15 11001001
If winning is not important, why keep score?
Own the day. Klingon tlhIngan Hol: jaj vIghaj Ensign Lyndsay Ballard's favourite Klingon battle cry. Star Trek Voyager: Season 6, episode 18, Ashes To Ashes
Peace may cost less than war, or infinitely more, for war cannot cost more than one's own life. The Final Reflection, John M. Ford
References [ edit ]
Appendix:Klingon in Look upin Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Topic:Klingon At Wikiversity, you can learn about:Photo: Disney
Now that Disney’s troubled movie studio is under new management, our spies tells us that, curiously, one of the first properties to be developed for a feature film is a reboot of 1991’s thirties-set adventure film, The Rocketeer.
We say ‘curiously’ because while the property was actually a flop at the time, its similarity to the current Disney-Marvel cash cow Iron Man is more than a little striking: In it, a racing pilot named Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) discovers a rocket-pack prototype in his stunt plane, hidden there by the gangsters who stole it from Howard Hughes; Secord tries it out, and, like Tony Stark, quickly discovers that a) flying without a plane is SO cool, and b) you gotta fight the bad guys (including Timothy Dalton, who two years prior had starred as James Bond for the second time) and save the girl (a luminous Jennifer Connelly).
While both properties are based on comic books, Iron Man actually arrived on the scene first: The Rocketeer was first published in 1982 by tiny (and now, sadly, defunct) Pacific Comics, and was conceived by artist Dave Stevens as an homage to the serial action heroes of the thirties. By the time Disney released The Rocketeer in 1991, Pacific had already been liquidated for half a decade. Stevens lost a battle with leukemia in March 2008 – just two months before Marvel’s adaptation of Iron Man was released.
We’re told the studio will soon be meeting with various writers to come up with a take. But its reappearance at Disney now, of course, begs the question: Why? What is new studio chief Alan Horn up to? It could be an early sign that the former Warner Bros. chief doesn’t just view his new job at Disney Studios as that of a mere portfolio manager, content to make sure acquisitions like Marvel, The Muppets, and Pixar, which keep churning out their own properties as Disney’s brand withers. That would be good news, indeed.
We’ll keep you updated as we hear more.It’s been long claimed that Brexit is against the wishes of most Scots, but in Scotland the Remain vote has been slashed by 13 per cent in just two months.
Political figures have increasingly warned if Britain votes to leave the European Union (EU) a break-up of the United Kingdom is all but guaranteed. A majority of Scots still back Remain, with figures in April showing 66 per cent of voters in Scotland wanting to stay in the EU, while 29 per cent favouring a Leave vote.
The latest Ipsos Mori poll for STV, of 1,000 adults carried out between June 6 and 12, found that now 53 per cent of respondents support remaining in the EU against 32 per cent backing Brexit – a 13 per cent drop in support for Remain.
Scottish Vote Leave director, Tom Harris, said: “This poll shows that David Cameron’s scare strategy isn’t working in Scotland.
“Scotland has everything to gain from leaving the EU, we would have more powers for the Scottish Parliament, we would have more money to spend on our public services and we would finally have control over our borders.
“The Scottish political class have taken Scottish voters for granted in this referendum, we’re confident that our positive vision for a stronger Scotland outside the EU will shock the political elite on polling day.”
The plunge in support for Remain comes as SNP MP Alex Salmond said that Brexit would lead to a second Scottish independence referendum.
Director at Ipsos Mori Scotland, Mark Diffley, said: “It has been apparent from polling for a long time that Scots are more likely to back continued UK membership of the EU than voters in other parts of the UK, especially in England.
“Although the referendum is UK-wide, the vote in Scotland will be viewed with interest for two reasons.
“Firstly, it may be pivotal in deciding the outcome at a UK level while secondly there may be implications for a second independence referendum in the event of a Brexit when Scots have backed continued membership.”
Despite Mr. Salmond’s claims, in the event that Britain leaves the EU, Scots would still vote to stay in the UK. A poll in May found that in a scenario in which Scotland voted to remain but the UK as a whole backed leave, just 38 per cent said they would back a Yes vote in an independence referendum. Forty-eight per cent said they would vote No, and 14 per cent responded with “don’t know”.
When removing uncertain respondents, the results look very similar to those in Scotland’s 2014 independence referendum — 44 per cent would vote Yes and 56 per cent would vote No.AFTER the flood, I bought some metal shelving that, when assembled, was too big for the storeroom door.
Blokes who prowl the aisles of Bunnings like starstruck kids on Hollywood Boulevard do that sort of thing and wear the scorn of their partners and children.
However, when it comes to real incompetence, I dips me lid to the geniuses who bought for the army $40 million worth of landing craft that didn't fit the navy's amphibious ships.
This is your taxes at work.
At 25.4m long, the boats were not exactly runabouts and they weren't battleships, but you might have thought somebody would have run a tape measure over them before signing on the dotted line.
In the end, size didn't matter because they developed cracks during testing in 2007 and were quietly tied up and left to rot.
And, anyway, the amphibious ships for which they were ordered were rust buckets bought by some uniformed rube or Defence sucker and have been scrapped, which seems a neat way to rule off this page in the ledger of incompetence.
However, it is a thick ledger with entries going back so far it is impossible to quantify the total cost of this grotesque system of procurement.
It spans successive governments, suggesting that a solution is slipping beyond the reach of any political party or minister.
An electronic library search linking "Defence" with "incompetence" or "blunder" in the past 10 years reaps a rich harvest.
The latest Defence Minister to drink from the poisoned chalice is Stephen Smith, who had the job of officially deep-sixing the too-wide and overweight landing craft.
He reportedly also has his eye on the $3.8 billion order for 46 helicopters to replace the army's Black Hawk and the navy's Sea King fleets.
To put it in perspective, this is about double the sum to be raised by the Federal Government's flood levy, which is causing so much angst among political opportunists and tightwads.
Other troubled programs include the Collins class submarine sustainment project, ongoing glitches with the RAAF's Wedgetail Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft and its multi-role tanker transport.
Of 18 Defence "projects of concern" listed since 2008, seven have been removed "due to remediation" and two have been cancelled.
This is a record of fiscal and managerial idiocy that makes Building the Education Revolution clangers seem like masterpieces of planning and execution. You have to wonder whether Defence exists in our world or in some parallel universe of bottomless budgets and limitless stupidity.
Given the Federal Government last year rejected a Finance Department suggestion that we abandon a commitment to 3 per cent a year growth in the Defence budget for the next 20 years, it is reasonable to wonder if we are throwing good money after bad.
What other department would expect to have serial incompetence rewarded with endless generosity?
Little wonder Smith and Defence Materiel Minister Jason Clare coyly referred to "serious institutional problems" within Defence.
That's a bit like saying there are serious noise problems at the State of Origin.
"A key priority for Defence," said Smith, "will be to put in place a better accountability mechanism, better fiscal discipline internally within Defence.
"In the past there has been too much of an attitude or a culture that, irrespective of the cost, irrespective of the outcome, a Defence project was somehow immune from rigour."
It's a familiar tune that has been whistled by successive defence ministers as they have stumbled through the cloying fog of bureaucratic flim-flam.
The problem is we are suffering from incompetence fatigue. About the only thing that would surprise us would be if a Defence project came in on time, on cost and did the job.
We are so bedazzled by the figures involved that they take on an air of unreality.
And when it comes to assessing if weapons, machinery and assets do the job, we have nothing but the word of Defence or the top brass.
Those in the field often have a very different definition of success. (Heat-of-the-moment opinions about the suitability and reliability of army pumps during the flood crisis might surprise those who ordered them.)
Some bungles come to light only in the most spectacularly simple circumstances, such as when boats don't fit or helicopters don't fly.
Tragically, other failures might be revealed in blood.
Smith and Clare have declared a touching faith in Defence and the people who run it. You might wonder why, given that it is their political necks on the chopping block.
When it comes to the ongoing joke about Defence incompetence, it's time to remember the immortal line: "Stop laughing, this is serious."
sweetwords@ozemail.com.au
Originally published as Defence blunders beyond a jokeOwn a Set of Bookends Made with Lumber from Ray Bradbury's House
Sold Out! If you subscribe to our Velvet Crowbar e-letter, you may remember that a few months ago we announced an upcoming run of a limited number of bookends, manufactured from the lumber salvaged from the house of famous author, Ray Bradbury.
Each bookend set is branded with a series number and the icon "451 F," to commemorate Bradbury’s best-seller, Fahrenheit 451. Sets are accompanied by a thank-you letter from The ReUse People (TRP), the company responsible for salvaging the material, and a certificate of authenticity signed by Alexandra Bradbury, the late author’s daughter, and TRP President Ted Reiff.
Each set is $88.50, which includes shipping and handling. Sales tax will be added for California residents during checkout.
A portion of the sale proceeds will be donated to the Center for Ray Bradbury Studies at Indiana University to help fund the re-creation of Bradbury’s home office, a major milestone in the Center's ongoing efforts to preserve his works and legacy.
Only 451 sets have been created, so don’t wait — order soon.
**Update: These bookends are now completely sold out.**I wish I would have spent the extra money for the newer model. My main issue is that the motion will pick up cars driving by on the street 20 yards away, but hardly ever get people walking on the sidewalk just feet from my door, and sometimes I will even get up to the second step of my doorstep only a couple feet from the thing and do a dance and it literally wont get it till I am within a foot of the doorbell.
These issues are intermittent and that's the annoying thing. At one point I had it dialed in to not get the cars on the parking lot, but then it would only ever get people if they were literally knocking on the door already, and I don't mean the delay, I mean you could stand there for as long as you want, but till you are right up near the door it wont sense you. Then I dialed it out and eliminated the whole middle section, and that helped with the cars. but because the leftover motion zone was so limited, it would only capture people once they were already past my door. (I live in a townhome, and there is a main walk about 7 feet from my front door).
The motion response time, and even the doorbell ring time is so delayed that I will almost always get just the back of people as they go away, even watching the videos after. I know part of it is that my situation isn't perfect for this, being that it only takes a couple seconds to be out of vew of my door and then knocking on it, but still I wish that at least the time from motion to recording was faster, cause then I could at least watch the after videos to see what happened.
Like mentioned before, the main thing that bugs me, is I have the motion settings set to only about 10 feet, but they wont get the sidewalk 7 feet away, and only get the road 20-30 yards away every time.
My other issue is that this thing is massive. I suppose that may be helpful as a deterrent, but still its a bit of an eyesore up on my porch.
This is still a pretty good product, and I feel safer having it on my door, but I wish I would have just spent the extra money fro the upgraded model.Taylor Swift arrives at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards at Staples Center on Feb. 8, 2015 in Los Angeles.
A former radio DJ who was ordered to pay a symbolic $1 to Taylor Swift for groping her at a photo op says he mailed her a Sacagawea coin last week.
David Mueller provided a letter to The Associated Press showing the payment was sent Nov. 28. Mueller previously told the AP he intended the coin featuring a prominent Native American woman as a final jab at the singer in a case her side called a win for all women.
Swift was among the "Silence Breakers" named as Time magazine's person of the year. In a story published Wednesday, she said she hadn't received the dollar.
Mueller had sued Swift claiming she falsely accused him of groping her and sought up to $3 million. A federal jury in Denver ruled for Swift.I made tiny gingerbread houses that are meant to be perched on the edge of a mug of hot chocolate.
I had been thinking about those sugar cubes that hook on the rim of a teacup earlier this month, and I was also thinking about 3-D cookies and how they fit together and figured it would be pretty neat to make cookies that hang on the edge of a mug. I thought I was being so brilliant but it only took a few seconds to discover that a flat cookie on the edge of a mug has already been done. So I started wondering what else I could do. At the time I was making a bunch of gingerbread recipes trying to find one that would hold up for my partridge in a pear tree cookie, so a gingerbread house was on my mind.
I made a few versions to figure out how to make one that wasn’t so top heavy that it would flip off the mug, and how small I could get away with and still fit on both large and small cups. I generally followed the size of my The Mini Gingerbread House Kit (though, those pieces don’t fit together as nicely as I’d have liked).
I’ve made a PDF pattern of gingerbread house pieces which you can open or download right here. My only instruction is that you should make sure that the wall pieces are to be sandwiched on the inside of the door pieces, that way the roof fits on properly. I included two door pieces you can choose from, one at 3/8ths inch wide and one at 1/2 inch wide. I found that a 3/8ths inch door, or slot, fits most mugs but the 1/2 can be used for your really big and heavy mugs. I traced the pieces onto this template page at 9:54 in the evening, please forgive the sloppiness but I’m getting tired, let’s just call the untidy lines charming.
I used the Gingerbread Snowflake and the Royal Icing recipes from marthastewart.com.
I rolled it out onto a sheet of tin foil at 1/8th inch thick. I skipped a silicone mat because I use a paring knife for the corner details and didn’t want to accidentally cut down to the layers of glass fibers, and after some trial I found that parchment paper will warp after being chilled and then stuck in an oven which can distort some shapes.
I used a dull sewing pattern roller (like a small pizza cutter) to go around most sides. You can do all of one side than turn the entire sheet of tin foil 90 degrees to do all of the next side, this makes the process go a bit faster. Try to fit all the pieces for each individual house in the same batch, I found my batches browned differently from each other. Lift the excess dough up from the tin foil, not moving your cut out shapes at all, this will help them keep their shape. Then slide the tin foil sheet onto a cookie sheet and put both in the freezer for about 15 minutes, you want the dough really well chilled before baking.
I used a (well cleaned) flat head screwdriver to get in the detail around the doors, then a paring knife to make sure the corners are cut cleanly.
Here are some tips, most of these are in the recipe but I don’t want you to overlook them:
After making it divide the dough into thirds (I made half a recipe) wrap in plastic wrap and chill in the fridge for at least an hour, preferably overnight. Make the royal icing while it’s chilling, you’ll need it before you make all the gingerbread you are planning on.
Roll the dough out to 1/8th of an inch. It seems impossibly thin but you be cutting the shapes and pulling the excess dough from around them so your pieces won’t be too disturbed. Feel free to nudge your shapes back into squares before chilling them again.
Preheat the oven, roll the dough out on tin foil, cut your shapes and lift off the excess dough, slide the tin foil onto your cookie sheet, now put the cookie sheet into the freezer for at least 15 minutes before baking. This will keep the gingerbread from spreading too much.
Make a single test house with your chosen door width. This sounds like a pita, and it will be, but it will be far less trouble than the frustration of finding none of your finished houses fit on mugs. Knowing now that you need to cut a wider door is worth it.
I found that dough chilled for only an hour puffed up quite a bit, but didn’t necessarily spread if the cut out shapes were chilled in the freezer. Dough that had been in the fridge overnight, or even the second day (it’ll keep for a few days) puffed up quite a bit less, perhaps because the baking powder had lost it’s mojo by this time?
If you suspect your intended mugs are thicker and sturdier than usual grab some cardstock or a magazine insert and cut a few different slots — 1/4, 3/8 and 1/2 inch wide, about two inches deep (or tall). The one that slides easily onto the edge of you mug and even has a little wiggle room is the width you want for your door.
If your gingerbread should spread and the doors look too narrow to you, you can trim them when the gingerbread is just out of the oven before it sets and cools too much. I suggest a paring knife and trimming just a bit from either side of the door.
I decided to only decorate the roofs for now. I might make these again next year and get more detailed with the decorations. I used a variety of sugars and sprinkles. One note, I discovered that candy cane dust will stick together so well that it will not show any piping detail beneath it. I liked the way regular sanding sugar made the roof sparkle a bit, though I couldn’t capture the cuteness in my pictures.
Don’t fill your mug of hot chocolate too full, you don’t want the bottom of your gingerbread house to get soggy.
Can you tell the crushed candy cane one was my favorite?
I would be these would be fantastic made out of sugar cookie or shortbread dough. You could certainly leave them undecorated, or perhaps press sanding sugar into the roof pieces before baking. On the other hand I’m curious to see what one would look like covered in pieces of tiny candies. I’m also planning on making house-shaped marshmallows that will fit on the edge of the mug.
update: I made a few variations including a chimney and a version made out of sugar cookie dough which you might be interested in.Few brands have specialized only in sport utility vehicles since their start. In fact, just two immediately come to mind: Jeep and Land Rover. The latter has steadily moved upscale with its product lineup and now offers many models near or past the six-figure mark, but the former still proudly stands as the 'everyman' SUV brand. Even the most-expensive Jeep, the Grand Cherokee SRT8 comes nowhere near $100,000 -- a fully-optioned one runs around $65,000 -- and most Jeeps can be had for less than $30,000 if you're easy on the options list.
To highlight its two best-selling models and their capability, Jeep invited a handful of journalists to southwestern Colorado to put their products to the test on rugged trails amid the dramatic scenery of the Rocky Mountains. Our first night was spent in the town of Durango. Like many towns in the American west, Durango is an interesting confluence of traditional and contemporary. Among the plentiful cowboy hats and pickups there is a nearly equal number of mountain bikes, organic eateries, and Subaru Outbacks.
Off the Trails, On the Rails
The first part of the journey took place not on off-road trails, but on board an antique coal-fired steam engine train. Although quaint and nostalgic, riding it gives you a good idea why diesel locomotives became the industry standard starting in the 1930s. We were specifically warned to wear protective eyewear when leaning out the side of the cars for photography because it was likely that we'd get a faceful of ash from the coal furnace exhaust.
The line we were on runs from Durango to Silverton and is of the few remaining narrow-gauge lines in the U.S. Dating back to 1882, the line runs alongside the Animas River for most of the route and offers views you won't see by car.
Give Me Comfort
Once we arrived in Silverton, the true 'Jeep Experience' began. I ran into one of the few other Americans on the trip, Autoweek's Mark Vaughn. Seeing the gray skies overhead and the rumbling of thunder, Mark and I quickly decided on the comfortably enclosed Grand Cherokee Limited while others were taking the tops off Wranglers. We watched in amusement as our fellow travelers quickly scrambled to re-attach the roofs on the Wranglers as the rain started to get more intense. We did not regret our decision, either from a comfort or capability standpoint, as the deceptively refined-looking Grand proved its mettle on the trail. Our only shared critique was a want for slightly more-aggressive rubber, as we had some tire slippage where the more aggressively treaded Wranglers climbed upward with less drama.
As it turned out, Jeep was a step ahead of us, having brought the 'Trailhawk' Grand Cherokee concept to the event. The Trailhawk, among other things, is fitted with beefier tires than the standard-issue all-season rubber on our Limited. Although they didn't give a specific date, they did say a model inspired by the Trailhawk would be headed to Jeep showrooms soon. There were also hints that it would be available with all powertrain options, including, presumably, the upcoming EcoDiesel.
Having just been to Moab, Utah about a month earlier, and having experienced 90 degree temperatures there, I naively assumed that weather in nearby southwestern Colorado would be similar. Had I done my research, I would have discovered the average altitude for most of our trip would be about double or triple that of Moab. Going on my poorly-informed assumption, I packed almost all shorts and T-shirts, a decision I soon regretted. Thankfully, through the hospitality of one of the other journalists, I was able to avoid too much undue discomfort.
Unexpected Refinement
The next morning, we headed out of our camp to go to some of the highest-elevation trails of the trip. My driving partner once again was Vaughn and, in the interest of journalistic objectivity and thoroughness, we thought it only fair that we ride in a Wrangler for the second day. Having been coddled by the refinement and comfort of the Grand Cherokee the day before, we were both expecting a decidedly cruder and more agricultural experience with the Wrangler.
To the surprise of both of us, the Wrangler was quite refined and stayed surprisingly squeak- and rattle-free on the trail. Even its aggressive-looking BFGoodrich tires were surprisingly quiet on the on-road portions of the route. My only wish is that Vaughn would have activated the Rubicon's anti-roll bar disconnect on the rocky first half of our ride, as there was quite a bit of side-to-side head tossing on the first leg. The second part of the drive down from the peak of Red Mountain III was less turbulent, partly because I had discovered the button to activate that feature and partly because as the remainder of the trail was less rugged.
In a stark contrast to the previous night's accommodations, we were put up for our last night at the posh Hotel Madeline in Telluride, though most of the group was most excited about a hot shower. There were few takers for the outdoor shower at our chilly and damp camp the night before.
A Glimpse of the Future?
The highlight of that afternoon was an up-close look -- and a too-brief drive -- of some of Jeep's latest concept vehicles. We were allowed behind the wheel of all but the unique Mighty FC concept. Head of Jeep Design Mark Allen chauffeured awaiting scribes on a brief ride in the high-riding concept, which entailed placing one foot in the center of the front wheel hub, the other on top of the tire, and grabbing the B-pillar with your left hand. By the time I was able to get into the vehicle, technical issues had prevented the Mighty FC from shifting out of first gear, so I was treated to the slow-speed version of the demo. It was still a unique experience. I felt like I was riding in a cabover commercial truck or Volkswagen van, but about three feet higher off the ground.
My personal favorite was the Wrangler Traildozer, a short-wheelbase Wrangler with its nose stuffed with 6.4 liters and 470 hp of Hemi fury. With a short loop of less than half a mile, there were no off-road antics nor much of an opportunity for pedal-to-the-metal wide open sprints, but the combination along with a six-speed manual provided an entertaining experience. It was evocative of an early Ford Bronco V-8, albeit one with about three times the horsepower. With the vehicle consisting of mostly off-the-shelf parts, this one seems like a no brainer to me. Then again, I don't have to deal with the likes of the EPA, DOT, and CARB.
Thanks to record sales, 2012 is shaping up to be Jeep's best year in its history. As the brand's two best-selling models, the Wrangler and Grand Cherokee are largely responsible for that success. By necessity, Jeep is diversifying away from being 'just' the Wrangler brand, but even its humbler, more street-oriented models are capable of at least some level of off-road driving. Even the entry-level Compass, which once was conspicuously bare of the 'Trail Rated' badge, earned it back thanks to some mid-cycle updates. With solid support from CEO Sergio Marchionne and some new models just around the corner, Jeep is firmly positioned to maintain its status as the most capable and attainable brand of SUVs in the world.Rolling Stone magazine’s Matt Taibbi appeared on Democracy, Now! Thursday to talk about how Wall Street hedge funds are set on sacking the pension funds of public employees. Those funds are the “last great, unguarded piles of money in this country,” he said, and naturally the top tiers of the private sector are going to battle amongst themselves to see who can seize the most.
In his latest piece for Rolling Stone, Taibbi detailed how private companies are enriching themselves by bankrupting public workers’ retirements and savings in the name of “saving” them.
“I think everyone realizes that states are in fiscal crises or having trouble paying out their obligations to workers,” Taibbi told hosts Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales. “One of the reasons is that at least 14 states have not been making their annual required contributions to the pension fund for years and years and years. So essentially, they have been illegally borrowing from these pension funds, sometimes going back decades.”
Taibbi’s research found that in many cases, such as in the state of Rhode Island, the hedge funders brought in to reorganize the state governments are getting paid the exact amounts of money that are being cut from public pensions.
“So essentially it is a wealth transfer from teachers, cops, and firemen to billionaire hedge-funders,” he said. The billionaires are then taking the leftover funds and applying the same risk-centric strategies that sank the economy in 2008.
He went on to discuss the situation in Detroit, where the tea party governor has brought in a cabal of pro-privatization cronies as “emergency managers” who are in the process of dismantling the public pension program.
“Look, pension funds are sort of the last great big unguarded piles of money in this country and there are going to be all sorts of operators who trying to get their hands on that money,” he explained. The person who is benefitting is “not some worker who is making $19,000 who is really making out in this kind of corruption. It is the hedge fund who is making $50 and $60 million in fees managing state funds. That is the much more typical narrative.”
Watch the video, embedded below via Democracy, Now!:As US Vice President Mike Pence visited the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), one of the welcoming party, the Orion crew module, is fast taking shape ahead of its Exploration Mission- |
congressional districts, but on partisanship and unequal representation. The most recent Supreme Court ruling in a political redistricting case occurred in 2004, in Vieth v. Jubelirer.
What does research tell us about the relationship between gerrymandering and what Brookings Senior Fellow Thomas Mann has called “the hyper-partisanship that paralyzes our politics and governance”? And, what are the solutions?
The origin of gerrymandering
Gerrymandering first entered the American vernacular in 1812 when Massachusetts Governor Elbridge Gerry, a signer of both the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation (he refused to sign the U.S. Constitution), signed a redistricting bill into law that benefitted his party over the Federalists, who held a majority among voters in the Commonwealth. The response was resoundingly negative: “A new species of Monster, which appeared in Essex South District in Jan. 1812,” blared an anonymous broadside printed in The Boston Gazette on March 26, 1812. The drawing represented the Essex South state senatorial district for the Massachusetts legislature, which had been drawn to not only resemble a salamander, but also to benefit the Democratic-Republican party in the state. Although the practice of drawing legislative boundaries for political benefit existed in 18th century American politics, the origin of the term “gerrymander” made its debut in this article.
As it happened, Gerry was no longer governor when this broadside appeared, having lost his re-election bid to Federalist Caleb Strong. Gerry would go on to serve as James Madison’s vice president until his death in 1814.
How are districts drawn today?
According to a 2013 Harris Poll, 71 percent of Americans—conservatives, moderates, and liberals alike—believe that “those who stand to benefit from redrawing congressional districts should not have a say in how they are redrawn.”
But the reality is quite different. For purposes of drawing boundaries for the U.S. House of Representatives only (as opposed to state legislative districts, which have different procedures across the states) the procedures vary widely from state to state. Consider this:
37 state legislatures draw congressional boundaries 6 of these 37 legislatures have either advisory or backup commissions
4 states use an independent commission: Arizona, California, Idaho, and Washington
2 states use politician commissions: Hawaii and New Jersey
7 states have only one congressional district each, so do not draw boundaries for the U.S. House (but they do for their own state legislatures)
For the states where the legislature conducts redistricting, some plans are approved by a simple majority in each chamber; some require two-thirds majorities; and others require a joint resolution, which the governor cannot veto.
Independent commissions limit the participation of elected officials.
More detailed information about how districts are drawn, including for state legislatures, can be found here and here.
How does gerrymandering relate to political polarization?
Polarization in American politics is a well-studied phenomenon, and it has been rising over the past few decades. But does gerrymandering itself cause or contribute to this divide? Brookings scholars who study the matter agree that it is not the primary cause of polarization, though this conclusion doesn’t mean that redistricting reform isn’t necessary.
But the more salient problem, experts observe, is that Americans are sorting themselves politically, regardless of how congressional district boundaries are drawn. In her paper on increasing voter turnout in congressional primaries, Senior Fellow Elaine Kamarck, founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management at Brookings (CEPM), noted that:
The bigger problem with relying on gerrymandering reform to increase competition is that in recent years Americans seem to have “sorted themselves” into like-minded communities. … In recent years, red states have gotten redder, blue states bluer and the same holds for counties. Thus even in the unlikely event of across the board redistricting reform, the increase in competitive congressional districts may not be very big.
Similarly, University of Denver professor Seth Masket explained in a CEPM paper that “districts tend to polarize more between redistrictings than during them. That is, this is more a phenomenon of voters sorting themselves into more ideologically homogeneous districts than it is politicians drawing such districts.” He adds that “[redistricting reform’s] prospects for substantially reducing the partisanship of America’s politicians are modest at best.”
This is not a new conclusion. In 2010, Senior Fellows Thomas Mann and William Galston wrote that “because people increasingly prefer to live near others who share their cultural and political preferences, they are voting with their feet and sorting themselves geographically. … Many more states and counties are dominated by one-party supermajorities than in the past. Contrary to widespread belief, reducing the gerrymandering of congressional districts would make only a small dent in the problem.”
Kamarck and Galston note an additional problem related to congressional redistricting: the negative effect it has on moderate voters, and the subsequent increase this (and other factors) has on polarization. “Congressional districts,” they wrote, “are drawn in ways that make nearly all of them safe for one or another of the major political parties. Considered in tandem with low-turnout primaries, gerrymandering further diminishes the influence of moderates.”
To fix this problem, they advised that “states should take redistricting out of the hands of legislatures and entrust it to nonpartisan commissions—as some states, such as Iowa, already have.”
In a paper for Third Way, Galston and Kamarck elaborated on three reasons why American politics are so polarized: the current system for primaries; redistricting; and the congressional leadership system. Again, these “systemic structural problems … silence the voice of moderate voters.” But the clustering of Americans into like-minded communities, they argued, makes redistricting reform not the ultimate solution to the problem of polarization. “Given these trends,” they wrote, “there is clearly a limit to the number of competitive Congressional districts that could be created if redistricting were removed from the self-interested political process in state legislatures and gerrymandering reduced.”
What can, or should, be done about gerrymandering?
While scholars agree that gerrymandering is not the leading cause of political polarization, and that eliminating it would not necessarily increase legislative competitiveness, they agree that partisan redistricting can amplify partisan divides, and that efforts should be taken to increase transparency and decrease partisan influence in the redistricting process.
As Mann wrote in The National Voter, “Redistricting reform cannot by itself reverse these trends toward declining electoral competition, increasing ideological polarization between the parties, and smash-mouth partisan manipulation of the electoral rules of the game.” He continued that:
The country is evenly divided between the two parties. Most voters have sorted themselves into a party by their ideological views, and their decisions on where to reside have promoted a geographical segregation of like-minded citizens—conservatives to the exurbs, liberals to cities. Furthermore, partisan attachments powerfully shape political perceptions, beliefs and values, and incumbents enjoy advantages well beyond the way in which their districts are configured. All of these forces will continue to shape our politics no matter what initiatives are taken to improve the process. Redistricting reform is no panacea, but it is a start.
Independent redistricting commission
As previously noted, a handful of states use independent, non-partisan commissions to draw their congressional districts. In a 2015 Supreme Court decision (Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission), the court found that Arizona’s voters had the constitutional authority to achieve redistricting through an independent commission rather than by the state legislature. Mann called this decision “a model of constitutional reasoning and statutory interpretation,” one that “strengthens the legitimacy of representative democracy by reinforcing the essential link between republican government and popular sovereignty.”
Transparency and Public Participation
In 2010, scholars from Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute collaborated on promoting transparency in redistricting. Calling the drawing of electoral districts “among the most easily manipulated and least transparent systems in democratic governance,” the group laid out a set of transparency principles and recommendations for promoting public participation. “Increasing transparency can empower the public to shape the representation for their communities,” they argued, plus “promote public commentary and discussion about redistricting, inform legislators and redistricting authorities which district configurations their constituents and the public support, and educate the public about the electoral process.”
Crowd-sourced redistricting maps
Former Brookings experts Micah Altman and Michael McDonald have studied the use of crowd-sourced mapping to “improve political representation and detect a gerrymander.” Through their research on public redistricting in key states, they “discovered that members of the public are capable of creating legal redistricting plans that outperform those maps created by legislatures in a number of ways.” Altman and McDonald concluded that the tradeoff between improving competitiveness without threatening the majority-minority districts that gerrymandering often creates “is a tradeoff we should gladly accept.”
Mann and AEI’s Norm Ornstein (the two are co-authors of “It’s Even Worse than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism”) recounted how they judged student plans in Virginia using public mapping software. “The best student plans show that it is possible to create more legitimate and responsive districts—and that with the right tools, citizens anywhere can create better plans to choose their representatives than the representatives do to protect their own careers. While politicians may fight to keep the process closed, the tools are available to enable us to do better.”
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Author Fred Dews Managing Editor, New Digital Products Partisan gerrymandering is not the major source of our dysfunctional politics,” Mann wrote in the wake of the Arizona decision, “but it surely reinforces and exacerbates the tribal wars between the parties.”
Thus, on the question of whether gerrymandering is the primary driver of partisan polarization in American political institutions, especially the U.S. Congress, the answer is a qualified “no.” Other factors contribute to polarization, especially residential self-sorting by American voters, the primary process, and how congressional leaders are picked. But, the practice of gerrymandering does have, as Brookings scholars have observed, other pernicious effects, including diminishing transparency in how the political process works and giving legislators too much power over who their voters. These in turn contribute to falling trust in political institutions, and in an era in which public confidence in political institutions is at a crisis point, the continued practice of partisan congressional boundary drawing only reinforces that downward trend. As Mann wrote in Time magazine last year, “In an era in which partisanship determines the electoral choices of most voters and the behavior of elected representatives in Congress and state legislatures, it is essential that the collective will of the electorate be reflected in the partisan composition of legislatures. Yet this straightforward notion of partisan fairness is often undermined by partisan gerrymandering.”In the winter between the 2009 and 2010 seasons, Randy Wolf was the Milwaukee Brewers' prize pitching acquisition. The veteran lefty received nearly $30 million over three years, one of the biggest free-agent signees that off-season.
One winter later, the Brewers stoked the hot-stove league fires by trading for pitchers Shaun Marcum and Zack Greinke, huge deals that transformed a sagging starting rotation.
So, Wolf had to be jealous about being pushed from star attraction to a supporting role, right?
Hardly.
"As far as what spot I had in the rotation, it didn't matter," said Wolf, who began the season in the No. 4 slot. "The main thing was we acquired two solid, solid pitchers.
"I think Marcum really went under the radar. When he's healthy and he's in there, he does a great job. He was in a tough division and pitching in Toronto, where it's very hitter friendly. That's a tough division to pitch in.
"That's what was important, how much better the rotation would be."
Wolf, who struggled during the first half of the 2010 season before turning things around after the break (6-3, 2.67 ERA in final 13 starts), has been the Brewers' most consistent starter during the team's recent June swoon.
He pitched seven shutout innings in Chicago on June 13 in a game the Brewers eventually lost, 1-0, and shackled the potent Boston Red Sox for seven frames (nine hits, two runs) last Saturday in a 4-2 interleague victory at Fenway Park.
Over his last six starts, the 34-year-old Wolf is 2-0 with a 2.06 ERA, allowing only nine earned runs in 39 1/3 innings. Out of his 15 appearances, 10 have been quality starts (at least six innings, no more than three earned runs).
Overall, Wolf is 5-4 with a 3.15 ERA though the Brewers have not taken full advantage of his strong outings, going 8-7 when he pitches.
"The whole goal is to get better as the season goes on," said Wolf, whose next start comes Friday in the opener of an interleague series against surging Minnesota at Miller Park.
"That's my goal. The most important thing is keeping the work level consistent between starts so you know you'll be strong at the end of the year. If you have a hiccup start, get back the next start. Don't stray from your routine."
Wolf's routine has changed over the years, along with his repertoire. Major adjustments became necessary after July 1, 2005, when he underwent Tommy John reconstructive elbow surgery while pitching for the Philadelphia Phillies.
Wolf missed much of the 2006 season but regrouped to become an effective pitcher again, though his travels took him to Los Angeles to pitch for the Dodgers as well as San Diego, Houston and back to L.A.
"When they went in there, they found out the (elbow) ligament had calcified," Wolf said. "That means there was an injury there somewhere from before. Along the calcification was some fraying.
"It felt like every time I threw it was about to snap. And it really was about to snap. I think now I'm just a lot smarter with my workout routine."
Much to Wolf's delight, he actually picked up velocity on his fastball after the surgery. Never one to light up the radar guns, he suddenly could throw 90 mph and above, which never hurts.
But, beyond an improved "heater," Wolf looked for other ways to become an effective pitcher. Like many of his brethren in recent years, he decided to incorporate the "cut" fastball, otherwise known as a "cutter."
"I always battled with that pitch," Wolf said. "(Brewers pitching coach) Rick (Kranitz) really helped me out in spring training with a new grip. It took me awhile to feel comfortable to the point that it was second nature. It has really become one of my bigger pitches.
"I still throw more fastballs but I use the cutter more than any other off-speed pitch. It breaks harder and later now, which is what you want. My slider before, I battled to get it over 80 mph. Now, I can get it 84-85 mph, sometimes 86-87 mph.
"With a fastball that is averaging at 89 mph, that's a big pitch for me. Any pitch that you can make look like a fastball as close to the hitting zone as possible and then have it break late, that's a good pitch."
At the other end of the spectrum, Wolf mixes in a slow curveball in danger of being cited for loitering. He's been throwing it since 2001, when the Phillies went to Colorado and had trouble dealing with the slow curveball of Brian Bohanon.
"He wasn't trying to throw it too hard, just locating it," Wolf said. "When I threw a bullpen the next day, I played around with a nice, slow curveball. I just threw it nice and easy and tried to locate it down and away. I was able to put more spin on it so it's sharper but it's still slow.
"That became an effective breaking pitch for me. I think it helped my fastball a lot. When I locate my curveball, it makes things a lot easier."
As part of the National League's most improved starting rotation, Wolf is just trying to do his part. Despite an inconsistent offense that particularly struggles on the road for whatever reason, the Brewers have managed to stay at or near the top of the division because of their pitching.
"You don't win with offense. You just don't," he said. "You score a lot of runs with good offense, but you win with good defense and pitching. That's a cliché but it's true.
"It's hard to find a team in the playoffs or that wins a championship without good pitching. If it happens, it's a complete anomaly. I felt coming into this year we'd have a great chance with this starting rotation. We can go deep into games and allow the offense to score some runs.
"It's always going to be tough to run off a lot of wins if there are problems with the starting rotation. It's comforting for everybody when you know who's pitching day to day. That's huge when that's a constant."From Riverfront Times:
Jane Cunningham (R – West County) believes Missouri kids need to improve their work ethic so she’s sponsoring a bill (SB 222) that would repeal much of the state’s child labor laws.
According to the bill’s official summary, children under the age of 14 would no longer be barred from employment. They’d also be able to work all hours of the day, no longer need a work permit from their school and be able to work at motels and resorts so long as they’re given a place to lay their weary heads each night. Moreover, businesses that employ children would no longer be subject to inspections from the Division of Labor Standards.
In an interview yesterday with the St. Louis Beacon, Cunningham defended her legislation by nothing that her two sons — now adults — both held jobs as minors and are today better for it.
“My aim is to put back some common sense,” Cunningham told the Beacon. “We’re not doing students any favor by telling them, ‘You cannot work.’ ”
Still, the bill is under attack from the AFL-CIO and other labor groups, who believe there’s good reason that current law only allows children to work three hours on school days and no more than eight hours on non-school days.
“The Missouri legislature can always be counted on to come up with bizarre legislation, but Senate Bill 222 is the strangest we’ve see in awhile,” writes the Kansas City Star in an op/ed this morning.Can't get your children to eat their vegetables or pick up their toys? Try game theory strategies for parents. WSJ contributor Jennifer Wallace joins Lunch Break with Tanya Rivero with some tips and tricks. Photo: iStock/kolinko_tanya
The party is over, and you're down to the last bit of cake. All three of your children want it. If you're familiar with game theory, you might think of the classic strategy in which one person cuts the cake and the other chooses the slice. But how do you divide it three ways without anyone throwing a fit?
Game theory is, in essence, the science of strategic thinking—a way of making the best decision possible based on the way you expect other people to act. It was once the domain of Nobel Prize-winning economists and big thinkers...WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Once derided as a white elephant, the U.S. Marine Corps' tilt-rotor aircraft, the V-22 Osprey, is proving its mettle in Iraq, military officials said.
An Osprey refuels before a night mission last week in central Iraq.
The Osprey, which takes off and lands like a helicopter but flies like a plane, was designed to replace the Corps' aging and less-capable helicopter fleet.
But a series of accidents involving the planes left 30 people dead from 1991 to 2000, and critics said the Osprey never would be able to replace the Vietnam-era CH-46 Sea Knight, which was the Corps' airlift workhorse.
The military, which has ordered 360 of the aircraft, said the 10 deployed to Iraq are doing what they are supposed to do -- carrying troops faster, farther and safer than the copters can.
Last September, Marine Medium Tiltrotor Squadron 263 left for Iraq's western Anbar province on the first deployment of the V-22.
Since then, the planes have logged more than 2,000 flight hours, initially doing routine cargo and troop movements from base to base in an area about the size of South Carolina.
In December, commanders gave the planes a more risky mission called "aero-scout" in which a group of V-22s flies into a relatively unsecured location and drops off Marines for a search mission.
The planes sit on the ground until the Marines load up and then fly off to somewhere else for another mission.
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The Osprey's speed has been a lifesaver, too, squadron officials said.
For instance, they said two V-22s were dispatched to fly a more than 130-mile round trip in the remote western desert to pick up a wounded Marine and get him to a hospital. The planes were able to do so in an hour, something no helicopter in the Marine inventory could do, squadron officials said.
Commanders in Iraq have allowed little media coverage of the V-22s since their arrival, wanting to get crews used to their mission and to keep insurgents from targeting the planes for propaganda purposes. The planes have not come under direct fire, officials said.
Critics said the plane is lightly defended, with only one rear-mounted gun.
But Marines said the Osprey has enough power and speed to get out of a hostile zone faster than any helicopter, and the aircraft can fly higher, allowing it to be out of range of shoulder-fired missiles.
The Osprey seems to have become a favorite of commanders who need to get to places quickly, including Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq. Petraeus used one to fly around the country on Christmas Day to visit troops.
"Gen. Petraeus flew in the jump seat and was very impressed by the aircraft's capabilities," according to Col. Steve Boylan, a spokesman for the general.
"The rate of climb is exceptional, and it can fly about twice as fast as a Black Hawk [helicopter], without needing to refuel as frequently," Boylan said. "Beyond that, its automatic-hover capability for use in landing in very dusty conditions, even at night, is tremendous."
Petraeus chose the Osprey for that mission because it was the only aircraft in the inventory that could fly around the country without refueling and not rely on runways, Boylan said.
Despite glowing remarks from troops in Iraq, the planes have an overarching reliability problem, according to critics.
"The Marines will tell you it's a new plane, and all new aircraft have problems, but it's not a new plane; it's been around for a long time now," said Philip Coyle, former chief of the Pentagon's weapons testing division.
"It seems like every time one problem is fixed another one comes along, and I just don't think the program will be able to get over that."
Marines contend the planes have performed well, with six to eight aircraft out of 10 available at any one time.
No serious reports of mechanical problems have been reported with the planes in Iraq, according to Marine Corps officials in Washington, and a shortage of spare parts has been alleviated.
Critics such as Coyle said they aren't convinced the planes are the answer for the Marines.
"It has flown more than 2,000 hours in Iraq, but most of that has been carefully coordinated to minimize the risks," he said.
"The program is like a bad poker hand. They keep putting money into it when they should have spent it on a new helicopter system."
The Marine commands in Washington and Iraq said they do not let the critics faze them.
"As with any first-time deployment, new lessons are learned every day," one Marine deployed with the Osprey squadron said. E-mail to a friend
All About Bell Boeing V-22 Osprey • Iraq War • U.S. Marines ActivitiesAdoptions are up, euthanasia is down and the number of homeless pets in Canada's animal shelters is lower, according to a report by the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies.
Overall, there were more than 82,000 cats and 35,000 dogs taken into Canadian shelters in 2015, said a report released by the organization last week.
Barbara Cartwright, the CEO of the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, said the country's shelter system has taken a more proactive approach to reducing numbers of homeless cats and dogs.
"In the past it was reactive, taking the animals in as fast as you can and turn them out as fast as you can," Cartwright said.
The charity collected 2015 data by sending out surveys to 170 humane societies and Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals shelters across the country, and 89 of those responded.
Cartwright said this is a typical response rate. Usually 85 to 100 shelters report back each year.
"We are comfortable with year-over-year comparisons because it's around the same number of respondents every year," Cartwright said, adding they can correct for it by comparing rates.
But, the report said, the data represents "only a fraction of homeless companion animals in Canada."
It doesn't capture private shelters, rescue and foster groups and municipal animal shelters.
Still, it's the only comprehensive study of the country's animal shelter system, Cartwright said.
Situation improving for homeless cats
Things are slowly improving for the nation's homeless cats, according to the report.
"While the proportion of stray dogs remained the same, the proportion of cats taken in as stray has been declining in recent years," the report said.
The report cites "intake management" as one of the reasons for fewer cats in shelters.
"Rather than accepting any surrendered cat at any time, appointments are scheduled to take in surrendered cats when the shelter's capacity permits in," the report reads.
"It is now understood to be a better practice to allow healthy, unowned outdoor cats to remain in their home location where they are thriving."
While the proportion of stray dogs remained the same, the proportion of cats taken in as stray has been declining in recent years, the report said. (Getty Images)
And, the report said, more than 90 per cent of shelters say they don't allow an animal to leave its care without being spayed or neutered — more than 58,000 cats and dogs in 2015 — to help control the pet population.
Adoption rates are up with 48 per cent of dogs and 57 per cent of cats adopted in 2015 — the highest level observed for cats in the two decades the charity has been collecting data.
Shelters are transferring pets to other shelters and rescue organizations as a way to increase adoption.
And "there is an increasing trend in the proportion of stray cats who are reclaimed," the report said. "These observations inspire a sense of optimism that the message to provide identification for cats is reaching more of the public."
Fewer animals being killed at shelters
Euthanasia rates for cats were down: 21 per cent of cats taken in were destroyed in 2015, down from 27 per cent the year before and 54 per cent in 2008.
Cartwright said there is appears to be a correlation to limiting the number of cats taken in with euthanasia rates.
"We see high euthanasia rates when a whole bunch of cats get together in a shelter, they get stressed and get diseases and they end up being euthanized," she said.
Euthanasia rates for dogs increased slightly in 2015 from the year before to more than 10 per cent of dogs taken in.
Overall, 15,341 cats and 2,820 dogs were euthanized last year.
While the news is good, Cartwright said, much more needs to be done.
But cats can look to dogs for success.
"We definitely treat cats differently than dogs," Cartwright said. "They tend to go to the vet less, they are very rarely microchipped, collared or identified in some way so they can get back home — they roam at large and it takes a while for owners, in general, to look for cats, compared to dogs."
"We have a much looser ethic with cats and that needs to shift."As President Barack Obama begins his second term in office, China poses a major policy challenge to the United States largely because of the unpredictable trajectory of both China’s domestic transformation and foreign relations. While there has been much attention paid to China’s rapid economic rise and growing international clout, two other scenarios have been overlooked: domestic revolution and foreign war. While some might view these events as “black swans”—low probability, high-impact developments—the Obama administration should be proactive and think through its policies options should these events unfold.
There are many serious problems in China that could trigger a major crisis, including slowing economic growth, widespread social unrest, rampant official corruption, vicious elite infighting, and heightened nationalism in the wake of escalated tensions over territorial disputes with Japan and some Southeast Asian countries. Either event would be very disruptive, severely impairing global economic development and regional security in the Asia-Pacific; a combination of the two would constitute one of the most complicated foreign-policy challenges for President Obama’s second term.
There are two particularly undesirable outcomes. One is a situation in which the vast majority of the Chinese public becomes both anti–Communist Party leadership and anti-American. The other is a situation in which the new party boss, Xi Jinping, derives his popularity from a strong endorsement of Chinese militarism.
The scenario of abrupt bottom-up revolution occurring in China has recently generated much debate within that country. One of the most popular books in elite circles today is the Chinese translation of Alexis de Tocqueville’s 1856 classic The Old Regime and the Revolution. In speeches given after becoming party general secretary, Xi warned that the party could collapse if the leadership failed to seize the opportunity to reform and improve governance.
The new leadership is known for its unprecedented predominance of “princelings” in power—leaders who come from families of high-ranking officials. Four of the seven Politburo Standing Committee members, including Xi, are princelings. Many prominent party leaders and their families have used their political power to convert state assets into private wealth; this includes transfers to family relatives who live, work, or study in the United States and other Western countries. This situation is not only undermining elite cohesion and the factional balance of power, but is also generating cynicism among the Chinese public regarding any promises on the part of the leadership to tackle corruption. Furthermore, it may add ammunition to the sensational accusation that the United States provides harbor to corrupt Communist Party officials.
To avert this first scenario we should, while engaging with the Chinese leadership, more explicitly articulate to the Chinese people both the longstanding goodwill that the United States has toward China and America’s firm commitment to democracy, human rights, media freedom, and the rule of law, which we believe are fundamental to the long-term stability of any country.
If the first scenario of domestic revolution can be seen as a failure of the Xi leadership to adopt effective political reforms to prevent crisis, then the second scenario—that of China in war—may be considered one possible “successful” attempt by Xi to consolidate power. This does not necessarily mean that the Chinese leadership intends to distract domestic tensions with an international conflict; contemporary Chinese history shows that the practice of trying to distract the public from domestic problems by playing up foreign conflicts has often ended in regime change. Yet Xi may be cornered into taking a confrontational approach to foreign policy in order to deflect criticism of his own strong foreign connections.
Even more important, we need to pay attention to the emergence of militarism among some military officers. Chinese analysts have observed that these military princelings are interested in bolstering the military’s power in the upcoming Xi era. Such a move would have the potential to increase the risk of both military interference in domestic politics and military conflicts in foreign relations.
It is not in the U.S.’s interest to see China’s transition to a constitutional democracy proceed in a manner overwhelmingly destructive to China’s social stability or its peaceful relations with any of its neighboring countries, which would risk leading the United States into war. Clarifying to the Chinese public that the U.S. neither aims to contain China nor is oblivious to their national and historical sentiment would help reduce anxiety and possible hostility across the Pacific. Second, enhanced contact between U.S. and Chinese civilian and military policymakers can help us better understand the decision-making processes and domestic dynamics within China. It can also aid us in heading off a regional conflict. Finally, when done within a broader strategy with all our allies and neighbors in the region, it could reassure China that the United States is not only firmly committed to its regional security framework in the Asia-Pacific, but also genuinely interested in finding a broadly acceptable solution to the various disputes.The Sinai Tribal Union is pushing to play a pivotal role in the ongoing confrontations between the Egyptian armed forces and extremist groups in the Sinai Peninsula, especially after the Nov. 24 attack that targeted the al-Rawda mosque, near el-Arish, killing 311 civilians. The union issued several statements announcing its support for the armed forces and its willingness to participate in armed confrontations against the extremist groups in Sinai.
The union consists of the 24 tribes of Sinai and is headed by Sheikh Ibrahim al-Argani. In an interview with Al-Monitor on Dec. 7 in Cairo, Argani said that the tribes were coordinating with the army to make extremists “regret their actions,” particularly in regard to the bombing of al-Rawda mosque, but did not specify in what way. He asserted that the al-Rawda attack had pushed the tribes to come together and overcome their differences. Argani also spoke about the government's development and investment plans for Sinai and the role of the Misr Sinai Investment Company, which the tribes founded in cooperation with the army.
Al-Monitor: What does the Union of Sinai Tribes think about the Nov. 24 bombing of al-Rawda mosque, near el-Arish, in North Sinai?
Argani: The attack targeting al-Rawda mosque shows how weak the extremist groups are. There is no real power in attacking and killing unarmed civilians while they pray. This is proof of a lack of human values.
Al-Monitor: Do you think that the bombing of al-Rawda mosque was targeting Sufis in Sinai? What is the message behind this incident?
Argani: The extremist groups were only trying to put on a show and create media hype to prove that they still have a strong presence in North Sinai. In addition, the incident intended to target Sufis in North Sinai, because these extremist organizations reject anyone that does not share their point of view, regardless of their religious or political affiliation.
Al-Monitor: In May, the Sinai tribes announced that they will engage in armed struggle against the extremist organizations. Will that confrontation develop after the bombing of al-Rawda mosque?
Argani: Indeed, a major development is expected. In fact, immediately after the bombing, the tribes began implementing an operation against extremist groups in cooperation with the army. We have issued several statements in this regard, namely a sharp statement on Nov. 30, calling on our tribes to take part in the cleansing of Sinai. All I can say is the tribes were very responsive, and many volunteered, but I cannot reveal any more details about the battle and those participating in it. With increased cooperation with the army, we will make [extremists] regret their actions.
Al-Monitor: How does the Union of Sinai Tribes play a role in uniting tribes and fighting extremist organizations? What is the purpose of this union?
Argani: The union consists of the 24 tribes present in Sinai. It is tasked with maintaining full coordination between the tribes themselves, especially in the fight against extremists. In addition, the union provides the army with information on the extremists’ activity and their whereabouts.
Al-Monitor: During a previous interview with Al-Monitor, spokesman for the Tarabin tribe Musa al-Dalah said, “Not all Sinai tribes cooperated properly in the battle against Wilayat Sinai.” Are there any differences between the tribes when it comes to this battle?
Argani: The ugliness of the recent incident and the extremists’ persistence in targeting innocent civilians urged the tribes to unite at this critical time.
Al-Monitor: The Union of Sinai Tribes announced in a Nov. 30 statement that it coordinates with the security services to support them in fighting extremists. What is the nature of this support?
Argani: We provide all the support the military might need, whether by volunteering to fight alongside it or by providing information. I cannot really reveal certain confidential details about our current work in the field in terms of our hand-in-hand confrontation, but the tribes insist on supporting the armed forces no matter what.
Al-Monitor: Does the bombing of al-Rawda mosque, which killed [311] people, reflect the state's failure to protect citizens in Sinai?
Argani: This incident has nothing to do with a security failure. There is no way we can guarantee the security of every mosque in North Sinai. There are 40 Sufi mosques in Sinai, and it is a shame that we could not predict the occurrence of such an incident.
Al-Monitor: After the incident, some called on the need to evacuate North Sinai, where the army is battling extremists, such as security expert and strategist Maj. Gen. Hussam Sweilem, who called for emptying the area of its residents so they would not be exploited by extremists to pressure the Egyptian state. What do you think about such calls?
Argani: Those making such calls do not understand the situation in Sinai. Evacuating Sinai would do the Egyptian army more harm than good, because tribes know the exact whereabouts of extremists. [In case of evacuation], the armed forces would have no other source of information, and Sinai would become home to extremists alone. The army never expressed desire to evacuate Sinai because it is well aware of the importance of keeping us here.
Al-Monitor: What kind of development projects does Sinai need?
Argani: The army and Sinai tribes founded Misr Sinai Investment Company in August 2014, and I was appointed chairman. The 24 tribes cooperated with the armed forces, represented by the National Service Projects Authority, in establishing the company, which is involved in several areas, including manufacturing marble and granite. A large marble factory will be opened in North Sinai in the coming days. Sinai needs numerous projects, such as paving roads and digging more wells, which the army is implementing in cooperation with the tribes.
Al-Monitor: How does the state encourage businessmen to invest in Sinai?
Argani: The state facilitates all necessary approvals for investment projects in Sinai and is willing to partner with all businessmen wishing to invest here in order to reassure them, while providing all the services they might need.
Al-Monitor: How do you see the future in Sinai?
Argani: |
making heavy redactions of documents it submitted to the court relevant to the case. (Uber later claimed that Waymo had asked for the redactions.)
Uber Associate General Counsel Angela Padilla provided the following statement regarding the case, when we contacted the company for response:Huai Jang stayed and taught at Po Jo monastery at Nan Yo. His teacher, the Sixth Patriarch of Zen, Hui Neng, had predicted that he, Huai Jang, would successfully pass on the Zen Dharma to someone like a colt or young horse. After some time passed at Nan Yo, he heard there was a very dedicated, serious young man by the name of Ma (horse) sitting constantly in a hut in the grounds of the Ch’uan Fa temple in another area of Nan Yo. When he heard of this young “horse”, his intuition told him this could very well be his predicted successor. Huai Jang decided to test this possibility, so he paid a visit to young master Ma to see if this young “horse” could be awakened to Buddha-nature and accept the Direct Mind Dharma beyond scriptures and practices of gradual development. Huai Jang was told that Ma Tzu would not look at anyone who called upon him, but Huai Jang was very resourceful. First, Huai Jang simply opened the door of the hut and observed Ma Tzu sitting there. Ma Tzu was a big, muscular lad with an unusually serene expression. Here was a young man obviously made for action, yet able to suppress his restless physical nature and stay quiet. Huai Jang could feel a great potential sitting there, so he resolved to attempt to awaken Ma Tzu on the spot. Stepping back outside, he was led to observe some tiles in a pile near the temple which were being polished and used as replacement tiles. He saw that one of those tiles and a polishing brush would be perfect for his purpose. So he picked up a tile and a brush, went back to Ma Tzu’s hut, stepped inside, sat down and began furiously brushing the tile. When a superconscious person performs an action in this manner, it is superaction for the purpose of awakening someone to superconsciousness. If there is a great potential in the target person, it is there as a potential super-receptivity (super-essence-of-being) that can receive the superaction and become awakened into superconsciousness or Buddha-nature. After quite a long while, Ma Tzu could not suppress his natural curiosity and alertness over this disturbing activity taking place before him, whereupon he shouted out with annoyance at the stranger working in his hut, “What are you trying to do?” No one, after all, had ever so disrespectfully attacked and tested Ma Tzu’s serene meditation. How dare this mad, aggressive monk come in and disturb his meditation with such ridiculous activity? But by inquiring of the mad tile-polishing monk, his mind was already moving toward the possible enlightenment. Huai Jang then replied, “I am polishing this tile to make a mirror for you.” Ma Tzu was of course still asleep in his Buddha-nature or he would have immediately awakened from seeing Huai Jang’s superaction (Great Function). The very fact that the question was asked was a display of little action, ordinary ignorant expression. So Huai Jang had no superconscious recourse but to answer Ma Tzu with superspeech. Ma Tzu, going along with the game, commented, “Even if I were to want a mirror produced by you, this is not going to work, because you cannot make a mirror by polishing a tile.” Huai Jang then said, devastatingly, “If a mirror cannot be made by polishing a tile, how can one become a Buddha by sitting in meditation?” This statement completely blew Ma Tzu’s mind. His entire determination and understanding about meditation and enlightenment was rapidly collapsing under the force of the blow coming from Master Huai Jang’s impeccable metaphorical logic. Huai Jang had unleashed a superthought upon the consciousness of Ma Tzu. Ma Tzu then rose from his seat. This corresponds to the rising internally of his great potential for direct awakening of his Buddha-nature, which is the primary cause of his enlightenment which was being triggered by the superaction of Huai Jang as the concurrent or intervening cause. Ma Tzu, now standing, asked Master Huai Jang, “What should one do then?” The Master answered, “If a cart drawn by an ox does not move, is it correct to whip the ox or the cart?” What is Huai Jang talking about here? If the inner mind is attending to disciplining and suppressing physical and mental activity to achieve stillness of body and outer mind, is not the ignorant state of the inner mind the real problem? How can an ignorant, but determined inner mind produce an awakened Buddha-nature? How can a consciousness, however sincere and aspiring, produce superconsciousness? The Indian Buddhist Adept, Tilopa, once said, “If the mind, filled with ambition, should seek a goal, it only hides the Light.” Ma Tzu was being shown that his ambitious, goal-seeking inner mind, focused on the disciplinary and suppression of body and outer mind, was missing the point that the very status of his ambitious inner mind was the real target, the ox. Huai Jang could see that the ambitious inner mind of Ma Tzu was not yet fully stopped in its tracks, so he made the further explanation by saying, “Do you want to go on endlessly sitting in meditation trying to become a Buddha or would you not rather be a Buddha who just happens to be sitting when it is necessary to sit? If you want to sit in real meditative awareness, meditative awareness does not cling to sitting, lying down, standing up or walking about. If you would rather be a Buddha who happens to be sitting, Buddha-nature is neither motionless nor forced to be always in motion, which means that motion is neither accepted nor rejected. If you sit with determination of your non-Buddha nature to become a Buddha, you are killing Buddha in your effort to resurrect him. If you go on clinging to your stupidly ambitious sitting practice, you will never awaken to the true Dharma.” Upon hearing this with super-receptivity, Ma Tzu awakened within his Buddha-nature beyond all doubts, arguments and spiritual ambitions of his inner causal mind of duality. Ma Tzu could not help but bow thankfully at the feet of Master Huai Jang, for this was indeed the supreme moment of his life that he had most deeply hoped for, which he could now recognize. Even though he would need some further instruction from Huai Jang to avoid slipping back into his old ignorant state of wrongly centred spiritual ambition and effort, he had nonetheless been able to rise to the occasion and self-awaken with Huai Jang’s extremely resourceful actions and words. These two Buddha-natures did their dance of teacher and student, but that dance continues in your own Buddha-nature, if you can see it and hear it with superunderstanding; otherwise you will have to patiently wait, for your potential may not be matured yet to the point of self-awakening, in which case you will have to study many things and make many experiments with yourself.The new top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said yesterday that more American troops are urgently required to combat a worsening insurgency, but he stated emphatically that no Iraq-style "surge" of forces will end the conflict there.
"Afghanistan is not Iraq," said Gen. David D. McKiernan, who led ground forces during the 2003 Iraq invasion and took over four months ago as head of the NATO-led coalition in Afghanistan.
Speaking in Washington yesterday, McKiernan described Afghanistan as "a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq." The country's mountainous terrain, rural population, poverty, illiteracy, 400 major tribal networks and history of civil war all make for unique challenges, he said.
"The word I don't use for Afghanistan is'surge,' " McKiernan stressed, saying that what is required is a "sustained commitment" to a counterinsurgency effort that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.
The strategic differences or similarities between Iraq and Afghanistan have emerged as an issue in the presidential campaign. In last week's debate between the candidates, for example, Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) said that "the same strategy that [Sen. Barack Obama] condemned in Iraq, that's going to have to be employed in Afghanistan."
McCain said he is confident that Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq who will soon oversee Afghanistan and the broader region as the head of U.S. Central Command, will succeed in applying that strategy.
Another facet of the Iraq strategy that McKiernan doubts can be duplicated in Afghanistan is the U.S. military's programs to recruit tribes to oppose insurgents. That effort, begun in 2006 in Iraq's Anbar province, led a loose coalition of tribes to turn against the Sunni insurgent group al-Qaeda in Iraq and side with the U.S. military. It was expanded in early 2007 in a U.S. military effort to hire local tribesmen and former insurgents to serve as armed guards in their neighborhoods. In Iraq, nearly 100,000 of the volunteers, primarily Sunnis, are on the job.
Tribal engagement in Afghanistan is also vital, McKiernan said, but it must be carried out through the Afghan government and not by the U.S. military.
"I don't want the military to be engaging the tribes," he said. Given Afghanistan's complicated system of rival tribes and ethnic groups and the recent history of civil war, allying with the wrong tribe risks rekindling internecine conflict, he said. "It wouldn't take much to go back to a civil war."
Overall, McKiernan offered a sober view of Afghanistan, saying the violence is more intense than he had anticipated, particularly in the east and south. The U.S. military death toll has risen to more than 130 this year, exceeding the 117 killed last year and reaching a new annual high since the war began in 2001.
Attacks into Afghanistan from Pakistan have escalated, but the coordination of U.S., Afghan and Pakistani forces in the border region remains weak. "We are just scratching the surface, if you will" in coordinating actions along the porous border, he said.
An influx of foreign fighters across the border is bolstering the Taliban insurgency and has shown a "significant increase from what we saw this time last year," he said, pointing to intelligence that picked up fighters speaking Uzbek, Chechen, Arabic and other languages.
"We are in a very tough fight," he said. "The idea that it might get worse before it gets better is certainly a possibility."
Additional U.S. and other international troops, helicopters and intelligence-gathering equipment are needed "as quickly as possible" to counter the insurgency, McKiernan said. He said he has asked for four more U.S. military combat brigades to fight the insurgents and train the Afghan army and police. One brigade will deploy to Afghanistan in January, although Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said last month that the other three might not be available until next spring or summer, as more troops leave Iraq.
A sizable international force will be required in Afghanistan for years until a "tipping point" is reached that allows the Afghan army and police to take responsibility for security, he said. An effort is underway to double the size of the Afghan army, now about 67,000 strong, McKiernan said.
The decision to increase U.S. troop levels came after Gates tried to persuade NATO allies and other countries to boost their contributions, with limited success. McKiernan voiced frustration yesterday that restrictions on the combat roles of some international forces degrade the coalition's efforts. "Some come to conduct war; some come to summer camp, quite frankly," McKiernan said.Assistant cities minister Angus Taylor says economic change has made the outer suburbs and semi-urban areas ripe for political disruption across the world
There are some big questions floating around in politics right now, none more so than the one relating to the forces behind Brexit, Trump and – in the eyes of one Coalition frontbencher – Australia’s federal election.
Assistant cities minister Angus Taylor believes the answer lies in the outer suburbs of big cities, peri-urban areas and regional towns.
“If you look at the UK, if you look at Australia, if you look at the US, there is political disruption going on,” Taylor told Guardian Australia.
“And the disruption is coming from the outer suburbs and regional cities. That’s where Trump has focused, that’s where Brexit was focused and we saw that in the recent federal election.
People in those areas are crying out for solutions Angus Taylor
“And that is because people in those areas are crying out for solutions. They want governments to come up with solutions and so that’s where we are focused.”
Taylor is one of the younger, driven, ambitious generation. He is of the class of 2013, one rung below the more senior members of the Coalition. He floats between the right and centre right, resisting categorisation. While the former McKinsey partner and Rhodes scholar was omitted from the first Turnbull ministry, the spectacular departure of former ministers Jamie Briggs and Mal Brough meant he did not have long to wait.
At the same time as he was given the cities portfolio earlier this year, Taylor’s southern NSW seat of Hume was pushed further north towards Sydney after a redistribution. It now straddles rural towns such as the farming community of Boorowa and regional cities such as Goulburn, stretching into peri-urban areas leading up to Camden in south-west Sydney. While he suffered a swing of only 3.4%, his colleagues in western Sydney took much bigger hits. Liberal MP Russell Matheson lost the neighbouring seat of Macarthur to Labor’s Mike Freelander on an 11.7% swing.
Trump supporters look to Brexit and see only one thing: freedom Read more
When party pollster Mark Textor joined Liberal federal director Tony Nutt to address the partyroom in the post-election briefing, one of the factors he named was lifestyle pressures such as high mortgages and commuting. Voters in western Sydney, Textor said, had a “greater level of cynicism” than other Australian voters.
“I think it is a pattern everywhere, I don’t think it’s confined to western Sydney, though clearly we saw it in western Sydney,” Taylor said in a wide-ranging interview with Guardian Australia.
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Property construction on Sydney’s north-western fringe. Angus Taylor pinpoints the outer suburbs as a key political and economic battleground. Photograph: Will Burgess/REUTERS
“This is true in the outer suburbs of Perth or the outer suburbs and the peri-urban areas of Brisbane and that message – we don’t need a pollster to give us that message.
“That message is embedded in the results at the election and has been embedded in the results of the United States primaries and the UK Brexit debate. If politicians weren’t seeing this now they would be ignoring the very obvious signals.”
But what do politicians do with this message in a post-Brexit world?
To include or enable?
George Megalogenis, in his Quarterly Essay Balancing Act, argued the political system could not restore public confidence without a more responsive government.
“And the economy won’t stabilise without a more active government,” Megalogenis wrote.
“The default setting of politics in the 21st century – to trust in the market – has proven to be bad economics, even for Australia, the only high-income nation to avoid the Great Recession. It has left us with gridlocked cities, growing inequality and a corporate sector that feels no obligation to pay tax.”
Inequality has also been troubling Labor policy minds such as frontbencher and economist Jenny Macklin. Her opposition project has been a wide ranging report into policies which tackle inequality, wrapping the notion of economic growth in the notion of inclusion. She has quoted the work of Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, who has argued inequality is bad for economic growth.
As a conservative, Taylor sees government as an enabler. He rejects increased default government spending in favour of providing opportunities, to individuals, communities and business. Infrastructure spending is necessary to create liveable cities and regions and he favours public-private partnerships where government sees infrastructure as an investment to drive economic growth.
Stress in the city
While the political rip pulled Australia towards a double dissolution election, one of the lesser known government policies released in April was the cities deal. It was worked up by Taylor with Malcolm Turnbull’s new cities division in the department of prime minister and cabinet.
$50m 'investment-banking style' unit to fund transport projects Read more
“The plan will draw on the Commonwealth’s coordination capacity and the strength of its balance sheet at a time of historically low interest rates, to get the best infrastructure projects off the ground,” their statement said.
But what does that mean for people squeezed by mortgage stress and long commutes?
Enter the 30-minute city – a favourite for both sides of politics. In Taylor’s version, it does not mean you can get across the city in 30 minutes – in a city the size of Sydney or Melbourne you never will. It means reversing the jobs tide rushing towards the central business districts by creating “job hubs”.
For example he believes Sydney should be three cities - the CBD, Parramatta and Badgerys Creek/Penrith. In another era, it might be known as decentralisation. But rather than move a big government department, Taylor says its all about laying down the infrastructure for business to provide jobs and to give people a comfortable place to live. That means transport, roads and amenities.
“We [government] are not the job creator, the private sector is the job creator, but we are an important enabler,” Taylor said.
“We create the infrastructure, we can influence the planning decisions, we can influence whether these places are great places to live that are well connected.
“Just the fact that we are committed to Badgerys Creek [airport] and the infrastructure that will surround Badgerys Creek as well as spending billions of dollars in western Sydney on infrastructure, we are an extremely important enabler.”
Swing city – where politics and policy collide
As counting continued in the Queensland seat of Herbert, where Liberal MP Ewen Jones continues to trail Labor’s Cathy O’Toole by a handful of votes, Taylor and Turnbull travelled to its heart in Townsville this week.
They announced the federal government was in discussions with the state and local governments for a Townsville city deal, which would create an agreement to work on providing infrastructure, attracting businesses and jobs in a town where unemployment has hit 13.2%.
The city deal sounds a little airy fairy until you remember the fight between the Andrews Victorian Labor government and the Abbott Coalition government over the East West Link, a $3bn, 18km toll road project in Melbourne.
'Quietly confident' Cathy O’Toole awaits Herbert's cliffhanger result Read more
The tied federal funding of $1.5bn was promised by Abbott and rejected by Andrews, who said he wanted to prioritise the Melbourne Metro rail project. The money was never handed over because the two tiers of government could not decide on a priority.
On the Townsville deal, Taylor described the Queensland government as “extremely collaborative”.
The political and policy synergy which meet in the most marginal seat in the land is no accident. Another city deal is expected in Launceston, in northern Tasmania. (The Coalition lost all three of its seats Bass, Braddon and Lyons in Tasmania.) The third? Swing city – western Sydney.
It could sound like pork barrelling in the marginals. But Taylor says the policy solution is required because those areas were reacting to issues of liveability.
“I think it is very symbolic, it says the outer suburbs and the regional cities have to be a priority for any government in the western world now,” he said.
“At the ballot box, they have made that clear. And rightly so, because there are issues to be resolved.”Amazon still owns the cloud. But earnings reports on Thursday from the e-retailer as well as rivals Microsoft and Alphabet show that the battle is in its early days and competition is fierce.
In a rare confluence of events, all three companies reported quarterly results on the same day, giving investors an abundance of data on the state of cloud computing:
Amazon Web Services is the clear leader and the only one of the three companies that provide a clean number for its cloud infrastructure business. Amazon said AWS revenue surged 43 percent in the quarter to $3.66 billion. Multiply that by four, and you get an annualized run rate of $14.6 billion.
Microsoft wraps its Azure business into a division called Intelligent Cloud, which includes various other servers and cloud services. In total, that business grew 11 percent to $6.8 billion. While Microsoft doesn't break out Azure's revenue, it does offer up a growth number. In the quarter ended March, sales jumped 93 percent. Microsoft also said that its full Commercial Cloud business now has an annualized run rate of $15.2 billion, but that business also includes Office 365, not just the Azure infrastructure service.
The Google Cloud Platform remains a laggard and is such a small portion of Alphabet that the company didn't even mention the business in its earnings release. Of Google's $24.5 billion in first-quarter revenue, $21.4 billion came from advertising. However, sales in the rest of the company jumped 50 percent to $3.1 billion, and a big part of that increase was clearly from new cloud-computing clients.
With more corporations, government entities and non-profits downsizing their own data centers in favor of the massive infrastructure operations controlled by the tech giants, all three companies are racing to land major contracts and attract developers by building cutting-edge tools.
"This space is an oligopoly," said Trip Miller, the founder of Gullane Capital Partners and an investor in Amazon. "No one else of any meaningful size outside a handful of major players is getting into it because they can't afford to get into it."
AWS's fingerprints were all over Amazon's earnings report, with the acronym showing up 44 times.
In addition to disclosing revenue and the unit's 24.3 percent operating margin, Amazon referred to a host of new AWS products like Amazon Chime for making online meetings easier and contact center technology called Amazon Connect. The company also said that AWS has regions opening up this year in France and China and that the cloud division "collaborated with NASA to deliver the highest resolution video ever broadcast live from space."
According to Synergy Research Group, AWS controlled 40 percent of the public cloud services market as of early February, compared to 23 percent for Microsoft, IBM and Google combined.FILE PHOTO: A billboard showing a pictures of US president-elect Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin is seen through pedestrians in Danilovgrad, Montenegro, November 16, 2016. REUTERS/Stevo Vasiljevic/File photo
MOSCOW (Reuters) - The Kremlin said on Monday there was talk of a possible meeting between President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Donald Trump taking place before a G20 summit in July, but there was nothing specific to report so far.
The two men have never met, but both have said they want to try to mend battered U.S.-Russia ties, which fell to their lowest level since the Cold War after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea.
The new U.S. administration is under pressure over Russia however because Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, is struggling to get past a controversy over a call he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States Sergei Kislyak before Trump took office.
Top White House officials have been reviewing over the weekend Flynn’s contacts and whether he discussed the possibility of lifting U.S. sanctions on Russia once Trump took office, which could potentially be in violation of a law banning private citizens from engaging in foreign policy.
When asked about it on Monday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a conference call with reporters that Flynn and Kislyak had not discussed lifting sanctions on Moscow.
“Obviously every ambassador informs the center (Moscow) about all the contacts he has so the information gets to us, but we are not willing to comment on internal discussions being held in Washington,” Peskov said.
Asked if there had been talks between any Russian and U.S. representatives on easing sanctions, Peskov said: “We have already said there have not been any (such talks)”.Suddenly, government shutdowns have become cool again — in the media and on Capitol Hill, depending on who’s talking … and when. Both Politico and the Washington Post have warnings up about the first potential shuttering of the executive since Ted Cruz’ ill-fated attempt to defund ObamaCare in 2013 over a budgeting dispute over benefits for coal miners. The House-passed version of the continuing resolution only extends those benefits through the end of April, which is the same time frame as the extension for all FY2017 spending. They have recessed, however, leaving the Senate with a take-it-or-leave-it proposition.
Politico leads by reporting it as “a major threat”:
Coal-state Senate Democrats are not backing off their resistance to a short-term government funding measure, raising a major threat of a shutdown at midnight Friday if the standoff over coalminer’s benefits drags on. The issue is serious enough for Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) that he postponed a planned meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower on Friday. Manchin, who is reportedly in the mix for a Cabinet position for the incoming administration, will now meet with Trump on Monday, a spokesman for the senator said.
But at the end, Manchin and other unnamed Senate Democrats specifically dismiss talk of a shutdown:
Senate Democrats heading the charge for coalminers’ benefits insist they aren’t triggering the threat of a government funding lapse – saying there’s ample to time to figure out a longer-term fix for the workers before their benefits run dry at the end of this year. “There’s no reason to speak about shutdowns,” Manchin said.
Manchin might be speaking out of both sides of his mouth. The Washington Post report has a much different quote from Manchin that emphasizes that Senate Democrats are threatening to shut down the government … although they can’t do it for long:
Senate Democrats are threatening to force a brief government shutdown this weekend to pressure Republicans to support policies they say match promises President-elect Donald Trump made on the campaign trail to help coal country and boost American manufacturers. Government funding is set to run out at the end of Friday and lawmakers are considering a stopgap spending bill that would keep federal agencies funded through April 28. The angry Democrats are not threatening to block the spending measure, but to threaten to miss the Friday deadline in hopes they can entice Republicans into further negotiations. … “I want to shut her down,” Manchin said Wednesday about the government, pointing to his anger over concerns about the miner provisions. “I mean this is ridiculous... You can’t throw 16,000 people out.”
Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp — rumored to be in the running for a Cabinet post — publicly invoked Donald Trump in their public statements, hoping to leverage Trump’s popularity with coal miners, or perhaps to damage it and Trump if he doesn’t intervene. That’s an odd position given that a third of the House Democratic caucus voted in support of the CR with the four-month extension, and especially given the Democratic Party’s years-long effort to put the coal industry out of business.
It should be difficult for Senate Democrats to explain why they’d let the government shut down over the holidays to keep from taking up a bipartisan CR that extends the benefits the same amount of time as the overall budget. They’re probably banking on getting more sympathetic treatment of their shutdown from the media than Cruz got for his, even though both would be equally futile and pointless. Republicans have already agreed to negotiate a longer benefit package in the next session of Congress, Mitch McConnell says, and Democrats need to “take ‘yes’ for an answer”:
“The difficulty here is they are having a hard time taking yes for an answer. I represent a lot of coal miners, I’m concerned about this issue. I had hoped we’d get a year. But we’ve got until the end of April to get at it again,” McConnell said in an interview on Friday — a point he stressed on the Senate floor later that morning. Asked if the government would shut down, the GOP leader replied: “I certainly hope not. There’s no reason for it.”
The shutdown will likely be nothing more than a stunt, if it occurs at all. Authorization for spending ends at midnight tonight, which is why McConnell wants unanimous consent to take up the CR and pass it before the deadline. If Democrats refuse, McConnell can call a cloture vote, but needs 60 votes to break the threshold. Either way, though, Democrats can only stall a budget bill for a short period, which runs out on Sunday, as filibusters do not apply to budget bills. The CR would need only a majority at that point, limiting the shutdown to a single day — the least-followed news day of the week, at that.
There’s no reason to drag it out, but don’t bet against it happening. Senate Democrats need some sort of catharsis after watching their hopes of regaining the majority go down in flames.Technology development seems to gallop a little faster each year. But there's always one laggard: encryption. Why the deliberate pace? Because a single, small mistake can cut off communications or shut down businesses.
Yet there are times when you take stock—only to discover the encryption landscape seems to have transformed overnight. Now is that time. Although the changes have been incremental over several years, the net effect is dramatic.
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Some of those changes began shortly after Edward Snowden's disclosures of the U.S. government’s extensive surveillance apparatus. Others are the natural result of cryptographic ideas reaching the marketplace, says Brent Waters, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and the recipient of the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2015 Grace Murray Hopper Award.
“Many of the new tools and applications available are based on research innovations from 2005 and 2006,” Waters says. “We are just realizing what type of crypto functionality is possible.”
A step closer to an encrypted world
Encrypted web traffic is the first step toward a more secure online world where attackers cannot intercept private communications, financial transactions, or general online activity. Many sites, including Google and Facebook, have turned HTTPS on by default for all users. But for most domain owners, buying and deploying SSL/TLS certificates in order to secure traffic to their sites has been a costly and complicated endeavor.
Fortunately, Let’s Encrypt and its free SSL/TLS certificates have transformed the landscape, giving domain owners the tools to turn on HTTPS for their websites easily. A nonprofit certificate authority run by the Internet Security Research Group, Let’s Encrypt is backed by such internet heavyweights as Mozilla, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cisco, and Akamai.
How ubiquitous has HTTPS become? In October, Josh Aas, head of Let’s Encrypt and former Mozilla employee, posted a graph from Mozilla Telemetry showing that 50 percent of pages loaded that day used HTTPS, not HTTP. While the graph showed only Firefox users, the figure is still significant, because for the first time, the number of encrypted pages outnumbered unencrypted pages. NSS Labs expects the trend to continue, predicting that 75 percent of all Web traffic will be encrypted by 2019.
Free certificate offerings will further accelerate adoption. By next year, the number of publicly trusted free certificates issued will likely outnumber those that are paid for, says Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at key-management company Venafi. Many enterprises will also start using free services. With certificate cost no longer a consideration, certificate authorities will focus on better tools to securely manage certificates and protect their keys.
Speaking of certificate management, after years of warnings that SHA-1 certificates were weak and vulnerable to attack, enterprises are making steady progress toward upgrading to certificates that use SHA-2, the set of cryptographic hash functions succeeding the obsolete SHA-1 algorithm. Major browser makers, including Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft, have pledged to deprecate SHA-1 by the beginning of the year and to start blocking sites still using the older certificates. Facebook stopped serving SHA-1 connections and saw “no measurable impact,” wrote Facebook production engineer Wojciech Wojtyniak.
From May to October 2016, the use of SHA-1 on the web fell from 3.5 percent to less than 1 percent, as measured by Firefox Telemetry. Enterprises can’t be complacent, though, since recent estimates from Venafi suggest approximately 60 million websites still rely on the insecure encryption algorithm.
“We look forward to the industry's movement toward greater use of stronger certificates like SHA-256,” Wojtyniak said.
Crypto is still king
Cryptography has taken quite a beating over the past few months, with researchers developing cryptographic attacks such as Drown, which can be used to decrypt TLS connections between a user and a server if the server supports SSLv2, and Sweet32, a way to attack encrypted web connections by generating huge amounts of web traffic.
Nation-state actors also have encryption in their crosshairs. Late last year, Juniper Networks uncovered spying code implanted in specific models of its firewall and Virtual Private Network appliances. Many experts believe the NSA was involved.
Shortly after the cache of hacking tools allegedly belonging to the NSA made its way to underground markets this summer, Cisco discovered a vulnerability in its IOS, IOS XE, and IOS XR software that powers many of its networking devices. The flaw, which could be used to extract sensitive information from device memory, was similar to the vulnerability exploited by the tools and was related to how the operating system processed the key exchange protocol for VPNs, Cisco said.
Even Apple’s iMessage app, the poster child for how companies can bring end-to-end encryption to the masses, had its share of issues. Cryptography professor Matthew Green and his team of students at Johns Hopkins University were able to develop a practical adaptive chosen ciphertext attack that could decrypt iMessage payloads and attachments under specific circumstances. The team also found that iMessage lacked the forward secrecy mechanism, meaning attackers could decrypt previously encrypted messages, such as those stored in iCloud. Forward secrecy works by generating a new key after a set period of time so that even if the attackers obtained the original key, the previously encrypted messages can’t be cracked.
One thing remains clear despite all the bad news: Cryptography is not broken. The mathematics behind cryptographic calculations remain strong, and encryption is still the best way to protect information.
“The latest attacks have not been on the math, but on the implementation,” Waters says.
In fact, encryption works so well that attackers rely on it, too. Criminals are equally as capable of obtaining keys and certificates to hide their activities inside encrypted traffic. The fact that this attack vector is fast becoming default behavior for cybercriminals “almost counteracts the whole purpose of adding more encryption,” Bocek says.
Cybercriminals are using encryption to great effect in ransomware. Once the files are encrypted, victims have to either pay up to obtain a key or wipe their systems and start over. Just as attackers target flawed implementations, security researchers have successfully developed decryption tools for ransomware variants that contained mistakes in their encryption code.
Government backs down on backdoors
Technology firms have always had to balance security and privacy concerns with law enforcement requests for user information. FBI Director James Comey had been pushing hard for backdoors in technology products using encryption, claiming that increased use of encryption was hindering criminal investigations. While companies frequently quietly cooperate with law enforcement and intelligence requests, the unprecedented public showdown between the FBI and Apple showed that in recent years, enterprises are beginning to push back.
The FBI backed down in that fight, and a bipartisan Congressional working group—with members of both House Judiciary and Energy & Commerce Committees—was formed to study the encryption problem. The House Judiciary Committee’s Encryption Working Group unequivocally rejected Comey's calls for backdoors and advised the United States to explore other solutions.
“Any measure that weakens encryption works against the national interest,” the working group wrote in its report. “Congress cannot stop bad actors—at home or overseas—from adopting encryption. Therefore, the Committees should explore other strategies to address the needs of the law enforcement community.”
Weakening encryption so that police can break into encrypted devices would speed up criminal investigations, but it would be a short-term win "against the long-term impacts to the national interest," the working group warned. Alternative strategies include giving law enforcement legal methods to compel suspects to unlock their devices and improving metadata collection and analysis.
While the working group report indicates Congress will not pursue legal backdoors, other encryption-related battles are looming on the horizon. The report seemed to support letting police use "legal hacking" to break into products using software vulnerabilities that only law enforcement and intelligence authorities know about, which poses its own security implications. The technology industry has an interest in learning about vulnerabilities as soon as they are found, and not letting the government stockpile them with no oversight.
As for Comey's "going dark" claim, the working group said “the challenge appears to be more akin to ‘going spotty.’”
Adding to the enterprise tech stack
Governments have been trotting out the terrorists “going dark” argument for years and will always play on those fears, says Mike Janke, co-founder and chairman of encrypted communications company Silent Circle. What's changing is that the enterprises are becoming more serious about securing their communications stack and are less willing to compromise on those features.
Many organizations were shocked at the extent of government surveillance exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. They reacted by integrating secure video and text messaging tools along with encrypted voice calls into the enterprise communications stack, Janke says. Encryption is now a bigger part of the technology conversation, as enterprises ask about what features and capabilities are available. IT no longer treats encryption as an added feature to pay extra for, but as a must-have for every product and platform they work with.
Consumers were outraged by the surveillance programs, and anecdotal evidence indicates many have signed up for encrypted messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Signal. But for the most part, they aren't paying for secure products or changing their behaviors to make privacy a bigger part of their daily lives.
The change is coming from CSOs, vice presidents of engineering, and other technical enterprise leaders, because they're at the forefront of making security and privacy decisions for their products and services. With Tesla now digitally signing firmware for every single one of its internal components with a cryptographic key, it's easier to ask TV manufacturers or toymakers, "Why aren't you doing that?" says Janke.
Consumers are the ones who will benefit from encryption built in by default as enterprises change their mindset about the importance of encryption.
Riding the innovation wave
Cryptography tends to go in waves, with important innovations and research from 2005 to 2006 finally coming out as practical applications. Researchers are currently looking at improving the "precision of encrpytion," instead of the current model of all or nothing, where if something is exposed |
similarly-shaped controversy is now brewing among Democrats; as NPR reported over the weekend, a Sanders fan named Spencer Thayer created a website originally titled the Superdelegate Hitlist, to locate and persuade superdelegates nationwide who are either undecided or support Clinton.
In a tweet that has since been deleted, Thayer used the word “harass” to describe the Hitlist’s goal:
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On April 1, he also used that word, arguing that Sanders supporters need to “harass the establishment:”
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Thayer changed the name of the website on April 6, two days after it was launched, as well as the logo, originally a deer’s head backed by arrows (the deer is now flanked by red telephones). From the site’s FAQ:
WHY HAS THE SITE’S NAME AND LOGO CHANGED? The branding began to detract from the campaign’s purpose, so it wasn’t a hard decision to make the change once it was clear it wasn’t working. WHAT WAS YOUR GOAL BEHIND THE “SUPERDELEGATE HIT LIST?” The superdelegate system is rigged to protect establishment politicians and shut down populism. Superdelegates by their very nature diminish the value of the vote by giving an elite constituency of representatives, party leaders, and even lobbyists extra power. The Superdelegate List exists to help voters challenge this undemocratic system. Contacting our elected representatives and party leaders and holding them to account is an American tradition. This is the only way to keep the voter base from being patronized or ignored.
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On the same day, as the Washington Post reports, Superdelegate Bob Mulholland, who’s supporting Clinton, wrote a furious letter to the Sanders campaign, saying that Sanders fans were “bullying” and harassing superdelegates. Mulholland demanded the campaign denounce those tactics. From the letter, which you can read in full here:
Society has been trying to deal with High School bullies and the same Rule should apply to your campaign and your supporters. Us active Democrats enjoy healthy discussions and debates at meetings, Caucuses and Conventions but it is unacceptable for us to get harassing communications from bullies. As a Clinton supporter, I have not received harassing phone calls but it does appear women DNC Members are getting the brunt of the threats. Professionally, campaign staff and representatives should be the ones calling delegates. A 12 year old child answering the phone at home should not be hearing threats.
For his side, Thayer told the Post that the intent isn’t to threaten or harass the superdelegates, but to make them accountable to the people they represent:
“Historically, the superdelegates have been able to disenfranchise voters without being held accountable,” he said. “The Internet has changed power relationships between party leaders and their constituents, and those in power have a tendency to interpret challenges to their authority as harassment.
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This is the Bernie Bro phenomenon in a nutshell: a good-enough idea (pointing out the superdelegate system is fundamentally undemocratic) runs into an obnoxious social media tactic, helmed by someone who seems like a bit of a dick.
In theory, contacting superdelegates shouldn’t be controversial. Many of them are politicians, working as state representatives, senators, or in positions within the DNC. For the most part, the list features their professional contact information. Only one address for one superdelegate, the site’s FAQ says, may have been a home address and was removed: “There was one address labeled ‘home’ for an entry. The data came from another large public list submitted to the site that day. A volunteer removed the address once it was discovered.”
And yet: Several superdelegates told NPR that the contacts from Sanders supports were not having their intended effect, because people are being humongous dicks about it. Akilah Ross Ensley with Young Democrats of America said her Facebook page became a mire of harassing comments:
Ensley said she’s been called names, and there have been expletives. “They said, you know, you should go to hell,” said Ensley, describing another message. “How dare you vote against your own interests as an African-American woman. I expected you would be smarter than that.” When Clinton-backing super delegate Joyce Elliott heard she was on, what at the time was called the Superdelegate Hit List, she was taken aback. “That is, that is very interesting,” Elliott said after laughing uncomfortably. “As far as I know, this is probably only the second time I’ve been on a hit list, and the other one was not pleasant.”
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Maine DNC member Maggie Allen told the Washington Examiner she received a “drunken” phone call from someone late at night telling her “Hey bitch, switch your vote.”
Calling or emailing a state representative or DNC chair through professional channels does not necessarily constitute harassment. Showing up at someone’s hotel room or phoning them late at night to call them a bitch unquestionably does. On her show Monday night, Samantha Bee called Thayer a “self-righteous Twitter douche,” likening him to Roger Stone and showcasing a 2012 clip of him shouting at a homeless man reading a Bible on the street:
For his part, Thayer seems unmoved by the criticism:
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Congrats, Democrats: you’re certainly keeping this primary much more exciting than it should be, and in the wrong ways.Get the biggest daily news 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
Hundreds of Muslims marched through central London at the weekend to call for peace and unity.
Yet the organisers of the annual procession said not one single mainstream media outlet covered it because it was not "juicy" enough.
Men, women and children were pictured and filmed waving brightly coloured banners during the UK Arbaeen Procession on Sunday.
It is is organised every year by the Husaini Islamic Trust UK and according to their website is the ‘largest annually organised Islamic event in Europe’
The march aims to promote the teachings of Imam Husain – a grandson of the Prophet Mohammed they revere as a freedom fighter for standing up against dictators trying to deny citizens their rights.
(Image: @Malsharifi)
On its website, organisers wrote they aimed for a "peaceful and successful procession and to cement a bond of unity and friendship between people of all ages and cultures under the banner of love for the Holy Household."
Mohammed Al-Sharifi, a part-time activist and regular volunteer at The Husaini Trust told Unilad: "We can still apply the same principles today when we are terrorised by the likes of ISIS. The message applies now more than ever to current issues.
"We are trying to undo people’s misconceptions about Islam – this a multi-faith event and we are trying to promote universal human values."
Attendance at the march – which starts at Marble Arch and heads down Park Lane – has increased steadily year on year.
But its organisers said the march was not covered because the media is reluctant to give a platform to moderate Muslims.
“It’s never covered because it’s not juicy,” said Mohammed. “If a Muslim does something juicy it goes viral, it’s front page news. The mainstream media is reluctant to give a platform to moderate Muslims.”
Mohammed is also involved in the #NO2ISIS official Facebook page, which has gathered over 17,000 likes since the extremist terror group first came into being.
He said: "I’ve never met anyone who is pro-ISIS, 99 per cent of Muslims just want to lead peaceful lives, you know, have a coffee with friends. This is the message we want to get out there."Horizon Zero Dawn has a total of 56 Trophies (1 Platinum, 2 Gold, 5 Silver, 48 Bronze for a total of 1230 points). Below you can find the trophy list:
Horizon Zero Dawn Trophies:
Trophy Description Value All trophies obtained Obtained all Horizon Zero Dawn trophies. Platinum Stealth killed 10 machines Performed a stealth kill on 10 machines. Bronze 3 Strikes From Above Killed 3 enemies using the Strike from Above skill. Bronze Tore off 10 components Detached 10 components from machines during combat. Bronze 10 Vulnerable machine kills Killed 10 machines weak to Fire while burning, or weak to Freeze while frozen. Bronze Tore off 5 heavy weapons Detached 5 heavy weapons from machines during combat. Bronze 7 types of machine overridden Unlocked and used the overrides for 7 different types of machine. Bronze Headshot 30 human enemies Killed 30 human enemies by landing headshots on them. Bronze Downed 23 Grazer dummies Found and knocked over all of the Grazer training dummies in the Nora region. Bronze First Modification Used a Weapon Coil or Outfit Weave on a modifiable weapon or outfit. Bronze All Acquisition machines killed Killed at least one of every type of Acquisition machine. Bronze All Recon machines killed Killed at least one of every type of Reconnaissance machine. Bronze All Combat machines killed Killed at least one of every type of Combat machine. Bronze All Transport machines killed Killed at least one of every type of Transport machine. Bronze Reached level 10 Reached player level 10. Bronze Reached level 25 Reached player level 25. Bronze Reached level 40 Reached player level 40. Bronze Reached level 50 Reached player level 50. Bronze All Skills learned Learned all available skills. Bronze First Tallneck Overridden Scaled a Tallneck and accessed its information. Bronze First Bandit Camp cleared Took back a settlement from a bandit clan. Bronze First Core Overridden Reached the Core of a Cauldron and accessed its information. Bronze All Suns at one Ground Earned at least a Half Sun mark in all three trials at one Hunting Ground. Bronze Blazing Suns at one Ground Earned a Blazing Sun mark in all three trials at one Hunting Ground. Bronze First Corrupted Zone cleared Killed all the corrupted machines in a Corrupted Zone. Bronze All Tallnecks Overridden Scaled all of the Tallnecks and accessed their information. Silver Cleared all the Bandit Camps Took back all settlements from the bandit clans. Silver All Cores Overridden Reached the Core of every Cauldron and accessed the information within. Silver All Suns at all Grounds Earned at least a Half Sun mark in all trials at all of the Hunting Grounds. Silver Blazing Suns at all Grounds Earned a Blazing Sun mark in all trials at all of the Hunting Grounds. Gold All Corrupted Zones cleared Killed all the corrupted machines in every Corrupted Zone. Silver All machines catalogued Encountered and Focus scanned every type of machine. Bronze First Vantage found Found and accessed a Vantage datapoint. Bronze First Metal Flower found Discovered a strange metal flower. Bronze First Banuk Figure found Found a wooden effigy left by a Banuk traveler. Bronze First Ancient Vessel found Found an ancient vessel once used by the Old Ones. Bronze All Vantages found Found and accessed all of the Vantage datapoints. Bronze All Metal Flowers found Found all of the Metal Flowers. Bronze All Banuk Figures found Found all of Arnak’s figures. Bronze All Ancient Vessels found Found all the Ancient Vessels. Bronze Got the Shield-Weaver outfit Recovered an ancient technology and put it to use. Bronze Followed Rost’s teachings Learned to hunt and fight alongside Rost. Bronze Defeated the Sawtooth Defeated the Sawtooth that threatened the Nora. Bronze Triumphed in the Proving Overcame adversity and placed first in the Proving. Bronze Fought back the corruption Destroyed the corruption inside the Nora valley. Bronze Learned of the ancient past Learned of the ancient past at Maker’s End. Bronze Crashed the Eclipse network Infiltrated the Eclipse battle camp and crashed their network. Bronze Discovered the truth Discovered the truth of Zero Dawn. Bronze Broke the siege of All-Mother Defeated the invaders and went inside the sacred mountain. Bronze Recovered a powerful weapon Explored the Mountain That Fell and recovered a powerful weapon. Bronze All allies joined Given Aloy’s actions, all possible optional allies joined the defense. Bronze Ended the war machine threat Ended the threat of the ancient war machines. Gold Victorious with the War-Chief Found the Nora War-Chief and defeated the killers in the Ring of Metal. Bronze Saved Meridian from its foe Helped Erend investigate Ersa’s fate, and foiled a plot against Meridian. Bronze Aided the defectors Aided the escapes of Uthid and the child king Itamen from the Shadow Carja. Bronze Hunted Redmaw with Talanah Rose through the ranks of the Hunters Lodge and helped Talanah defeat Redmaw. Bronze
It seems there’s a fair amount of collectibles and completion based tasks. What are your thoughts on this list? Leave a comment below. If you want to learn more about the trophies check out the full Horizon Zero Dawn Trophy Guide & Roadmap.In an internal memo sent Friday afternoon, U.S. News and World Report editor Brian Kelly informed staffers that the monthly magazine would cease regular print publication in favor of a "predominantly digital publishing model."
The last print issue will ship to subscribers in December. U.S. News and World Report will continue to produce "selected, single-topic print issues," such as the publication's popular university and personal finance guides, which will be made available at newsstands and through "targeted distribution," Kelly said.
The magazine also plans to release four other special editions concentrated on topics such as history and religion throughout the year.
The publication will continue to focus on building out its website — which it pledged to do in November 2008, when it shifted its publishing frequency from bi-weekly to weekly — and developing content for emerging platforms, such as the iPad and Android tablets.
"We can't sit still," Kelly urged.
It sounds an awful lot like the advice Marc Andreessen delivered to old media companies earlier this year: "You gotta burn the boats," he said.
Image courtesy of Flickr, PinkMooseCrewe produced a wonderful away display to take a three-goal advantage into the second leg of their Johnstone's Paint Trophy northern final against Coventry.
Stephen Elliott twice forced Alex keeper Steve Phillips into smart stops as the hosts looked likely to score.
The Alex took a 52nd minute lead when Brad Inman struck from inside the box.
Inman then scored a superb second late on when he ran at the defence to fire into the bottom corner before AJ Leitch-Smith curled in the third.
Crewe soaked up a great deal of pressure from the Sky Blues, but will now take a large lead into the home second leg in a fortnight's time with a great chance of reaching the Wembley final on 7 April.
Coventry, handicapped by the loss of keeper Joe Murphy at half-time with a hamstring injury, were unlucky not to get on the scoresheet.
They came close on a number of occasions in the second half as Elliott was again denied by Phillips and Carl Baker struck the post from the edge of the area.
But they could not find the net in front of a near-capacity crowd of 31,054, the highest attendance in the competition outside the final - and the second highest in the Sky Blues' eight seasons at the Ricoh Arena.Canadian would-be parents are facing severe red tape when trying to adopt from Muslim countries, according to adoption experts who are calling on the government to take action.
"What has the government done about it? Nothing," says Toronto immigration lawyer Preevanda Sapru. "It hasn't even come to the forefront that there is a problem for people to adopt from countries where there is Shariah law."
Nusrat Munshi would like to bring Aleeza to Canada from Pakistan, but has run into bureaucratic red tape. (Submitted by Nusrat Munshi) In a sudden change of policy in 2013, the Canadian government suspended adoptions from Pakistan, arguing that the country has no legal equivalent of Canada's definition of the transfer of parenting responsibilities.
The Canadian government's Adopt A Child site says, "Pakistani law prohibits adoption, instead recognizing a form of guardianship called kafala; applications for related placements are no longer accepted."
But Saskatoon immigration lawyer Haidah Amirzadeh says the problem is much bigger than that.
Amirzadeh has been working with a Canadian couple whose five-year battle to bring their adopted son home from Pakistan ended successfully last week. She says many parents adopting from Muslim countries are finding that they, too, are being roadblocked, and that their children may never be able to become Canadians simply because of the countries in which they were born.
"I believe that this is very serious and needs public attention, as it does not stop at Pakistan. This is the issue with almost all Muslim countries," Amirzadeh says.
She adds that she has clients from Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, Iran, and Afghanistan — all of whom cannot bring their children home because the Canadian government won't recognize the adoptions, even though it has not instituted formal suspensions for those countries.
'Centre of my life'
It's a problem Canadian citizen Nusrat Munshi, 47, knows all too well.
In 2012, Munshi was working in Pakistan and obtained legal guardianship of a baby named Aleeza just two months after the little girl was abandoned at a Karachi orphanage.
But last October, Canada's Federal Court ruled that baby Aleeza wouldn't be coming home with Munshi. The court reasoned that the pair didn't meet Canada's standard of a genuine parent-child relationship.
Hearing that was the hardest part, Munshi says, because she is the only mother Aleeza has ever known.
"I haven't given birth to her, but she's the centre of my life," says Munshi from Karachi, where she remains since the ruling.
In order to be recognized here, Canada requires that adoptions first be completed in a child's home country.
But many Muslim nations have no legal provision for permanent adoption, and instead use kafala guardianship.
Canada maintains that kafala does not qualify as adoption, arguing that the arrangement does not sever legal ties with a child's biological parents.
Bureaucratic web
Other Western countries, including the United States and United Kingdom, have policies allowing kafala arrangements to be legally recognized there.
Canada's position on kafala can leave families who have received guardianship in Muslim countries caught in a bureaucratic web that appears to be unique to Canada, and unable to bring their children home.
Nusrat Munshi obtained legal guardianship of Aleeza just two months after the little girl was abandoned at a Karachi orphanage. (Submitted by Nusrat Munshi) Citizenship and Immigration Canada spokeswoman Nancy Caron says it is not Canada's policy to discriminate against any country when it comes to adoption.
"Eligibility of individual countries for inter-country adoption is determined on a case-by-case basis by the provinces and territories based on Canadian laws, and with respect for international laws as well as the statutes and wishes of the originating country."
However, Amirzadeh says whether it's an official government policy or not, the red tape effectively discriminates against Muslim families. "It's like saying, 'You're born there, so you're doomed.'"
And while a formal ban on adoptions from Muslim countries isn't currently official policy, Canada hasn't entirely ruled one out.
Documents obtained through access to information show that in 2013, the provinces and territories debated a ban on adoptions not only from Pakistan, but other Muslim countries, too.
At least two provinces, British Columbia and Ontario, refused the proposal, according to the documents.
"At this time, there is no intention of extending this closure to inter-country adoptions from other countries, although this does not limit such actions being taken in the future if determined to be warranted," Citizenship and Immigration Canada wrote then.
Michael Blugerman, a Toronto-based adoption agent who was licensed to process adoptions from Pakistan for years until the 2013 ban, says while the government needs to make sure adoptions are legitimate, lumping cases from Muslim countries together isn't the answer.
"It's what I'd call a cultural-religious-profiling problem," he says.
Karachi court approval
Meanwhile, Canada and Pakistan differ over the reasons for the adoption ban.
Citizenship and Immigration spokesperson Remi Lariviere says that adoptions from Pakistan were suspended through "ongoing procedural evaluations by the Government of Canada with input from the Government of Pakistan."
But it seems Pakistan is not objecting to adoptions.
"It was a decision of the Government of Canada," says spokesperson Nazia Khalid of Pakistan's High Commission in Ottawa. "If they decide not to allow adoption, what can the Pakistani government say about it?"
Court documents show that Pakistan does not bar Canadian citizens with guardianship from completing formal adoptions abroad.
In fact in 2012, a Karachi court explicitly allowed Munshi to take baby Aleeza to Canada for adoption.
Legal experts say that as long as the Canadian government refuses to recognize such an order as valid for adoption, would-be parents such as Munshi are caught in legal limbo.
"The federal government blames the provincial governments, and the provincial governments blame the federal authorities," says Toronto immigration lawyer Ali Amini.
"In reality, the impact is most severe on the most vulnerable of all — children who will have no one to care for them."
As for Munshi, she's not sure if she'll try again to come back to Canada with her adopted daughter.
For now, she says, "I want to raise Aleeza in such a way that every country would want to make her one of their citizens."Nov. 14: USA Today’s Bob Nightengale tweets that Boras and Martinez have set an early asking price of $210MM over the life of a seven-year term.
Nov. 8: Teams that have spoken to agent Scott Boras about new client J.D. Martinez have come away with the impression that Boras and Martinez are seeking a deal in the vicinity of $200MM in total guarantees, tweets ESPN’s Jerry Crasnick. Martinez hired Boras as his new representative just days before the free-agent period began.
It’s a jarring number to see associated with the 30-year-old Martinez, though he certainly helped his case with an otherworldly season at the plate. Though Martinez missed the first five-plus weeks of the season due to a ligament injury in his foot, he nonetheless swatted 45 home runs in a career year at the plate. On the whole, Martinez slashed a ridiculous.303/.376/.690 with a career-high 10.8 percent walk rate through 489 plate appearances between the Tigers and D-backs.
In addition to his newfound plate discipline, Martinez’s 49 percent hard-contact rate was the best in the Majors of any player with at least 450 plate appearances. That stat may even undersell the extent to which he impressed in that regard; the next-highest percentage was Joey Gallo’s mark of 46.4 percent. Statcast data pegged Martinez’s average exit velocity of 90.8 mph 15th among players that put at least 100 balls in play this past season, and he ranked third in the league in barrel percentage and tied for fourth in total number of barreled balls despite the early-season layoff.
There’s little point in doubting Martinez’s status as an elite bat after his impressive four-year run between Detroit and Arizona, but he still comes with plenty of red flags. Martinez has tallied 1973 innings in right field over the past two seasons and turned in an awful mark of -27 Defensive Runs Saved (though 2017’s mark of -5 was a noted improvement over 2016’s ghastly -22). Ultimate Zone Rating is similarly down on his glovework, rating him 25 runs below average. Statcast’s new Outs Above Average metricT suggested that Martinez converted five fewer outs than an average defensive outfielder would have in 2017. That he’s missed 85 games over the past two years due to injury and will turn 31 next August both figure to limit his earning capacity to some degree as well.
We ranked Martinez as the No. 2 free agent on the market this winter and pegged him for a six-year, $150MM deal. If Boras’ aim is to secure a $200MM payday for his newest client, though, he’ll need to broker a deal of at least seven years in length — if not eight. While that’s difficult to envision, it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility. Both Jacoby Ellsbury and Shin-Soo Choo landed seven year contracts in their recent trips through free agency, with Choo’s contract beginning in his age-31 campaign. A seven-year contract for Martinez is not outside the realm of possibility, though it also goes without saying that any agent would aim high entering free agency. While Martinez should have no shortage of teams with interest, there are very few clubs that can realistically afford to pay him at that level.
Boras spoke to Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic about Martinez’s free-agent case and specifically referenced the free agencies of Ellsbury and Choo — both his clients — as well as fellow Boras clients Matt Holliday, Jayson Werth and Carlos Beltran. Boras indicated that he feels Martinez, who hit 40+ homers this season and has established himself as a.300 hitter, is a cut above that group (and above more recent cases like Yoenis Cespedes and Justin Upton) while entering free agency at a similar age. “It’s a very rare place. It’s a unique place,” said Boras. “…all of these guys that are at this level, they’re really good players. None of them were in the 45 [homer] and.300 [average] category.”
Asked whether he felt the Diamondbacks could be a realistic landing spot in free agency, Boras unsurprisingly suggested that he firmly believes that to be the case.
“You don’t sign Greinke and not sign this guy,” said Boras in a reference to Zack Greinke’s six-year, $206.5MM contract with the D-backs. “I mean, once you drop in the pool, you’re in the water. Once you’re in the water, it’s kind of hard to say you’re not wet.” Boras called D-backs owner Ken Kendrick a “competitive owner” and suggested that the onus will fall on Kendrick to increase payroll or find a way to fit the slugger onto the team’s books moving forward. Piecoro’s column is full of quotes from the polarizing Boras and is well worth a full read.“At the farmers markets, we got together with other women producers or couples farming, and the topic of tools constantly came up,” says Adams. Women farmers said they felt they were too weak to work with certain tools and regularly expressed frustration with everything from roto-tillers to tractor hitches. But Adams and Brensinger decided weakness wasn’t the problem. “Some of the tools didn’t work because they were designed for men,” Adams adds. “We saw a need for a place where women could go for tools that work for their bodies.”
And as a result, they founded Green Heron Tools in 2008 — to find and develop farming and gardening tools designed to work with the strengths of the female body.
It seemed like a market opportunity dying for attention. After all, in the past 30 years, the number of farms in the U.S. operated by women has nearly tripled. According to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, women operated five percent of the nation’s farms in 1978. By 2007, they owned 14 percent. While women-owned operations tend to be smaller (most have annual sales of less than $10,000), their numbers and their revenue are growing. Some 2,000 female producers have sales of $1 million or more.
As the engineers began videotaping women farmers shoveling, they discovered women use tools very differently.
And women who are not sole owners are still a significant force in agricultural labor. While 300,000 women own their own farms, about one million qualify as “farm operators,” often running an agricultural operation alongside a spouse.
And while any producer knows how physically demanding farm labor is, most accept back and muscle injuries as part and parcel of lifting and maneuvering heavy equipment or contending with tough farm labor like repeated digging. But Adams and Brensinger felt it didn’t have to be this way, for women or men. “What we discovered was a gaping niche,” explains Brensinger. “We understood the link between tools and equipment and health and safety.”
To get their business idea up and running, the partners applied for an $80,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. “We held focus groups with women throughout the country and conducted an online survey,” Adams explains. “We received a lot of feedback from women on what they liked and didn’t like about tools and which ones they most wanted to see redesigned.”
Feedback in hand, Adams and Brensinger applied for a Phase II SBIR grant, this time in the amount of $400,000, to actually develop the equipment women farmers said they were lacking. They hired an agricultural engineer in the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering Department at Penn State University, an industrial engineer specializing in ergonomics, an occupational therapist and a Ph.D. candidate at Penn State to help them create women-focused tools.
1 Green Heron co-owner Ann Adams throws soil into a wheelbarrow using HERS and an auxiliary D-grip from the Canadian company MOTUS; Green Heron is the U.S. distributor for these ergonomic grips, which also include a T-grip for the end of hoes and other long-handled tools to reduce wrist bending/twisting and allow for using the whole body in pushing and pulling. (Photo by Liz Brensinger.) 2 Donna Gayer shovels with HERS, a shovel-spade hybrid scientifically designed for women. Green Heron Tools' development of HERS was supported by a USDA Small Business Innovation Research grant focused on the increasing number of women farmers in the U.S. (Photo by Liz Brensinger.) 1 Green Heron co-owner Ann Adams throws soil into a wheelbarrow using HERS and an auxiliary D-grip from the Canadian company MOTUS; Green Heron is the U.S. distributor for these ergonomic grips, which also include a T-grip for the end of hoes and other long-handled tools to reduce wrist bending/twisting and allow for using the whole body in pushing and pulling. (Photo by Liz Brensinger.) 2 Donna Gayer shovels with HERS, a shovel-spade hybrid scientifically designed for women. Green Heron Tools' development of HERS was supported by a USDA Small Business Innovation Research grant focused on the increasing number of women farmers in the U.S. (Photo by Liz Brensinger.)
As the engineers began videotaping women farmers shoveling, for example, they discovered women use tools very differently. They put shovels into the ground at an angle to take advantage of lower body strength, rather than straight down as men do. “Women’s strength is in their lower body,” Adams explains, “so we decided to create a shovel that capitalized on how women put shovels in the ground.”
For two years, the partners and their researchers pulled shovels off the shelf at places like Lowe’s and Home Depot and sent women into the fields with them to monitor how they used them, including measuring the CO2 exchange in their breathing to determine the calorie burn required of different shovel types. They ultimately designed a shovel with a large definition, angled blade, and large D-handle (available in three sizes) that weighs only four pounds. “Our shovel required the least energy to use,” Adams remarks. “There was real science behind it.”
‘Everything we sell has particular characteristics that make them ideal for women’
Called the HERS™ Shovel, it is the world’s first ever ergonomically designed shovel for women. The shovel is their best-selling tool and so far the only one they’ve developed themselves that they’ve brought to market (the other ergonomically-designed items now for sale were developed by outside sources). Currently, Adams and Brensinger and their research team are finishing up a three-year project to design and develop a new lightweight, battery-powered roto-tiller.
“Instead of using rotary tines, it uses coiled, conical blades that look like augers,” Brensinger explains. “They dig as well as help propel the machine forward.” She says because it’s battery-powered, the Green Heron tiller doesn’t vibrate or throw the operator around either, nor does it pulverize the soil as traditional roto-tillers do. “It’s gentler on both the operator and the soil,” she adds.
1 Green Heron Tools co-owner Ann Adams prepares a field for planting using a prototype of the company's new tiller. More than 3 years in development, the tiller utilizes a patent-pending technology that allows for battery-powered, vibration-free operation. Lighter and easier to maneuver than traditional rototillers, the tiller is undergoing rigorous testing and will likely be available late in 2014. It was developed with support from a USDA Small Business Innovation Research grant. (Photo by Liz Brensinger.) 2 Green Heron co-owner Liz Brensinger uses a wheel hoe from Valley Oak Tool Co. in California. The wheel hoe is ergonomic in that handle height can be easily and quickly adjusted to match the height of the user, and it allows for weeding while walking, thereby saving the back from bending and twisting. (Photo by Ann Adams.) 1 Green Heron Tools co-owner Ann Adams prepares a field for planting using a prototype of the company's new tiller. More than 3 years in development, the tiller utilizes a patent-pending technology that allows for battery-powered, vibration-free operation. Lighter and easier to maneuver than traditional rototillers, the tiller is undergoing rigorous testing and will likely be available late in 2014. It was developed with support from a USDA Small Business Innovation Research grant. (Photo by Liz Brensinger.) 2 Green Heron co-owner Liz Brensinger uses a wheel hoe from Valley Oak Tool Co. in California. The wheel hoe is ergonomic in that handle height can be easily and quickly adjusted to match the height of the user, and it allows for weeding while walking, thereby saving the back from bending and twisting. (Photo by Ann Adams.)
The tiller also allows users to adjust the handlebar height and the depth of the till. The tiller is patented but not yet available for sale.
Green Heron also sells a variety of hand tools, from soil knifes to hand plows, developed by companies that have paid special attention to ergonomics. “Everything we sell has particular characteristics that make them ideal for women,” Brensinger says. They’ve discovered many of the tools through feedback from their own customers.
“Women play a critical role in producing food,” she says. “Our philosophy is to build on the strengths of women.”Class of 2014, the time has come to find a job and start paying down your student loans. Like many young graduates, you probably don’t feel like embracing this particular change. If that’s the case, I’d like to suggest you at least consider shaking its hand.
Commencement season is here, which means a torrent of speeches about risk-taking and being bold on life’s journey — with a laugh line here and there about the student loans new graduates will have to start paying down. However, given today’s job market, most folks wearing caps and gowns will fail to see the humor.
Almost universally, commencement speakers tell the newly graduated not to worry too much about being perfect, but to always do your best as you wend your way through the vales of Not Failing toward Success. That said, one of the first places many graduates will encounter failure in 2014 is in the job market.
A recent Slate article joined the murmuring throng of pieces about the job prospects for new graduates:
“It used to be that more than half of these overeducated young workers would find themselves in ‘good’ jobs — meaning that they’d pay at least $45,000 in today’s market. Today, less than 40 percent do. Meanwhile, more than a fifth of this group were in low-wage jobs, meaning they paid $25,000 a year or less.”
For many graduates, the first dose of reality hits when they discover that the amount of money they actually make is radically different than that which they estimated would be their likely starting salary when they originally took on the burden of those student loans.
The big problem here is that there is rarely an elegant exit from most student loan debt (for example, if you become totally and permanently disabled, or if you die – to name a couple possibilities — your debt might be discharged). Otherwise, for the most part, the only way to get out from under that dark mountain is to pay your way out. That said, there are always people who think they can game the system and avoid paying.
Here are three ways student loan borrowers try to escape their fate and why they won’t work.
1. Not Paying
Difficult as it may be to fathom, many people have tried this tactic. It seems simple enough. “I mean hey, what can a lender really do to me if I don’t pay?” How about plenty — and none of it is good.
When you don’t pay, the debt hangs around like a really bad canker sore in a mouth full of hot sauce. Unlike credit card debt, there is no real bankruptcy option on the horizon for student loan debt. With penalties and interest accruing, the obligation keeps growing and there’s no escape. It’s a modern day version of owing your life to the company store.
Additionally, this approach will prove to be an albatross around your neck when you try to get a mortgage (or even rent) down the line. That’s because student loan payments tend to be some of the first credit accounts new graduates have to their name. If you miss payments, it will hammer your credit score — one of the first things lenders (and landlords) look at when determining whether to lend or rent to you. If you want to see where your credit currently stands and how your student loans are impacting your scores, you can see two of your credit scores for free every month on Credit.com.
2. Paying With Credit Cards Then Declaring Bankruptcy
Here’s another misconception that will cost you — big time. The rates on your credit cards are much higher than those on student loans. So unless you have an unquenchable thirst to waste your money on unnecessary interest payments, the only reason to pay your student loan debt with credit cards would be a feeble and misguided attempt to change the character of the obligation and discharge the debt in bankruptcy.
Make no mistake, the bankruptcy court will see right through this scheme. The student loan debt will still be due, and you will have 7 years of ugly credit.
3. Using Your Home Equity to Pay Off the Loans
For some borrowers who have returned to school later in life, they may think that using equity in their home will help them consolidate their student loans and lower their monthly payments. While this option may work, it’s most likely not a good |
blocking WRs we’re getting now, but try him out for yourself since this card should be cheaper than his rare-ish Thanksgiving version. With the added hit power and all around quality of this card, he could be a solid defender in many different schemes. A Jack of all Trades.
Rating: Hold
90 overall HB DeAngelo Williams – Best Hair (Troy P Tribute of course)
93 speed with 97 acceleration is a solid foundation to build an RB. But like a house in the suburbs with a solid foundation, there isn’t the woodwork or marble columns on this thing to make you wow. Everything else is low 90’s and having elusiveness over trucking is a problem for me. He’s a starter home for a young professional. A solid back to hang your hat on and call home until you get the killer job with the high salary to really upgrade to something in the nice part of town.
Rating: Sell
90 Overall WR Victor Cruz – Best Dressed
Seeing the stats on this card I can only imagine my reaction is the same as the girls who saw me in high school. Ironic that the best dressed winner is the ugliest of all cards stats wise. Too expensive to redeem itself as a budget player.
Rating: Strong sell
90 Overall MLB Deone Bucannon – Most Changed
I figured Caitlyn Jenner would win this award too but luckily for us MUT players Deone won it. But my god, the play rec and speed combo on this thing means he’ll be all over the place for you. Like Han in the Millennium Falcon, he’ll always be in the right place at the right time. Great user but can also be left to his own devices in coverage. His man coverage is shit at 70 but his speed will help him on long drags like RuPaul. Blockshedding and pursuit is a little low for a traditional run stuffer but far more runs this year test the outside than the inside so his speed will help stop the run more than his blockshed. He won’t need to shed blocks that don’t touch him. I wish his jump was a little better and he’s only 6’1 but those are minor concerns for what this card brings you. The standout stud from this promotional group of cards.
Rating: STRONG BUY
89 overall WR Jarvis Landry – Best Hands
I’m not exactly sure what 100 catching does as the only time my WRs are catching the rock is when the spec catch comes into play or the catch in traffic does. But Jarvis has okay other stats. 90 speed is low for this time of year and 92 route running won’t get you separation as the DBs will stick on him like a fallen tree branch. His low after the catch stats like juke and elusiveness means he won’t be great for catching a ball short and picking up the first on his own. But his price might fall through like my business ventures so he could be worth it if he’s like 10k. I don’t see it getting there any time soon though.
Rating: Strong Sell
89 Overall ROLB Jared Allen – Best Personality
I sure hope he has good personality because this is an ugly card. A 3-4 pass rusher due to his terrible zone coverage. Has great play rec and power moves but his low speed will have him beat to the sidelines by both RBs and scrambling QBs. And 83 blockshed means he’s not a factor in the run game either.
Rating: Strong Sell
89 Overall CB Desmond Trufant – Mr. Invisible
Like I said above, 92 speed is on the low end of acceptable for this time in MUT. But he’ll be a great man corner as long as he isn’t against the Tavon Austin types. 95 man with 96 agility means he’ll go pee with a lot of WRs. 93 zone and 85 play rec is low but not horrendous. Especially for his price. 6’0 isn’t bad but 54 blockshed is. Not someone you want at the nickel or Dime. Depending on your coins, this could be a real good mid-tier corner for you.
I had it pointed out to me by fixyourgameEA on the muthead forums that Trufant’s lack of press is a hindrance to his man coverage. I didn’t make that point but I should have. Be wary when pressing with this card.
Rating: Buy
88 Overall LT Terron Armstead – Best Protector
This card is worse than his 83 in a bunch of categories. His upgrades came in Strength, Awareness and pass block. His run block and pass block are 90 and 93. Solid stats for his price. But are they enough to upgrade you from his 83 card? Value-wise, no. Overall this is still a pretty good card, it just isn’t a great upgrade like we had hoped from his 83 card. But best protector needed better pass block and since it’s only about 5 categories that make up an o-linemen’s overall, what can we expect when they upgrade 3 of them? (obviously to not downgrade the others gutfoxx)
Rating: Buy – His price is pretty low
88 Overall CB Byron Jones – Best hops
I was hoping this would go to my friend farmer John as his hops are the best. Sells them to brewery’s all over the place. But Farmer John’s field is not a football one so we’ll settle with Byron. 92 speed along with his 100 jump which was rightly deserved because he set the combine record for broad jump.
More athlete than corner, Byron is an interesting case study on what can be done with high physical stats. His coverage stats limit his card but if one of you trys him, let me know how he plays. I just wish the speed was a little higher so we can have a metaphorical “combine hero” before the actual sets come out this year.
Rating: Hold and let me know how he plays
88 Overall La’el Collins – Best Pancakes
He’s cheap like I like my dates. I don’t spring for the expensive fruits. He’s got great impact block and run block. But how is he going to use that impact block when he can’t find anyone with his low awareness? So don’t run plays with a pulling guard if he’s there because he’s more likely to Forest Gump his way through the tunnel than find an opponent to block. His run block is high enough that he’ll be killer on inside zones but his pass block is too low. He’s too one dimensional for me but his redeeming value is inside zones so he isn’t worthless.
Rating: Sell unless your scheme is inside zone and straight ahead runs.
88 Overall WR Dorial Green-Beckham
This card is a BEAST. 6’5 with 96 spec catch going for mid-20k coins? Great combo of speed, CIT and run block. This is an amazing budget beast on a similar level with Amari Cooper. Get this card ASAP.
Rating: STRONG BUY
86 Overall QB Matt Hasselbeck – Most likely to become a coach
New Elite exchange player! Or CPU QB in player lock challenges with his 100 awareness.
Rating: Strong Exchange
85 Overall Drew Stanton – Best Team Spirit
Another great elite exchange player. But other than that I think his lack of throw power and mobility hurts his otherwise decent accuracy stats. Although he’s got high acceleration which plays a big part in escaping the pocket so that doesn’t hurt. Overall he’s solid as a pocket passer on a budget. You can definitely do worse. But for just 11k or so you can get 90 Winston with his 98 throw power and chuck long bombs to DGB all day.
Rating: Sell or Exchange
That’s it, let me know what you guys think on some of these guys in the comments.11 of 11
Professional record: 55-11-3 (21 KOs)
While he emigrated to Canada when he was just three years old, Jimmy McLarnin was born in Hillsborough, County Down.
Baby Face would go on to become a two-time welterweight champion and would complete a rarity in the sport of boxing—he retired on a winning note and was never tempted into making a return.
Having lost at lightweight to Sammy Mandell in 1928, McLarnin claimed a world title five years later when he stopped Young Corbett III inside a round.
He then became involved in a trilogy of bouts with Barney Ross, losing two out of three against the American. On each occasion, however, the pair went the full 15 rounds.
In writing the fighter's obituary following his death at the age of 96, Mike Lewis of the Guardian said: "McLarnin carried awesome power in both fists and his right was particularly feared. Like most big punchers, he suffered hand injuries and became more of a boxer in the latter part of his career."
So, why is McLarnin at the top of the Irish rankings? Because he's the third best welterweight of all time, according to BoxRec. Only Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Henry Armstrong are above him.
The boy born near Belfast was a shining star who beat 13 world champions and is a member of the International Boxing Hall of Fame. His CV is good enough to earn him first place on the list.
Do you agree with our rankings? Should someone else have been considered for a place in the top 10? Feel free to have your say via the comments section.
All records used in the slideshow are from BoxRec.WATE web staff - NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) - There is a total of 133 new laws or amendments to laws that will take effect in Tennessee on July 1. Here's a run down so you know what's coming.
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The IMPROVE Act cuts taxes on food, but raises prices on gas and registration in order to pay for road and bridge funding.
The tax on a gallon of gas is going up by 4 cents on July 1, and then 1 cent each of the following two years, adding up to 6 cents total. The tax on diesel fuel is going up by a total of 10 cents over the next three years.
The cost to register a vehicle in Tennessee will increase by $5 for passenger motor vehicles, $10 for buses and taxis and $20 for semis and tractor trailers. Electric vehicles will have an additional $100 registration fee.
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved In this photo taken Jan. 27, 2017, a handgun with a silencer and two magazines are shown at a gun range in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Lisa Marie Pane) Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved In this photo taken Jan. 27, 2017, a handgun with a silencer and two magazines are shown at a gun range in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Lisa Marie Pane)
The Tennessee Hearing Protection Act of 2017 lets people use silencers on guns in Tennessee. Supporters said the measure will help protect sportsmen's ears.
Legislation was also passed that allows people who can legally have loaded or unloaded guns and ammunition to bring them on their boats. Proponents have said the bill brings more clarity to the current law.
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Ask any Tennessee public school teacher how much money they spend on students out of their own pockets and you'll always hear at least "several hundred dollars" and many times "as much as a thousand."
Currently, $200 is set aside for every public teacher in K-12 for instructional supplies. The $200 is divided with $100 given to each teacher for instructional supplies as determined necessary by the teacher and $100 being pooled with all such teachers in a school and spent as determined by a committee of the teachers for such purpose.
A new law increases removes the requirement that half of the funds be pooled and instead allocates the entire amount to each teacher for instructional supplies as determined necessary by the teacher.
4. Blocking a public street is a crime
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A traffic safety bill makes blocking public highways and streets in an area that restricts emergency vehicle access a misdemeanor. The offense is punishable by a fine of $200.
The law could impact protestors who stand in the street and restrict emergency vehicles.
5. Tougher rules for public employees who commit crimes while on the job
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved (Harrison Sweazea, Missouri Senate via AP)
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved (Harrison Sweazea, Missouri Senate via AP)
An amendment is making it more difficult for public employees accused of a misdemeanor offense during their employment to avoid punishment. Currently, employees can file for suspended prosecution or pretrial diversion.
Suspended prosecution allows the case to be put on hold for six months. After the conclusion of six months, the case could be dismissed if there were no other similar offenses during the six months.
A pretrial diversion is a voluntary program for defendants charged with misdemeanors or criminal violations. When a defendant successfully completes the program, a recommendation is made to the court to dismiss the charges.
The new law makes it so that public employees who commit misdemeanor offenses during their employment do not qualify for suspended prosecution or pretrial diversion.
6. Fines for voter fraud
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved (WOOD file)
An amendment to Tennessee's election laws requires a court to impose an additional $1,000 fine for a conviction for voter fraud. It also provides a $1,000 reward for information leading to a conviction of voter fraud.
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved Spoofed phone in Oak Ridge (Photo: City of Oak Ridge)
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved Spoofed phone in Oak Ridge (Photo: City of Oak Ridge)
Caller ID lets consumers avoid unwanted phone calls by displaying caller names and phone numbers, but the caller ID feature is sometimes manipulated by "spoofers" who masquerade as representatives of banks, creditors, insurance companies, or even the government.
An amendment is adding tougher punishment for those manipulating caller identification or text messages. It makes "spoofing" a Class A misdemeanor.
8. Increased sentencing for people who target police or military
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People convicted of committing a violent offense against a uniformed law enforcement officer or uniformed member of the military or national guard where the victim was selected because of their occupation will face tougher sentencing. An amendment to a sentencing law allows the defendant's sentence to be increased.
Copyright by WKRN - All rights reserved (Photo: WKRN)
A new law bans abortions in Tennessee after 20 weeks if a doctor determines the fetus is viable through required tests. The legislation that subjects doctors to felony penalties doesn't apply if the mother faces risks of death or serious damage to a major bodily function.
10. Homeowner's associations can't restrict how you display the American flag
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Under a new law that takes effect July 1, 2017 a homeowner's association can't enforce rules that prohibit displaying the flag of the United State of America or an official or replica flag of any branch of the United States armed forces on the property owner's property.
11. Purple paint is now a no trespassing sign
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Property owners can now use purple paint on trees or posts as an alternative to posting "no trespassing" signs. The property owner must post at least one sign at a major point that specifies that the use of purple paint signifies "no trespassing."
12. Yearly armed intruder drills in schools
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Tennessee school safety teams are required to conduct at least one armed intruder drill each year.
13. Desecrating a place of worship or burial is now a felony
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An amendment increases the punishment for intentionally desecrating a place of worship or burial from a Class A misdemeanor to a Class E felony.
14. Nurses practitioners can give minors drugs for STDs without a parent's consent
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A new bill authorizes physician assistants, nurse practitioners, and nurse midwives to treat minors for sexually transmitted diseases. They are also allowed to prescribe and dispense drugs to treat the STD. Currently, only health officers or physicians can treat minors with STDs without the knowledge of the parents of the minors.
15. Credit cards can charge 30 percent interest
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A law increases the maximum annual interest rate that a bank may charge on credit card accounts from 21 percent to 30 percent.
More Tennessee laws that take effect July 1, 2017:Close
"Pokémon Go Plus" much-awaited release date has been revealed. Latest reports claimed that Niantic is expected to take the wraps off its hugely-anticipated "Pokémon Go Plus" on July 31 and will start landing in the United Kingdom in mid-August.
Apparently, "Pokémon Go Plus" will switch up the way players presently play the game in some big ways. According to Alphr, it is a wristband-mounted accessory equipped with a standalone peripheral, allowing players to play out certain actions in the game without looking their mobile phone's screen and the "Pokémon Go" app the whole time.
In the event that a Pokémon is nearby, the said device will apparently vibrate and light up. By then, the player can toss a Poké Ball and press the button to capture the Pokémon.
However, Nintendo previously stated that the one-button-catch feature will just work on Pokémon that the players had caught before. What's more, players cannot also check what they have caught until the device is connected to an appropriate mobile device.
As for the design, "Pokémon Go Plus" is said to be a combination of a Poké Ball and the shape of the Google Maps pin. The device itself is 46 x 33 x 17.55mm and weighs 13 grams.
We are doing a #Giveaway on the release date for the #PokemonGo Plus - Follow and RT to take part. pic.twitter.com/YN1JXfkliX — Pokemon Go News (@PokemonGoEN) July 20, 2016
With a price tag of £34.99 in the UK ($34.99 USD), the highly anticipated device is only compatible with iOS 8 or higher operating system. Pocket Lint reported that compatibility with Android devices is currently under development.
The device is yet to open for pre-orders, with a shipping date of Aug. 31, 2016, in the UK. However, it should be noted that Nintendo UK store will reportedly sell only one "Pokémon Go Plus" to each customer to manage the demands.
"Pokémon Go," which was released on July 6, allows players to capture, battle and train virtual creatures, called Pokémon, who show up on mobile screens as though in the real world. The augmented reality mobile game was already downloaded by more than 30 million individuals across the globe.
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MMA fighter, “War Machine” (born Jonathan Koppenhaver), is in court facing 34 charges, including sexual assault and attempted murder, in relation to his abuse of ex-girlfriend, Christy Mack.
Last year, the self-described “Alpha Male” broke into Mack’s home, beating her and friend, Corey Thomas (who Koppenhaver allowed to escape, ordering him not to call the authorities), viciously, leaving the 24-year-old woman hospitalized with a lacerated liver, 18 broken bones, multiple stab wounds, a fractured rib, and two missing teeth. Koppenhaver also forced Mack to undress, threatened to rape her, then, allegedly, sexually assaulted her with his fingers after saying “That’s my pussy and I’m going to take it back now.” She escaped and ran to a neighbour’s house while Koppenhaver was in the kitchen, she believes, looking for another knife. Afterwards, he claimed he did all this out of love.
@ChristyMack I'm so heart broken…in all ways. I will always love you. — War Machine (@WarMachine170) August 9, 2014
I only wish that man hadn't been there and that Christy & I would behappily engaged.I don't know y I'm so cursed.One day truth will come out — War Machine (@WarMachine170) August 11, 2014
I'm not a bad guy, I went to surprise my gf, help her set up her show and to give her an engagement ring and ended up fighting for my life. — War Machine (@WarMachine170) August 11, 2014
Of course this was not the first time Koppenhaver had assaulted Mack.
“He became abusive about four to five months in,” she told ESPN. “But by that time I was totally in love with him… The first time I thought, ‘Oh it’ll never happen again.’ The day after, he stayed home from training and coddled me. After every time he would hit me, those were the best days of our relationship.”
In November 2013, she tweeted that her boyfriend at the time “beath the shit out of [her]” and threatened to kill her. There are other accounts of his violence, too…
Needless to say, it’s unsurprising that this misogyny has continued in court. On Monday, Koppenhaver and his defense attorney, Brandon Sua, argued that the fact that Mack was a porn actress constituted consent to rape, instilled in her “the desire, the preference, the acceptability towards a particular form of sex activities that were outside of the norm,” and that the sexual assaults Mack was charging Koppenhaver with were “a consensual part of their relationship.”
These claims are disturbingly familiar to the ones we heard from Jian Ghomeshi last year who, likewise, attempted to claim that assault was, in fact, simply consensual “rough sex” and said that “sexual preferences are a human right.”
Essentially, Koppenhaver and his lawyer were arguing that because Mack engaged in violent sexual acts, “rough sex,” and rape scenes in porn, she was unrapeable. But it’s not really just that he thinks she, as an individual, isn’t rapeable, it’s that he actually doesn’t think rape is wrong. He thinks it’s what “real men” do.
In 2013 he tweeted that he raped Mack, following his statement up by saying, “Real men rape. ( Their GF’s and wives, not strangers, don’t get your panties in a bunch.)”
Just raped @ChristyMack She tried to make me wait until "after errands" As if! =p — War Machine (@WarMachine170) August 10, 2013
Presumably, I don’t need to tell anyone here that rape is not negated because a woman works in the sex industry… That is to say, prostituted women and women in porn are raped all the time. But I also think it’s worth mentioning that the cultural narrative surrounding pornography and the supposedly “consensual rough sex” we see in porn is part of the problem. Men all over the world watch women be abused and raped in porn and learn that it’s simply a “sexual preference” and are told this “sexual preference is a human right.”
It’s not as though violent monsters like Koppenhaver are the only ones pushing this narrative — it’s progressive men and women, too. Ghomeshi is a good example — a man who pretending to be a feminist ally and, by all accounts, a politically progressive man, who also thought he had a “right” to act out his violent fantasies on women. But where do men get these ideas from? Whether or not they’re comfortable admitting to it, leftists and liberals are complicit.
Editor of Jacobin magazine, Connor Kilpatrick, defended men’s right to access porn (you can’t argue that men in prison have a “right” to porn without arguing that all men have a right to porn), framing the sexualized abuse of women as simply “booby pics.”
Yes, this is a battle people should fight: taking away booby pics from people locked in barbaric modern day gulags https://t.co/HlCZlId2eQ — Connor Kilpatrick (@ckilpatrick) October 28, 2015
The idea that porn culture is not only harmless but that it is a human right is embraced in our culture, despite the harm of the overarching message.
Porn actively advocates against consent. It teaches its audience that consent isn’t sexy but that violence is. Porn sends men the message, every single day, that sex, in any form, is their right. That access to women’s bodies is their right. It says that rape and violence is a “sexual preference.” So it’s no real surprise that men not only try to defend, but truly believe that their abuse is not abuse at all but simply a personal sexual preference that is completely harmless — they are fed this message constantly by liberals, leftists, and porn culture alike.
Sure there are men who watch porn but don’t rape, but the fact that we work so hard to convince them that the images they see on their computer screens constitute “sex,” a “human right,” and that they are a perfectly healthy part of being male don’t counter the anti-violence messages liberals and progressive pretend to support. Men aren’t seeing that line you keep trying to draw between rape culture and porn culture because it isn’t there. I mean, it’s no wonder men like Koppenhaver and Ghomeshi think they can get away with these lines.
War Machine only epitomizes the kind of behaviour our culture, at large, condones. To say violent porn is a man’s right only to turn around and say sexual violence is not sends a dangerously inconsistent message that has real-life consequences for women everywhere.
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Meghan Murphy Founder & Editor Meghan Murphy is a freelance writer and journalist. She has been podcasting and writing about feminism since 2010 and has published work in numerous national and international publications, including New Statesman, Vice, Al Jazeera, The Globe and Mail, I-D, Truthdig, and more. Meghan completed a Masters degree in the department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Simon Fraser University in 2012 and lives in Vancouver, B.C. with her dog.You can't get a Core i3 on Newegg right now for much less than $130 -- a sum that'll put you almost at the bottom of the Ivy Bridge league with a dual-core processor, 3MB cache and HD 2500 (i.e. not HD 4000) integrated graphics. That's why it's interesting to see these leaked AMD Trinity prices over at retailer BLT. If they're accurate, they indicate that the same amount of cash might afford a top-end Trinity A10 processor with overclockable 3.8GHz quad-cores, 4MB cache and vastly superior Radeon HD 7660D graphics. At the other end of AMD's range, a dual-core A4-5300 APU could cost as little as $60. The only catch we can see -- aside from the issue of accuracy -- is that by the time these processors actually become available rival Intel may well have seen fit to adjust its own prices. In fact, Chipzilla just launched some new Ivy Bridge processors over the weekend that brought the cost of entry down to $117 -- which goes to show that nothing stands still for long. Head past the break for some official gaming benchmark claims about the A10, or see More Coverage for extras.Battles of the Somme
The Great War Arrives in Picardy, September 1914
The German Kaiser Wilhelm II arrived in Bapaume on 29th September with his entourage. He was hoping for a victory over the French Army in Picardy followed by a triumphant march to Paris. (1)
By 22nd September 1914, following the First Battle of the Marne (6th – 12th September 1914) and the First Battle of the Aisne (12th – 21st September 1914), the French and German armies began fighting a series of battles side-stepping one another through northern France in an attempt to outflank the other. These outflanking manoeuvres would take them in a north-westerly direction from the Aisne region towards the French coast. This period of fighting became known as “The Race to the Sea”. When the fighting of the First World War arrived in the Somme and Picardy region in September 1914 the British Expeditionary Force was not involved in the first battles of the Somme at that time.
Battles of the Somme, 1914
The Somme Battlefield, 1915
German trench construction in Bernafay Wood (called Bayernwäldchen by the German Army) east of Montauban from 1915. Between the wooden fence and the supporting wooden wall in the photograph a set of stairs led down to one of the deepest German-built bunkers on the Somme. (3)
During 1915 the German Second Army carried out an intensive programme of construction on its Front Line and Second Line from its northern right flank at Monchy-au-Bois, south across the Ancre river valley and over the gently rolling chalk hills to the Somme river.
From August 1915 the British Third Army, commanded by General Sir Edmund Allenby, began to take over a sector of the Front Line north of the river Somme from the French Army. In December 1915 the new British front stretched from Ransart to Curlu on the Somme river. At this time the British Third Army was sandwiched between the French Tenth Army holding 20 miles of Front Line in the Arras sector and the French Sixth Army holding the Front Line south of the Somme river.
The Somme sector remained quiet over the winter of 1915/1916. The German troops busied themselves securing their defences. On both sides of the wire the troops carried on the daily routines of trench life and training.
Battles of the Somme, 1916
Battles of the Somme, 1918
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Cemeteries on the Somme Battlefields
Crosses for German casualties buried at the German military cemetery of Fricourt on the Somme battlefield.
There are over 250 military cemeteries on the Somme battlefields for the many thousands of casualties who have identified graves. The cemeteries range in size from a few battlefield burials to cemeteries containing several thousand individuals. There are graves marked as unidentified for those whose remains were discovered, but it was not possible to identify them. In the case of the French military cemeteries and burial sites there are graves and ossuaries for the remains of French soldiers. The German military cemeteries are on land granted by the French nation for the burial of German dead, but in most cases the soldiers are buried with up to four individuals in each plot and in mass graves marked as “Kameradengraben” (Comrades Grave).
Monuments on the Somme Battlefields
Monuments and memorials on the Somme battlefields range from monuments dedicated to the memory of thousands of troops whose identified remains are missing, to monuments commemorating a specific military unit or an individual.
Thiepval Memorial to the Missing
Thiepval Memorial to the Missing on the Somme battlefield.
The Thiepval Memorial to the Missing commemorates over 72,000 soldiers of the United Kingdom and South African forces who died in the Somme sector before 20th March 1918 and have no known grave. Over 90% of those commemorated died during the 1916 Battles of the Somme between July and November 1916.
Museums on the Somme BattlefieldsA/s/l?
18, Male, Massachusetts, mostly in my stable.
What is your background in soccer?
My life revolved around soccer. It was the most popular sport growing up, every kid wanted to play it. At first, they let me join the town league, but as I grew older, the referees banned my hooves, calling them "insufficient footwear" and a "danger to the other players." Sad to say, my soccer career ended there.
What is your ideal position in soccer? Tell us about the type of player you are.
I would have to say I'd be a forward. I have one horsepower, in car terms, and that allows me to speed away from defenders. Also I can get my big head on just about any cross. Scoring goals gets the fillies as well.
Assuming by the rarity of half-human-half-horses at soccer games, how does your family feel about you supporting the Revolution so publicly?
They are all very supportive of me. They know my background with not being able to play past the age of eight and they know I still love the game. They allow me to live my dream through the Revs.From the sounds of it, that six-year, $120 million offer the Red Sox submitted to Jon Lester is doing work. Peter Gammons reported on Monday morning that the Red Sox and Lester reunion is "close to happening" according to a pair of National League general managers. The thing is, though, that we will still have to wait a couple of weeks to find out if "close" can become complete instead, and there are still some hurdles to clear.
For one, Lester is meeting with the Cardinals the week after Thanksgiving. The Cardinals are not as rich as the Red Sox, but they're arguably the best-run organization in baseball, and could provide Lester with the stability and environment he has publicly hoped for. The Giants, seemingly realizing that Pablo Sandoval is slipping away, have shifted their attention to Lester, and can also provide a Lester-worthy environment and paycheck. Most frighteningly, one reason Lester and the Sox haven't agreed to anything yet is because his agents are still waiting to hear from the Yankees. He might not have any intention of pitching for them, but if the Yankees express interest in him, the Sox (or whomever) will have to bump their offer up at least a little bit.
That's a whole lot to digest from one paragraph buried deep within Gammons' latest, but that appears to be where the Red Sox and Lester stand at the moment. The Hanley Ramirez deal isn't finalized, but it sounds like that's one of Monday's goals for both sides. The Pablo Sandoval deal isn't official, but a decision will come on Monday, and if the Sox lose him to the Giants or Padres, they will still have Yoenis Cespedes around, and can shift Hanley to third base the moment the ink dries on his deal.
The Sox need Lester. If not Lester specifically, they need a pitcher of his ability. If they can get him slightly under market because of their familiarity with him, the presence of John Farrell, and maybe their almost new additions, then that's fantastic news for the Sox. Even if they do still need another pitcher after that. There is time yet for that, as well as convincing Lester to come back home.Dell has followed in the footsteps of its rival HP by hitting the reboot button on its various brands.
Chief Michael Dell confirmed in a letter to employees that Dell—which turned 32 years of age on Tuesday—had a new name: "our family of businesses will officially be known as Dell Technologies," he said. The announcement will be made formally at the EMC World trade show, which kicks off today in Las Vegas.
Dell's family of affected brands includes Dell itself, EMC, VMware, Pivotal, SecureWorks, RSA, and Virtustream—all of which now fall under the "Dell Technologies" banner.
Things got a little bit more garbled, however, when Dell (Mister Dell, that is) confirmed that Dell's client solutions business will be branded simply "Dell." To this, Dell said, "The brand equity in the Dell PC is irreplaceable. We have incredible momentum, gaining share in 13 straight quarters. The business is absolutely core to our vision of technology infrastructure and our ability to drive innovation at scale at the edge. And above all, it’s critically important to our customers."
Further Reading Report: Dell in merger talks with storage giant EMC
But wait, there's more: Dell's enterprise business will be renamed "Dell EMC" because the two monikers, we're told, "stand for something very special to you and our customers." Dell confirmed in October last year that it was buying EMC for $67 billion (~£43.6 billion)—the biggest tech deal in history and one that brought to a close what had become an extremely acrimonious rivalry in the enterprise storage world.
Dell (Mister) added that he thought Dell Technologies had a "nice ring" to it, before pledging that "with the EMC transaction moving forward as planned, I think we’re about to get a whole lot bigger and able to do a whole lot more for customers. You better believe the best is yet to come."
There's no word yet, however, on whether Michael Dell will be re-branded Michael Michael Dell Dell. Watch this space.Canada’s national statistics agency has mapped the country’s bars and taverns, revealing that it’s easiest to find a drink in the major cities of Quebec and Atlantic Canada.
Ottawa?
It’s the very picture of moderation.
Statistics Canada divided Canadian cities into five categories based on how many drinking establishments they had for every 10,000 people in their census metropolitan areas (CMAs). Ottawa-Gatineau was a mid-ranked city with 1.0 to 1.2 bars, taverns and nightclubs for every 10,000 people within its borders.
The study included only licensed establishments that earned the majority of their revenue from alcohol sales. It excluded full-service restaurants.
The cities of Montréal, Québec City, Sherbrooke, Trois-Rivières, Saint John, Moncton and St. John’s all had more than twice as many drinking establishments for every 10,000 (2.0 to 3.3) as Ottawa. Kelowna was the only city in Western Canada in the same category.
In Ontario, St. Catharines-Niagara, Windsor, Sudbury and Kingston are the most drinker-friendly cities with 1.2 to 2.0 watering holes for every 10,000 people, according to Statistics Canada.
Ottawa was more well-watered than cities such as Toronto, Hamilton, London, Oshawa and Guelph, all of which had less than 1.0 drinking places for every 10,000.
The same map also showed that Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador were the provinces most heavily populated by bars and taverns on a per-capita basis.
Statistics Canada analyst Jamie Brunet produced the information map based on data collected as part of a national count of the country’s businesses. He said the map has to be read with some caution since the data does not consider the size of a bar or tavern.
“Any differences could be saying as much about the kinds of drinking establishments |
Average Draft Position is important to remember when you enter your fantasy football drafts this summer. If you do you homework, you will know which players are being undervalued and who is being overvalued, as well as the same for certain positions. This year, I am starting our ADP Mock Drafts with ADP from High Stakes drafts. Anyone who is willing to play in these expensive leagues is going to be an expert and willing to put in the time and effort it would take to win these leagues, and it starts with the draft! Make sure to follow along this summer as we roll out weekly ADP Mocks from, ESPN andfantasy football!All in all, after 10 rounds, each team had 1 QB & TE, but 53 WRs & 43 RBs were selected.Our son is now 7 and a half weeks old. When he was 5 weeks old I read an article in the Guardian with the clickbait title “Dropping out of university was the best career decision I ever made.”
These types of articles, posts, books, interviews, etc. are not new. However, as a new parent, I'm keen on understanding the backstory of these types of dropout narratives.
For example, what was it like financially for Thea De Gallier, the author of the Guardian article, after she dropped out of university? It's none of my business really, but if you're going to create the narrative that dropping out was a good decision, it's probably more honest than not to include a bit of background on socioeconomic status. It's a lot easier to drop out and “make it” if your road through life has been a bit more gilded than others. I'm not saying that this was/is De Gallier's path, but it seems like the dropout crowd has almost always benefitted from having a family history laced with a fair amount of wealth and resources that are generally omitted from the dropout story.
Perhaps the most prominent example of the university dropout myth comes from Peter Thiel and the Thiel Fellowship. Thiel's program “awards $100,000 to 20 people under the age of 20 in order to spur them to drop out of college and create their own ventures.” While it's nice that Thiel is urging people to “skip college,” what's missing in his hyperbolic anti-university push is that Thiel has two degrees from Stanford University.
Here's the thing: it's really easy (and super disingenuous) to push the “university dropout” rhetoric when you're successful. Thiel is a billionaire. When he says "drop out of college or better yet don't even go,” he is conveniently leaving out the fact that he has directly benefitted from his higher education experience.
In 2013, one of the first Thiel Fellows, Dale J. Stephens sent me a copy of his book “Hacking Your Education: Ditch the Lectures, Save Tens of Thousands, and Learn More Than Your Peers Ever Will.” To be honest, I didn't make it very far into the book before I chucked it in the bin. It reeked of unacknowledged advantage.
I was curious about Stephens' background. A quick search led me to an article by Lisa Balbone, Stephens' mother: “A Mother’s Tips: How to Raise a Thiel Fellow.” It's an interesting read for sure, but it conveniently forgets to mention that (according to her LinkedIn profile) Balbone has a degree from Duke University and a teaching credential from Sonoma State University. That's the context that matters. Stephens may say that college isn't necessary, but his mother sure seemed to think that it was...and I bet her university experience had a direct connection to her son's success.
Between us, my wife and I have attended 4 universities and 1 community college. Our parents are all university educated. Our educational background will have an effect on our son's decisions in 2035. Whether or not he decides to go to university is his choice. However, it matters that his family history is full of higher education experiences.
It's the missing context that unwraps the false narratives perpetuated by the multitude of university dropout stories. It's important to acknowledge parental/familial history in terms of university experience. Otherwise, these stories are just myths that perpetuate a false story that is more damaging than helpful.
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Photo CreditCable network tvN’s long-awaited series Wise Prison Life made its premiere Wednesday night with an impressive nationwide TV audience rating of 4.638 %, which is quite high for a cable drama that has just started. What is notable about this achievement is the fact that the series doesn’t have superstars in its cast or a very famous screenwriter in its production team to attract a large number of audience. It seems like all the viewers needed to watch the drama was PD Shin Won-ho’s name on it.
PD Shin Won-ho is the award-winning director of highly acclaimed and hit dramas Reply 1988, Reply 1994, and Reply 1997. 22 months after the end of his last TV series, he is back with another project that boasts of a unique and fresh content. Wise Prison Life is a black comedy that centers on the story of a famous baseball player who becomes a criminal overnight, giving the viewers a rare glimpse of everyday life in prison for someone whose successful career was ruined in an instant and those around him. It’s not actually the kind of synopsis to lure everyone so easily into watching the show but thanks to PD Shin’s credibility as a director, the drama is off to a good start with a nationwide TV audience share that beats Criminal Minds‘s record, and for that matter, all other 2017 cable dramas’ pilot episode ratings.
Criminal Minds hit the headlines last July for pulling off a successful premiere with a rating of 4.187 % which was at that time the highest-rated premiere ever for a cable drama in 2017. It could have held that status until next year if not for Wise Prison Life, which broke its record by starting off with the highest pilot viewership among all cable dramas that have been broadcast to date by JTBC, OCN, and tvN this year.
Completing the top five cable dramas in terms of pilot episode rating are Man to Man (4.055 %), Strong Woman Do Bong Soon (3.829 %), and Bride of the Water God (3.660 %).
As far as TV ratings are concerned, Wise Prison Life has had a really successful start, but can it sustain this achievement until the finale? The rating for the second episode tonight should somehow give an answer. In any case, the pressure on PD Shin, writer Jung Bo-hoon, and the main cast—Park Hae-soo, Jung Kyung-ho, and Krystal—to maintain the quality of the drama will last throughout the broadcast.
Over at the three major broadcasters, SBS’s newest series Nothing To Lose obtained 6.9 % and 8.0 % for its first two episodes while KBS2’s Mad Dog pulled in 7.4 %. MBC, meanwhile, made a rerun (which got 3.7 %) of its Saturday drama Money Flower pending the premiere of Hospital Ship‘s successor.Concern about the political effects of a deeply unpopular county pop tax — on top of recent state and city tax increases — on Thursday hung over the first day of Cook County Democrats' endorsement session for next year's primary election.
Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle took the podium to make the first pitch of the day, asking the party she vice-chairs for an endorsement for re-election next year. The beverage tax that she broke a tie vote to approve in November has been collected for just more than a week, but state Rep. Luis Arroyo asked her whether she would repeal it.
"My answer is no," Preckwinkle responded. "We had a choice last fall, either raise revenue, or make 1,100 cuts in personnel and lay off 1,100 people, and I thought then, I think now, that would severely impact the quality of services."
"Eighty-seven percent of our budget is public health and public safety, and that is the principal area in which our staff is located," she added. "So, no, I'm not going to do that."
Preckwinkle afterward avoided addressing potential political fallout of the tax and instead defended its passage. Other Democrats expressed worries, though, that the controversial drink tax could combine with a state income tax hike and increases in city property taxes to sow the seeds for a potential voter tax revolt against Democrats in November 2018.
Northwest Side Ald. Nicholas Sposato, 38th, said he expects some backlash against the pop tax "down the road in the election next year." People complaining to him about the tax "are blaming Preckwinkle and the Democrats," he said, adding that the income tax increase would compound the problem.
Democrats last month overrode Gov. Bruce Rauner's veto of a state income tax rate hike from 3.75 percent to 4.95 percent, a move made to end a two-year state budget stalemate and try to balance the state's books.
"It certainly will affect the party," Sposato said. "There will be some backlash for it."
With more than a year before next year's election, voters also might move on to other concerns. Candidates could learn more in the coming weeks, when they set out to collect petition signatures they need to run for office next year.
"While this (beverage tax criticism) has been fast moving, the rubber will hit the road — and we will have the best understanding with what's happening with the voters — when candidates go out and solicit (nominating) petitions," said one Democratic candidate who asked not to be identified to avoid conflict with Preckwinkle and other party leaders.
Even elected officials who don't serve on the County Board and had no role in enacting the penny-per-ounce beverage levy are getting heat.
"People at the grocery store are asking me why I voted for it," said one Democratic elected official who doesn't serve at the county level and asked not to be identified to avoid conflict with party leaders. "There is a combination effect. You've got this tax, the city putting on taxes, the state income tax. There may be a backlash."
The Democratic elected official said the November 2018 election remains far away and questioned whether the raw public criticism seen in the opening days of the beverage tax's collection would remain. Still, the official said, lawsuits filed against Walgreens, McDonald's and 7-Eleven over issues implementing the tax "keeps the issue in the public eye."
The same goes for radio ads and a continuing legal challenge of the new tax funded by the beverage industry and news Thursday that the county could lose $87 million in federal food stamp money if a problem in collecting the tax isn't fixed.
In apparent acknowledgment of political concerns over the beverage tax, Preckwinkle spent some of her pitch before party slatemakers Thursday defending it and saying more needs to be done to inform the public about the workings of county government.
"We're in a moment of time now where we're particularly challenged around the sweetened beverage tax," Preckwinkle told top Democratic leaders.
"We've got some challenges getting our message out about the sweetened beverage tax and we're going to begin to do that as the campaign heats (up) at the end of August and Labor Day," she said.
Ironically, the issue of a repeal of the tax was raised to Preckwinkle by Arroyo, an 11-year state lawmaker whose namesake son is a member of the County Board. Luis Arroyo Jr. was on the fence about supporting the beverage tax until the day of the vote in November, when he backed it.
Asked after the meeting whether anyone should read anything into his father's question about repealing the tax, Luis Arroyo Jr. said: "We'll see what happens."
Democratic Cook County Commissioner Richard Boykin voted against the tax and has been using public criticism of the issue to explore a potential challenge to Preckwinkle. He did not appear before slatemakers.
Also surfacing again among top Democrats on Thursday was the fairness of property assessments, which are used to figure property taxes. Making the issue particularly politically sensitive is the fact that County Assessor Joe Berrios also is the county's Democratic chairman overseeing the week's slatemaking.
Berrios could face a challenge from first-time candidate Fritz Kaegi. He has been trying to capitalize on the Tribune's "Tax Divide" series, which concluded the property tax assessment system Berrios runs favors the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
During his presentation, Berrios defended his work as assessor, saying, "Everyone has a right to file an appeal of their property assessment if they feel it is too high.... I think we're doing a great job."
Some committeemen pressed him on the issue, though, asking whether he was willing to stop accepting campaign contributions from attorneys who file assessment appeals. Berrios said that could create a system under which a well-heeled candidate would have an advantage over those without personal wealth.
"If you make a system that is fair to everyone, I will abide by it," he said.
Berrios also was asked about the way he assesses properties. "If there's a better model than what we have right now, I will use it immediately," he said.Vinyl Details Vinyl Color: Translucent Red
Album Details
Matchbox Twenty immediately established themselves as one of modern pop-rock's most popular and talented new bands with the arrival of their blockbuster debut album, 1996's Yourself Or Someone Like You. The album generated five extraordinary hit singles - including "Long Day," "Back 2 Good," and "3 am" - on its way to RIAA Diamond Award certification for total U.S. sales now exceeding 12 million. Two further multi-platinum albums followed, with 2000's Mad Season and 2002's More Than You Think You Are each spawning a steady stream of hugely successful singles, including such chart-topping favorites as "If You're Gone," "Disease," and "Bright Lights." In addition to more than 30 million records sold worldwide, Matchbox Twenty has also earned countless accolades, including five Grammy nominations, four American Music Award nods, and the 2004 People's Choice Award for "Favorite Musical Group." What's more, Rob Thomas has proven one of the most highly decorated artists of recent years, receiving three Grammy Awards, 11 BMI Awards, and two Billboard "Songwriter of the Year" honors for both his chart-topping solo work as well as collaborations with such legends as Santana, Mick Jagger, and Willie Nelson. Thomas' collaboration with Carlos Santana on "Smooth" was also named the #2 Most Popular Song Ever on Billboard's List of the 100 Most Popular songs behind "The Twist." He was also named to Billboard's Top 20 List of Hot 100 Songwriters 2000-2011 at #5 and was the top ranking artist/songwriter on the list.BC’s new government is set to table its first provincial budget on Monday, September 11. While it is expected to be less comprehensive than a full budget (as almost half the year has already passed), the investments made or missing from it will reveal a lot about this government’s priorities.
The agreement signed by BC NDP and the BC Green Party that outlines their shared policy agenda is impressive and hopeful; we hope next week’s budget will be as well. Here is our take on 9 key areas where we expect to see action.
1. Build affordable housing
Buying a home is well out of reach for the vast majority of households in Metro Vancouver (and many other parts of the province), while ultra-low vacancy rates have made conditions worse for renters. In spite of a construction boom, new supply in the form of luxury investments for the super-rich is not what’s needed. Put simply, we need the BC government to step in and build new, dedicated affordable housing stock. The NDP’s election promise was for 11,400 new “rental, non-profit, co-op and owner-purchase” units per year for the next decade, ranging from supported social housing to market rentals.
2. Invest in public transportation
To keep BC moving, major new transportation investments are needed, in particular for Metro Vancouver. The Mayors’ Council on Regional Transportation has a $7.5 billion Ten-Year Plan to keep up with population growth, build a new Pattullo bridge and add substantial new transit capacity, including a Broadway subway in Vancouver and light-rail in Surrey. The NDP promised to fund 40% of capital costs for the plan. In addition, the budget must account for the loss of revenues due to the elimination of tolls on the Port Mann and Golden Ears bridges.
3. Get serious about poverty reduction
In its first week in office, the new government announced a $100 per month increase in welfare rates (breaking a 10-year freeze), and more recently eliminated tuition fees for high school level classes for adults and made post-secondary education free to youth aging out of the foster care system. Additionally, a Fair Wage Commission will soon be struck to establish the path to a $15 minimum wage. And the new government has promised to provide funding for a basic income pilot in its first budget. Swift action and funding for other key elements of a poverty reduction plan should also build the services and infrastructure that are vital to creating a path out of poverty. In addition to building new social housing, it is essential to adequately fund mental health and addictions services, make further investments in child protection services and bring welfare rates to a level that meets the actual costs of living in the province (which requires more than the initial $100 per month increase).
4. Begin implementation of an affordable, quality childcare plan
There is a massive affordability crisis for BC families that need child care. Fees can run upwards of $10,000 per year—higher than university tuition—and regulated spaces are available for only 27% of BC children under age five. The NDP-Green agreement commits to “invest in childcare and early childhood education to improve quality, expand spaces, increase affordability and ensure childcare is accessible to all families, with a focus on early childhood education.” We strongly believe that this should take the form of the widely endorsed $10-a-Day Child Care Plan, which lays out a framework for transforming the existing patchwork of early education services into a comprehensive, affordable, and high-quality child care system that integrates early learning and care, and which is accessible to all BC families. In a 2015 CCPA study, Senior Economist Iglika Ivanova finds that $10-a-day child care would boost the economy and largely pay for itself through the higher government revenues resulting from more women being able to participate in the workforce.
5. Make the tax system more fair
BC’s overall tax system has become remarkably unfair over the last 16 years. To address this, MSP premiums are set to drop by half for families with income under $120,000 as of January 2018, and the new government has promised a task force to plan to eliminate the MSP altogether within four years. Tax fairness also means staying the course on the corporate tax increase and the new high-income tax bracket that were promised in the NDP platform. In addition, we recommend a Fair Tax Commission to review the entire provincial tax system—including natural resource royalties—and recommend measures to make our tax system more fair and to ensure we have the fiscal capacity to address urgent problems facing BC, including the affordability crisis and climate change.
6. Rebuild K-12 education
In response to last year’s Supreme Court ruling, thousands of new teachers are being hired and class sizes are being reduced across the province. We can expect this additional funding to be reflected in Monday’s budget update, along with promised funding for school supplies and the recently announced elimination of tuition fees for Adult Basic Education and English language learning programs. With overcrowded schools in many districts and some schools in urgent need of seismic upgrades, additional commitments to capital funding for education are also needed, though it’s possible this will have to wait until the first full budget in the new year.
7. Strengthen universal health care
Facing the terrible opioid crisis is obviously a top budget priority for the new Ministry of Mental Health and Addictions. On the broader health care file, the NDP-Green agreement also calls for an essential drugs program to reign in prescription drug costs, increased emphasis on preventative health services, and the expansion of team-based health care, though some of these may have to wait until the full budget. Additionally, the NDP-Green agreement also includes a commitment to invest in home and community care for seniors to improve health and reduce costs in hospitals. This is one of the three key health care priorities outlined by CCPA-BC research associate Andy Longhurst, and should be accompanied by measures to reduce surgical wait times and better utilize health human resources by reducing wasteful for-profit delivery and increasing collaboration between health care professionals.
8. Rebuild BC’s gutted public service
The previous government oversaw an incredible shrinking of government’s role over the past 16 years, including that of providing expertise, oversight and regulation. For example, prior to the Mount Polley disaster, the government significantly cut the rate of provincial mine inspections. Since 2001, the number of full-time park rangers in BC fell from 27 to seven, even as BC’s natural environment became more vulnerable than ever. The majority of provincial government scientists say that public service cutbacks “negatively impact environmental research/regulation.” The NDP election platform called for the establishment of “an independent oversight unit” for the mining industry. One thing to watch for in the budget is a signal of significant reinvestment in the expertise and regulatory capacity of BC’s public service.
9. Ramp up climate action
BC’s record wildfire season is just the latest reminder to the urgency of climate action. The NDP-Green agreement calls for $5 per tonne annual increases in the carbon tax (currently at $30 per tonne, or 6.7 cents per litre at the pump) starting April 1, 2018. The carbon tax was last increased in 2012. The agreement also promises a rebate cheque going to BC households from carbon tax revenue, such that a majority of British Columbians are better off. But much more needs to be done to tackle the climate challenge seriously—including building retrofits, expanding public transit and forest conservation—some of which will likely not be addressed in the budget until next February.
**
Of course, a number of important commitments do not directly correspond to budget line items—including getting big money out of politics, lobbying reform, a referendum on proportional representation in the fall of 2018, and the adoption of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Tsilhqot’in Supreme Court decision. But if Monday’s budget allows for meaningful action in the 9 priority areas discussed above, the new government will be off to a good start on meeting the key commitment that both the NDP and the Greens made during the campaign: to make government work for all British Columbians.
Alex and Iglika will be at the budget lockup on Monday; stay tuned for their analysis and more budget commentary from our team.
Topics: Features, Provincial budget & financeHalf the public opposes pat-downs, while two-thirds support digital scans, a new poll found. TSA uproar moves to the Hill
The uproar over new TSA screening procedures expanded from airport checkpoints to Capitol Hill on Monday, as the Democratic and Republican House caucuses convened a rare House-wide staff briefing on the new procedures this morning in the Capitol basement.
The briefing came as a new Washington Post poll shows that half the American public opposes the controversial enhanced pat-downs, the paper reported Monday. The poll also showed that almost two thirds of Americans – down from 80 percent earlier this month according to another poll the administration has widely cited to defend the policy — support the use of digital scanning machines at airports
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The enhanced pat-downs that have sparked passenger complaints are used as secondary screening as part of a new TSA policy that went into place earlier this month.
The comprehensive briefing of House staff, by a TSA deputy, covered everything – the threat from Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, screening procedures, pat-downs (standard and enhanced) – “the whole works,” one House staffer who attended the briefing told POLITICO.
He said that several House staffers were uncomfortable and averted their eyes when the TSA demonstrated an enhanced pat-down in the room of 200 people.
“The dumbest part: they did two pat-down demonstrations – male on male, and female on female,” the House staffer said. And they used a young female TSA volunteer “and in front of a room of 200 people, they touched her breasts and her buttocks. People were averting their eyes. The TSA was trying to demonstrate ‘this is not so bad,’ but it made people so uncomfortable to watch, that people were averting their eyes.”
“They shot themselves in the foot,” the staffer continued.
Obama administration and TSA officials have been trying to downplay public horror stories that have exploded on the Internet and in the media in the last few days at the controversial screening procedures, suggesting that some of them are exaggerated or even fabricated.
TSA officials note, for instance, that a widely disseminated YouTube video of a shirtless young boy having a TSA officer put his hands inside the waistband of the frightened boy's pants had had his shirt removed not by the TSA officer but by his father who was trying to speed up the TSA pat-down that the child was resisting.There is a steady increasing number of bitcoin ATMs on the map. However, many people complain that fees to use these machines are still high, although these complaints might not be that prominent as they were at the start of first bitcoin ATMs launch times. Users finally realize that running a bitcoin ATM is not that easy and there are many costs associated with it.
Bitcoin ATM fees were already analysed in our blog back in 2014. This article is supposed to look at what are the latest figures across the industry as of the end 2016.
There are two ways of collecting fee size on the site:
First is based on the manually defined values. This is normally used for bitcoin ATMs, which don’t support passing online information over API. Most prominent example is Lamassu with currently 185 installed and operational bitcoin ATMs across the world. Another way to collect data is via online feeds. There are several bitcoin ATM providers, which support online reporting of information similar to the one used at actual machines. These are: Genesis Coin, General Bytes, and Bitaccess. In case of Genesis Coin and General Bytes machines, online price is taken and converted to fee size based on Bitcoin Average rate. This allows to make all fee size comparable. In case of Bitaccess fees are reported directly.
Since April 2015 we collect daily information about fee size. There were some algorithm adjustments to calculation and storing procedure over time, but generally fees are comparable historically.
General
Current worldwide average bitcoin ATM fee is 8.4% for buying bitcoins from machines, and 5.4% for selling bitcoins for cash.
The following chart shows how these rates changed over time:
As it is clearly seen average sell rate was relatively constant over time, floating around 5.5%, while average buy bitcoin fee at ATM went up from about 6% to roughly 8%. Also from the chart it is seen that rise in buy fees is mostly attributed to 2015 year, while in year 2016 rate was relatively stable at around 8%. This could be explained that major operators entered the market in 2015 and basically did price discovery at the same time, while in 2016 they were increasing number of machines in their networks, probably keeping the price at the same level.
By country
Top three countries with largest number of ATMs are USA, Canada, UK. Let’s check how fees evolve in these countries over time.
USA
USA is the largest market with 520 (58% of all worldwide) bitcoin ATMs installed in the country.
Being the dominant market, USA influences the worldwide rates a lot. This can be seen from similarity of dynamics on both charts. There is an interesting drop in sell fees at the beginning of 2016, which potentially can be attributed to the following fact. Nowadays it is hard to find a banking partner to run such a business, as a lot of cash has to be deposited to the bank account and wired to bitcoin exchange or other BTC liquidity provider. Some operators started to charge even negative fee rates for sell BTC deals. What does it mean — any person could sell bitcoins for cash to a machine at a rate better than spot on the market (taking advantage of arbitrage get profits immediately), so such ATM operators transferred the liquidity provider functionality to end users, and earn mostly on buy bitcoin orders. That’s why average rate went to as low as 4% and stayed at about this level for the whole 2016 year.
Canada
Canada is the second largest market with 135 (15%) bitcoin ATMs installed in the country.
In Canada there was no significant change over time. Buy bitcoin fee stayed relatively stable at 6%, sell bitcoin fee grew over 1.5 years from ~5.5% to ~6.5% on average. Interesting to see on contrast from American market how buy and sell fees are relatively the same.
United Kingdom
United Kingdom is the third largest market with 46 (5%) bitcoin ATMs installed in the country.
Fees for buying bitcoin grew over time in UK: from ~4% to ~6%. Sell fee rate was floating around 5-6% interval, with some spike up to 9% in the end of 2016 and then retracting back to ~6%. There is no clear reason which could lead to this spike.
By manufacturer / ATM type
We look at top 4 manufacturers, which cover 83% of the market of installed machines: Genesis Coin, Lamassu, General Bytes, BitAccess. The following chart shows comparison of average fees for buying bitcoins at different machine types.
Lamassu and General Bytes operators charge on average similar fee ~6.5%, and General Bytes operators fee distribution is more dense around the mean value. Then there are Bitaccess machines with ~7.5% on average. The most expensive to use are Genesis Coin machines with an average of 11% buy bitcoin fee.
It was interesting to check how the price differs at one-way machines vs. two-way machines of the same manufacturer. In particular BATM2 vs. BATM3 for General Bytes, and Satoshi1 vs. Satoshi2 for Genesis Coin.
Although the values are not statistically significantly different, there is a tendency that on average buying bitcoins is cheaper at ATMs which also support sell bitcoin operation (2-way). As an explanation probably could be used the argument that operator earns on these machines more due to larger scope of operations, hence can allow lower fee for buying bitcoins. On average the difference is about 1%.
Online updated vs. manual input
As there are two ways in which fees are defined on the site (see above) it was interesting to check whether manually defined fees are biased (could be on purpose defined lower than actual (online updated) fees).
The following two charts demonstrate distribution of bitcoin ATMs depending on fee size in the U.S.
Generally, there is no obvious pattern of misreporting fees when they are set manually on the site. The spike for online updated fees at 7% is contributed by Coinsource bitcoin machines, who currently has 67 machines and charges 7-8% at their machines.
Conclusion
It was a common belief that with larger number of bitcoin ATMs installed and increased competition fees will go down at machines. The pattern of previous 1.5 years shows on opposite that fees are increasing. This can be explained by demand inelasticity, which means there is relatively stable demand despite the price level, while it keeps at reasonable levels (e.g. comparable to localbitcoins deals), also there are costs associated with running a bitcoin ATM and operators need to put markup or markdown from spot price in order to be profitable.
Another conclusion is that the world of bitcoin ATMs is split into 2 approximately equal parts: one is the U.S. market with an average fee of roughly 10% for buying bitcoins, and the rest of the world with an average of 6% fees. Combined together they give 8% fee on average, but it’s a tyranny of averages in this case.
Manually defined fees on the site don’t have obvious bias (not reported intentionally lower), and can be used as a good indicator about fee size, when automatically reported fees are not available.Japan’s biggest mobile operator said Monday it will launch a translation service that lets people chat over the telephone in several different languages.
The application for NTT DoCoMo subscribers will give two-way voice and text readouts of conversations between Japanese speakers and those talking in English, Chinese or Korean with a several-second delay, the firm said. “Hanashite Honyaku” will be a free application that can be used on smartphones and tablet computers with the Android operating system, DoCoMo said.
Customers will also be able to call landlines using the service, it said, adding that voice-to-text readouts will soon be available in French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Thai.
“We hope that with this application, our subscribers will be able to widen the range of their communication,” a company spokeswoman said.
However, she conceded the service does not offer perfect translations and has trouble deciphering some dialects. DoCoMo also said it has launched a separate service that lets users translate menus and signage using the smartphone camera. Edited from Japan firm launches real-time telephone translation.WordPress developers added the ability to create child themes so you can build sub-themes based on the characteristics of a parent or master theme. A child theme allows you to use and modify a master theme, and then save the child theme separately without affecting the parent theme. In this WP tutorial, you will learn how to create and customize a WordPress child theme.
Why You Should Use WordPress Child Themes
A child theme lets you modify a parent theme as much (or as little) as you want. You can then change the child theme without impacting the parent theme or any other projects using it as an anchor for its own child themes.
How WordPress Child Themes Work
A child theme resides in a separate directory from the parent theme, and every child directory needs to include its own style.css and functions.php files. Additional customized files and file types can be added as needed, but those files are recommended for the theme to function properly.
Using the relevant.css and.php files, you can modify everything from styling and layout parameters, to actual coding and scripts that the child theme uses, even if those scripts aren’t present in the parent theme directory.
Think of your child theme as an overlay sitting on top of the parent theme. When a visitor loads your website, WordPress first loads the child theme, and then inherits missing styles and functions from the parent theme. As a result, the majority of your background coding still pulls from the parent directory but is modified according to the child theme’s parameters before the content displays on the page.
What you’ll need
Before you begin this guide you’ll need the following:
Step 1 – Creating a Child Theme in WordPress
Creating a child theme isn’t any more complicated than the work you’ve already been doing with a single master theme.
You will create a directory for the child theme in the existing wp-content/themes directory. It’s best to maintain good directory organization by adding -child to the end of of the parent theme’s name. You can also add the name of the specific project if you prefer. Remember not to include any spaces in the file name because they can cause errors. To create a new directory, you can either use FTP client or File Manager.
The following example uses File Manager to create a child theme based on the Twenty Seventeen theme, so the full path to the child theme folder will be wp-content/themes/twentyseventeen-child.
Access the Hostinger control panel and click File Manager. Navigate to your WordPress installation directory (usually called public_html) and open the wp-content -> themes folder. Click the create new folder icon, enter your child theme’s name and click Create.
Access newly created child theme’s folder. Click the New File button, enter style.css as the file name, and click Create.
Populate the file with the following code: /* Theme Name: Twenty Seventeen Child Theme URL: http://hostinger-tutorials.com Description: Twenty Seventeen Child Theme Author: John Doe Author URL: http://hostinger-tutorials.com Template: twentyseventeen Version: 1.0.0 Text Domain: twentyseventeen-child */ Custom CSS goes after this line Give your new theme a name and change all other values to match your theme and domain name. The most important field is Template field because it tells WordPress which parent theme your child theme is based on. Once you are done, click Save.
Add a new functions.php file in the same folder, but do not copy/paste the code from the parent theme’s file, because it needs to remain separate from any modifications you make to the child theme. Instead, create a blank file or add any new.php functions required for your child theme. From the WordPress admin area, navigate to Appearance -> Themes to see your newly created child theme and click Activate.
Visit your website, and you’ll see your theme with some obvious issues (as pictured below). Don’t panic, because the functions.php file isn’t loading the CSS from the parent theme yet.
From the WordPress admin area, navigate to Appearance -> Editor and choose functions.php. WordPress has a function to load the CSS from parent themes. Copy and paste the following code to the child theme’s function.php file: <?php add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'enqueue_parent_styles' ); function enqueue_parent_styles() { wp_enqueue_style( 'parent-style', get_template_directory_uri().'/style.css' ); }?> Click Update at the bottom of the page to save your changes. Visit your website again. You will notice that the CSS is loaded and your child theme looks exactly the same as the parent theme.
As you can see the creation of WordPress child theme is pretty simple if you break down the process to separate steps.
Step 2 – Customizing a WordPress Child Theme
Most likely you want to customize the look of your child theme. That’s why you created it in the first place, right?
Step 2.1 – Customizing the Look of Your Child Theme
To customize the look of your theme, you need to edit child theme’s custom.css file. You can use a text editor and FTP client, file manager, or use the WordPress editor (Appearance -> Editor). You also need a basic understanding of CSS rules and know how to inspect elements using your browser. By right clicking anything you want to change and then selecting ‘Inspect Element’, you can look for the assigned classes for that element and the default CSS attached to it.
For example, to change the background color of the WordPress child theme, add the following CSS rule to the style.css file:
.site-content-contain { background-color: #d5ffa0; position: relative; }
See below for how this would change the look of your WordPress site. Follow a similar process for any other element you want to change.
Same goes for any other element you want to |
_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_ARMOR3] Knighted Zombie [ZOMBIE_DARK_ARMOR3_DESCRIPTION] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_ARMOR3_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_DESCRIPTION] {FLAVOR}Brains are always scarce for the common Peasant Zombie. Though he has great hunger in his belly it never compensates for his lack of upward mobility. [ZOMBIE_DARK_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_FLAG] Peasant Flag Zombie [ZOMBIE_DARK_FLAG_DESCRIPTION] {FLAVOR}There is no greater reward for a Peasant Zombie than carrying a banner into battle. Except maybe being granted a cone, or a bucket, or a nice helm. [ZOMBIE_DARK_FLAG_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_GARGANTUAR] Dark Ages Gargantuar [ZOMBIE_DARK_GARGANTUAR_DESCRIPTION] {KEYWORD}Damage: {STAT}crushes plants with hammer {KEYWORD}Special: {STAT}launches Imp Monk when damaged {FLAVOR}With a mighty swing he brings destruction to plant and fungus alike. Nothing can stand before the blows of his decisive axe... wait this guy's not carrying an axe? He looks like an axe man to me. [ZOMBIE_DARK_GARGANTUAR_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_IMP] Imp Monk Zombie [ZOMBIE_DARK_IMP_DESCRIPTION] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_IMP_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_IMP_DRAGON] Imp Dragon Zombie [ZOMBIE_DARK_IMP_DRAGON_DESCRIPTION] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_IMP_DRAGON_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_JUGGLER] Zombie Jester [ZOMBIE_DARK_JUGGLER_DESCRIPTION] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_JUGGLER_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_KING] Zombie King [ZOMBIE_DARK_KING_DESCRIPTION] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_KING_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_DARK_WIZARD] Wizard Zombie [ZOMBIE_DARK_WIZARD_DESCRIPTION] {FLAVOR}While Dr. Zomboss is amazed at the mystic powers of the Wizard Zombie, he suggested that turning plants into zombies could be an improvement. The dark Wizard would have none of it though, he only works with sheep. [ZOMBIE_DARK_WIZARD_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD [ZOMBIE_ZOMBOSSMECH_DARK] Zombot Dark Dragon [ZOMBIE_ZOMBOSSMECH_DARK_DESCRIPTION] {KEYWORD}Damage: {STAT}fire breathing attacks destroy plants {KEYWORD}Special: {STAT}dropped eggs hatch into Imp Dragons {FLAVOR}With a rumble of destruction, Dr. Zomboss forged his Dark Dragon in the heart of a volcano. Then he tempered the beast in the chilled waters of Doom Lake. Finally he fed it's furnace with coal from the Mines of Morbidity. And the paint job, that was done by Carl. [ZOMBIE_ZOMBOSSMECH_DARK_DESCRIPTION_HEADER] TBD TBD
Big Wave Beach
This version was changed from the coding as of the 2.7.1 update. On June 20, 2014, PopCap developed the world "The Beach." The Beach would only have 20 levels like Dark Ages, however it was later changed to 25 and finally to 32 levels.
Coconut Bowler - This plant was an early version of, and was replaced by Bowling Bulb, although its projectiles were the same. Its cost was 10 sun, and had a sluggish recharge.
Bamboom - PopCap was planning to bring a plant from Plants vs. Zombies Adventures to Plants vs. Zombies 2, as tribute to their fans due to the former game's shutdown on October 12, 2014, but the idea was later scrapped, and instead replaced by the addition of 12 more levels than the original plan and was replaced by the Banana Launcher. Its cost was 10 Sun, and had a sluggish recharge.
to, as tribute to their fans due to the former game's shutdown on October 12, 2014, but the idea was later scrapped, and instead replaced by the addition of 12 more levels than the original plan and was replaced by the Banana Launcher. Its cost was 10 Sun, and had a sluggish recharge. Fast Swimmer Zombie - Would have gone fast when entering the water, but would have gone normal zombie speed on land. This idea was later made into Surfer Zombie.
All other zombies remained the same before and after the 2.7.1 update.
Big Wave Beach unused content
Big Wave Beach's previous name was "The Beach".
"The Beach" description: "Check out the beach, it's hot. Get it? Hot!"
Tiki Torch-er was originally named "Coastal Calamity".
There is also scrapped dialogue from what was originally The Beach - Day 10.
[NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_1]{NPC_ENTER:zombossicon}{SAY}I'm here to bum you out again dude [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_g2]{SAY}Down there is a certain creep from the deep [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_3]{SAY}When he gets here, there's gonna be a har-har-har [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_4]{SAY}Wipe-out of your brains [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_5]{SAY}Later dude, Doc Zomboss
Main article: Big Wave Beach More beta concepts below
[NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_BANANA_1]{NPC_ENTER:crazydave}{NPC_ENTER:winnie}{PLAYFUL:crazydave}Banana's are the most a peeling fruit! [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_BANANA_2]{SAY:winnie} [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_BANANA_3]{EXCITED:crazydave}But, beware their brutal banana blast! [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_BOWLING_1]{NPC_ENTER:crazydave}{NPC_ENTER:winnie}{EXCITED:crazydave}These bulbs were made for bowling! [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_BOWLING_2]{PLAYFUL:winnie}One of these days these bulbs are gonna bowl right over you? [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_CHOMPER_1]{NPC_ENTER:crazydave}{NPC_ENTER:winnie}{SAY:crazydave}For a plant that bites those zombies back [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_CHOMPER_2]{EXCITED:crazydave}Chomper has very pleasant breath! [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_FIRSTLEVEL_1]{NPC_ENTER:crazydave}{NPC_ENTER:winnie}{EXCITED:crazydave}Look at this magnificent beach! [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_FIRSTLEVEL_2]{SAY:crazydave}Sun, sand, and water! [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_FIRSTLEVEL_3]{PLAYFUL:crazydave}What else could a growing plant want! [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_FIRSTLEVEL_4]{SAY:winnie}There's too much water actually [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_FIRSTLEVEL_5]{SAY:winnie}You normally can't plant on water [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_FIRSTLEVEL_6]{EXCITED:winnie}But, plant Lily Pads first and you'll be in business [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_FIRSTLEVEL_7]{EXCITED:crazydave}The wet and gritty business of kicking zombie butt! [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_1]{NPC_ENTER:zombossicon}{SAY}I'm here to bum you out again dude [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_2]{SAY}Down there is a certain creep from the deep [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_3]{SAY}When he gets here, there's gonna be a har-har-har [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_4]{SAY}Wipe-out of your brains [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_5]{SAY}Later dude, Doc Zomboss [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_GARGANTUAR_6]{NPC_EXIT:zombossicon}{NPC_ENTER:crazydave}{NPC_ENTER:winnie}{SAY:crazydave}This is totally Rhombusville totally [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_HOMINGTHISTLE_1]{NPC_ENTER:crazydave}{NPC_ENTER:winnie}{SAY:crazydave}Homing Thistle is one sure shot [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_HOMINGTHISTLE_2]{SAY:winnie}It helps when the shots can steer themselves [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_HOMINGTHISTLE_3]{PLAYFUL:crazydave}I wonder where those little guys went to flying school? [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_MORE_BOWLING_1]{NPC_ENTER:crazydave}{NPC_ENTER:winnie}{EXCITED:crazydave}There's a new bulb in town to help you bowl 'em over [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_MORE_BOWLING_2]{SAY:winnie}And this bulb won't steer you in a missed direction [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_MORE_BOWLING_3]{PLAYFUL:crazydave}Penny, I believe you meant Mrs Direction [NARRATIVE_BEACH_INTRO_ZOMBOSS_1]{NPC_ENTER:zombossicon}TBD intro [NARRATIVE_BEACH_OUTRO_DANGER_ROOM_KEY_1]{NPC_ENTER:crazydave}{NPC_ENTER:winnie}{EXCITED:crazydave}A clam! Let's make a glorious chowder with it! [NARRATIVE_BEACH_OUTRO_DANGER_ROOM_KEY_2](SAY:winnie)My analysis indicates that is one bad clam [NARRATIVE_BEACH_OUTRO_ZOMBOSS_1]{NPC_ENTER:crazydave}{NPC_ENTER:winnie}{SAY:winnie}TBD outro
Unused bowling ball projectile
In the Bulb Bowling Brain Buster (only in Day 8, because in Day 24 there's no code about it), there was a giant bowling bulb which was going to appear (like the Giant Wall-nut in the mini-game Wall-nut Bowling 2 from Plants vs. Zombies), but was scrapped.
Beta Bulb Seed Packets
Frostbite Caves
Before being renamed, Ice Age was its concept name. It advertised +16 Levels! +3 Plants!", and a total of 19 items.
Icebound Battleground was originally named "Frozen Fear." The introduction text was originally: Crazy Dave: Hi neighbor! Welcome to Frozen Fear! (tap) It's even more challenging than the Slushee of Sorrow!
Zombot Tuskmaster 10,000 BC was originally named "Zombot Mastodon-otron."
Unused Frostbite Caves level
Plants vs. Zombies 2 Hidden Level - Frostbite Caves Day 24B!!!
Trivia
It was the first level with multiple versions of the same plant, with five Hot Potatoes (unless the player counts using the Imitater). Furthermore, it is also the one of levels where all the tiles are pre-planted on and all of them are frozen; the second is a step in Electrical Boogaloo.
Neglecting Frostbite Caves - Day 30, it is the only level that does not feature ice floes.
Lost City
These plants still remain unused (they were unintentionally exposed in the Neon Mixtape Tour Side B Dev Diary as well): Sungun - Would have attracted sun, then would have shot it out towards a zombie with each shot dealing 7 normal damage shots. Its cost is 75 sun, and has a fast recharge. Sunpod - Has similar properties to Pea Pod, and has something to do with how much sun the player has: when the player has ≥500 sun, it grows a head, and when the player has ≥1000 sun, it grows another head and so on until it is maxed out. Its cost is 300 sun, and has a fast recharge.
These plants have been renamed: Columnpod (now Red Stinger, seeing as it increases defense when put further from the player's house) Goldtileturnip (now Gold Leaf, seeing as it refers to Gold Tile-producing Tile Turnip)
Unused zombies: Totem Dropper Zombie would have dropped objects to create a totem, and would have required 3 objects in a pile to create the said totem. The totem would have then afterwards summoned an Explorer Zombie. It might have been a prototype version of the Imp Porter, albeit with a different theme (totem dropping, instead of tent depositing) and a specific zombie being summoned.
Unused achievement Can't Stop the Rock: Defeat 5 zombies with a single boulder trap. The achievement was proven to be too easy, as even a zombie itself can achieve this for the player in Lost City - Day 22.
Neon Mixtape Tour
Initial name
There is an unused Frostbite Caves Locked and Loaded level, that has all of the plants frozen in ice blocks. The player starts with multiple Hot Potatoes installed on their corresponding seeds. Name level stays as is and would have been before the current version of Day 24
According to the credits of the 3.9 update, Neon Mixtape Tour's prototype name was probably "Mondo Mixtape Tour, with "mondo" meaning, "big" or "major." Also, its code name is "eighties."
Beta lawn
The beta lawn is identical to the current one, but has red cups all over the place.
Unused idle animations
MC Zom-B and Breakdancer Zombie have unused idle animations that were probably going to be used in the Almanac and seed selection. By modding the game, it is possible for MC Zom-B and Breakdancer Zombie to play these animations. Punk Zombie also has an unused dancing animation but has since been removed since Neon Mixtape Tour Side B.
Later, PopCap Shanghai decided to bring these back into the Chinese version of the game, as part of the idle animation when Pyro-shroom's Plant Food effect would be played.
Flag's image
Instead of a brain, Neon Flag Zombie used to have a written the logo of ZTV, a parody of MTV. This was still used in the Piñata Party teaser icon.
Beta music
PvZ 2 Neon Mixtape Tour custom mix 2 (beta music)
Jurassic Marsh
Jurassic Marsh's prototype name was Mesozoic Marsh.
Perfume-shroom's beta name was "dinonip." Dinonip would later become its own plant in the Chinese version
Mesozoic Marsh (old name of Jurassic Marsh) in Part 1, would have only had 2 dinosaurs (raptor and stegosaurus).
In Part 2, there would be 3 dinosaurs (T. Rex, Ankylosaurus and either Pterodactyl, Brontosaurus, or a new dinosaur).
Modern Day
Unused Beghouled Power Up
The video for the beta music can be found here. It seem to have used actual songs such as "Walk Like an Egyptian" from The Bangles and others for placeholders.
There is an unused powerup in Beghouled which was blue in color and a shovel appearing to fill a hole. Its usage in-game is unknown, though could be a function to fill a crater left by an eaten plant, like in the first game.
Renamed plants
Aquabooster (now Moonflower)
Beta music
Sound Description Middle wave B Last flag
Beta gameplay
Before the release of the game, these are the graphics that were going to be used.
UI concept art
The following images are concept art done by Noah Maas. Tactical Cuke, an unused upgrade or Power Up, can be seen. According to the first three images, it seems that the seed packets were like the first game's seed packets on mobile devices. The second image showcased that plants were once going to be leveled up like in the Chinese version and the menu button appeared in the seed selection screen.
Unused worlds
Tutorial World
There are codes for a tutorial world, in which the first four tutorial levels could have been played again like normal levels. This was later scrapped for an unknown reason.
Pieces of the world The note
Prehistoric World
Before the android release, there was data for a world simply named "prehistoric." Nothing else existed for this world, except its existence in the world map selection data. It was possibly a concept of Frostbite Caves, or even Jurassic Marsh.
A world in the Chinese spin-off game Plants vs. Zombies: All Stars was released based on this concept, under the name Prehistoric Ages.
Time Twister
Time Twister was originally in the game files, but it was later removed. It would have been the final world, composed of features from all the previous worlds. Modern Day replaces this world, as both contain previous world gimmicks and zombies. The name, however, was reused as the name of a Piñata Party event.
World icon World icon silhouette Icon
Unused plant upgrades
Thyme Warp
Thyme Warp currently has no upgrades. However, some exist in the files:
Level Seed packets Coins Upgrades Sun Cost Recharge
(Very Slow) 1 50 1,000 75 60 seconds 2 3,000 75 60 seconds 3 5,000 75 60 seconds 4 75 60 seconds 5 75 60 seconds 6 75 50 seconds 7 75 50 seconds 8 50 50 seconds 9 50 50 seconds 10 50 45 seconds
Unused code
These are unused upgrades and text files found in the code.
Collectible Bacon : It is unknown what it can do, but there are some text related to "Collectible Bacon" in the files. Description: Collect Bacon. Because Bacon.
: It is unknown what it can do, but there are some text related to "Collectible Bacon" in the files. Increase Power-Up Duration Upgrade : It can increase the duration of the power-ups that are active, two exist in the game's files. Description: Increases the duration that your powerups are active.
: It can increase the duration of the power-ups that are active, two exist in the game's files. Valuable Mowers Upgrade : It is an upgrade that can make the lawnmowers give two coins instead of one. It is found in the files. Description: Drops more money for each lawnmower at the end of a level.
: It is an upgrade that can make the lawnmowers give two coins instead of one. It is found in the files. Change Vase Color Power-Up : It is a powerup that lets you change the color of a vase, for example turning a brown vase into a green vase.
: It is a powerup that lets you change the color of a vase, for example turning a brown vase into a green vase. Scrapped zombies: ZombieProto seems to be an early version of the Basic Zombie and was removed in later versions.
ZombieProto seems to be an early version of the Basic Zombie and was removed in later versions. Unused zombies : There are two unused zombies named "ZombiePet" and "Cleopatra." Since for now Zombie Pet just works like a slower basic zombie that attacks other types of zombies (A tool named "Zombie Spawner" sends Zombie Pets down the lane, as seen below when you press a mower). Cleopatra summons Mummy Zombies, and stops moving as soon as it gets damaged or reaches a plant.
: There are two unused zombies named "ZombiePet" and "Cleopatra." Since for now Zombie Pet just works like a slower basic zombie that attacks other types of zombies (A tool named "Zombie Spawner" sends Zombie Pets down the lane, as seen below when you press a mower). Cleopatra summons Mummy Zombies, and stops moving as soon as it gets damaged or reaches a plant. Non-colliding barricades exist, which let the player plant above them.
exist, which let the player plant above them. Endless Mini-games are endless versions of Mummy Memory, Cannons Away and Not OK Corral.
are endless versions of Mummy Memory, Cannons Away and Not OK Corral. Tactical Cuke : The Cuke from the Chinese version has a seed packet in the international version named "tacticalcuke," a plant from Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare.
: The Cuke from the Chinese version has a seed packet in the international version named "tacticalcuke," a plant from. Sprout was originally going to be used in the Zen Garden, instead of small plants. It was ultimately scrapped, but has data to be used in-game (this was exposed in the Neon Mixtape Tour, Side B Dev Diary).
Power Flame before the 2.7 update Power Flame from the 2.7 update to the 3.1 update Collectible Bacon and other upgrades Using Power Flame in an earlier update Vasebreaker before using the Change Vase Color Vasebreaker after using Change Vase Color multiple times Plants vs Zombies 2 - Hidden Powerup in Vasebreaker Color Changer Gameplay of the Change Vase Color Power-Up Tactical Cuke seed packet Sprout in-game Sprout Endless Zone card An unused upgrade (possibly a Sun Bonus or Seed Bonus considering its design) Sprites for the removed "Hero Cleopatra" PvZ 2- Cleopatra Zombie! Skip to 4:39 and look at the right corner to see summoning Mummies Sprites of "ZombieProto" which all what was left was a dot Unused Puff-shroom projectiles
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Plantable in-game Marigold
Marigold was originally going to be plantable in-game, but this idea was later scrapped and Marigold became only available in the Zen Garden. In the Chinese version, Marigold seems to be plantable because in the Chinese version it costs 50 sun and is usable, and it has its levels 2-4 seed packets.
Unused/Beta Images
Unused text
There is a line on the files about a message, that is shown if the player tries to plant a Tangle Kelp on a Lily Pad and other things related to Lily Pad. [ADVICE_PLANT_TANGLEDKELP_ON_LILYPAD] No planting Tangled Kelp on a Lily Pad. [ADVICE_PLANT_LILYPAD_ON_LILYPAD] Lily pads can't be planted on Lily Pads. [ADVICE_PLANT_MORE_LILYPADS] Try planting more Lily Pads! [ADVICE_PLANT_LILYPADS_ON_WET] Lily Pads can only be planted on wet sand and water.
Penny is referenced internally as "Winnie."
The following flavor text was scrapped: Starfruit and Marigold used their flavor text from Plants vs. Zombies. Citron: Since he was a young citrus he tried to donate plasma to help out people, but his juices were too acidic. Then he discovered how to donate a different kind of plasma. Laser Bean: Was just a regular bean until a lab accident involving a chemical spill and a radioactive weevil gave him strange powers beyond those of normal beans. Magnifying Grass: Magnifying Grass turns sun into a focused beam of damage. (description header) Tile Turnip: Through great sacrifice comes great Power Tiles. Such is the way of the Tile Turnip. Sun-shroom: With a little more time and effort Sun-shroom know he could do better. He's pretty proud of those big suns he pops out, though he does feel a little bloated. Puff-shroom: Puff-shroom is deeply rooted in the social networking systems. His online favorites are Yeastbook and Funggit, but nothing beats camaraderie of a Lawn Area Network of fellow Puff-shrooms. Fume-shroom: "I think of myself as a pretty confident shroom and an all-around fungi," says Fume-shroom. "But sometimes I hear chuckles, and calls for 'Balloon-shroom'. I don't think they know how much that can hurt my feelings." Sun Bean: Sunbeans infect zombies with sun. As a zombie takes damage they generate sun. (Description header, version 2.2.2) Sun Bean: One of a growing band of bean brothers, Sun Bean thinks Chili is a little crude, Spring is rather lazy, and Laser is a bit far-out. Still he loves them all the same. Pea-nut: Pea-Nut swears that he is hypo-allergenic and safe for use by all manner of lawn defenders. He just wishes people would stop planting him upside down. Magnet-shroom: Magnet-shroom is quite aware of his unconventional appearance, but he doesn't let it bother him. In his heart he knows he's the most attractive shroom around. Cold Snapdragon: Cold Snapdragon gets chilly when anyone brings up his cousin Snapdragon. "It happened a long time ago, and I'd really rather not discuss it" he says. Yikes.
Unused tombstones and minecarts
There are tombstones in the code for all worlds. There were also unused tombstones in Dark Ages. There are also unused minecarts and rails that were originally going to be in Ancient Egypt, Pirate Seas, and Far Future, but they were ultimately removed and they were used only in Wild West. However, in the Chinese version of Plants vs. Zombies 2, Far Future minecarts and rails are usable, as they are essential for an exclusive Brain Buster, All by Oneself, albeit with a slightly different minecart design. Big Wave Beach tombstones were originally going to be used for certain unreleased Vasebreaker levels, but those are either scrapped or unreleased.
Beta costs
A few of the plants had a different sun cost and gems cost prior to its final release. Some of the Power Ups were also going to have a different coin cost.
Beta music
The music that plays in Crazy Dave's second transmission is the early music for Pirate Seas. It was also composed by Laura Shigihara. All this is confirmed by Shigihara, as seen here.
Unused Zen Garden features
Unused boosts
There are some unused boosts found in the code, which are called Bounty Hunter, Extra Toughness, Fast Recharge, Rapid fire, Shovel Bomb and Sun Discount. They could be obtained in the Zen Garden.
[BOOST_COMBAT_RAPID_FIRE] Faster attack rate. [BOOST_COMBAT_SHOVEL_BOMB] Explodes when shoveled. [BOOST_COMBAT_SUN_DISCOUNT] Reduced sun cost. [BOOST_DETAIL_BOUNTY_HUNTER] Zombies defeated by this plant drop coins. This boost lasts for 1 level. [BOOST_DETAIL_EXTRA_TOUGH] Extra protection from zombies. This boost lasts for 1 level. [BOOST_DETAIL_FAST_RECHARGE] Recharges more quickly. This boost lasts for 1 level. [BOOST_DETAIL_RAPID_FIRE] Attacks at a faster rate. This boost lasts for 1 level. [BOOST_DETAIL_SHOVEL_BOMB] Explodes when shovelled. This boost lasts for 1 level. [BOOST_DETAIL_SUN_DISCOUNT] Costs less sun to plant. This boost lasts for 1 level. [BOOST_TITLE_BOUNTY_HUNTER] Bounty Hunter [BOOST_TITLE_EXTRA_TOUGH] Extra Toughness
Unused Zen Garden watering animations
Gallery
Unused zombies and features
Unused Treasure Yeti costume
The single-use plants were originally going to have boosts, thus being available in the Zen Garden. They were scrapped because since the plants disappear right after being planted, boosts for them would be completely unnecessary. Only the plants up to Far Future have these animations. These animations were later used after the 5.7.1 update when you get all the seed packets to level up the plant. Every single-use plant after Far Future just have their idle animation reset. The Sprout from the first game was replaced by small plants. These animations can still be viewed by upgrading one of these plants, as their animation will play when their seed packets max out on a level.
There was going to be a Wild West costume for Treasure Yeti (it was found in its sprite file), but it was scrapped for unknown reasons.
Old seed packet designs
Before the Lost City seed packets were created, all world-based seed packets were different than what would be released later on.
Costumes
Several costumes are known to exist or appear in the sprite files, but never appeared. Some of these are used in the Chinese version or Plants vs. Zombies: All Stars, while some of them may appear in future updates.
Scrapped costumes
The following costume was changed between updates:
The following costume was moved to a different plant between updates:
Developmental features
A "Zombie Spawner" feature allows the unused Pet Zombie to be summoned from lawn mowers that would attack other zombies. Renting premium plants are also hidden. In 3.8.1, A new feature was added, the favorite button which would mark a plant with an x and put the said plant's seed packet in front of the Player's House plants. In Update 7.0.1, this feature was officially added to the game with a redesigned UI.
Gallery
Unused Levels
Empty Level - Unused Level - Plants vs. Zombies 2 It's About Time Challenge Test! - Unused Level - Plants vs. Zombies 2 It's About Time Starter Plant Prototype 1 - Unused Level - Plants vs. Zombies 2 It's About Time Starter Plant Prototype 2 - Unused Level - Plants vs. Zombies 2 It's About Time Starter Plant Prototype 3 - Unused Level - Plants vs. Zombies 2 It's About Time Sprout Planting Prototype 4 - Unused level - Plants vs. Zombies 2 It's About Time Sun Surplus Prototype 1 - Unused Level - Plants vs. Zombies 2 It's About Time
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Jukebox
There is currently a data for a jukebox in the code. It is unknown how it works or where it can be played. However, it could provide a way to listen to the game's soundtrack.
Resources†ý...UI_PauseMenu..UI_DangerRoomþ
The code suggests that it can be played in the pause menu and Endless Zones. It also has UI but currently has no textures.
CurrentUI..JukeboxSongListAreaƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshotƒ...CurrentUI..DurationAreaƒ...CurrentUI..CloseButtonƒ...CurrentUI..PlayButtonƒ...CurrentUI..PauseButtonƒ...CurrentUI..BackwardButtonƒ...CurrentUI..ForwardButtonƒ...CurrentUI..LoopButtonƒ...CurrentUI..ShuffleButtonþ
This suggests it has a Song List, Rewind Button, Fast Forward Button, Play Button, Loop Button, and Shuffle Button.
CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_beachƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_cowboyƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_darkƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_dinoƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_egyptƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_eightiesƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_futureƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_iceageƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_lostcityƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_menusƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_modernƒ...CurrentUI..AlbumSnapshot_pirateþ‘.‘.‘.‘.‘.†ý...UI_Jukeboxþ‘..$IMAGE_UI_JUKEBOX_JUKEBOX_ALBUM_MENUSÿÿ…‘.†ý...AlbumSnapshot_beachþ
It also appears they will have album artwork for every world.It’s no secret that a growing number of anglophone parents in Quebec are choosing French schools for their children.
This has contributed to a decline in enrolment at Quebec’s English schools, particularly on the island of Montreal. While other factors are beyond school boards’ control — like demographics and the restrictions imposed by Bill 101 — the 12 per cent of anglophones opting for French schools is one variable they might hope to influence.
These parents increasingly realize that for their children to not only survive but thrive in Quebec they need to be both bilingual and bicultural.
But these very personal decisions are often at odds with the interests of the English-speaking community, which benefits from strong institutions that serve members in their mother tongue.
Quebec’s English schools need to do more to adapt to this dynamic. The English Montreal School Board this week launched a new publicity campaign: “Être bilingue, c’est gagnant!” to tout the benefits of its bilingual and immersion programs. It might also extol the advantages of education in English schools, like stronger writing skills in English, and the advantages of a mother-tongue education for weaker students or those with learning disabilities.
But English schools must further improve the quality of French instruction if they are to win over anglophone parents whose children have eligibility certificates.
It’s also important that English schools find ways to give anglophone children more exposure to their francophone counterparts outside the classroom. For example, sharing facilities at under-capacity English schools with bursting-at-the-seams French schools would be one way to expose anglophone children to the kind of schoolyard interactions many of their parents are craving. This could also pave the way for shared after-school programs and extracurricular activities.
There could also be more informal co-operation, like exchange programs or the twinning of nearby French and English schools for special activities.
While there are sure to be objections from French-language hardliners, many francophone parents also want this. And precedents do exist.
Parents must do their part, too. Perhaps the level of French would be higher in English schools if more anglophone children started school with a stronger grasp of French from daycare or preschool.
If parents fail in this task, it will be their loss. Their children may one day leave the province.
The way to safeguard the future of the English-speaking community and its institutions is to ensure the next generation is at ease both linguistically and culturally in Quebec. The key to this common goal is a closer alignment between the needs of anglophones as individuals and of the community as a whole.Michele Ferri is the brother of 51-year-old Andrea, a petrol station manager who was allegedly gunned down by two men including one young employee he treated like a son.
The death shocked the north-eastern town of Pesaro.
Michele Ferri wrote a letter to the Pope telling him of his inability to forgive the killers and was shocked when he picked up the telephone on Wednesday evening to hear: “Ciao Michele, it’s Pope Francis.”
At first Mr Ferri thought it was a joke but said he was overcome with emotion when he realised it was really Francis on the line from the Vatican.
“He told me he cried when he read the letter I wrote to him,” Mr Ferri said.
The Pope also asked to speak to Mr Ferri’s mother to express his personal sympathy.
The telephone call is the latest in a series of spontaneous personal gestures by Pope Francis that have surprised Catholics around the world since he was elected Pope in March.
Read the rest.A woman was hospitalized Wednesday after she was shot during what police called a domestic disturbance.
Boone County emergency dispatchers received a call at 1:14 a.m. reporting a woman with a gunshot wound at Midwest Petroleum, 1412 Range Line St., according to a Columbia Police Department news release. The 30-year-old woman told police she was shot in the foot during a fight with a man in the 1500 block of Fir Place. The woman told officers that she was in a relationship with the shooter, according to the release.
Police tried to contact the man at the Fir Place residence, calling in the Crisis Negotiation and SWAT teams when the man stopped talking to officers who were trying to negotiate his surrender, the department said. Police raided the house after the man stopped talking to them, but he was not inside, the release said.President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration team reportedly wanted to include tanks and missiles in his parade Friday to show off U.S. military power, the Huffington Post reported Thursday.
According to several sources involved in Friday's proceedings, Trump wanted to make sure his swearing-in came amid an "unusual display of heavy military equipment," the HuffPost's Jessica Schulberg reported—although the military itself ultimately denied the request.
"They were legit thinking Red Square/North Korea-style parade," the source said, referring to the kind of show-of-strength military marches typically seen in Moscow and Pyongyang.
As Trump himself told the Washington Post on Wednesday of plans for the parade, "That military may come marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. That military may be flying over New York City and Washington, D.C., for parades. I mean, we're going to be showing our military."
Schulberg writes:
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The military, which traditionally works closely with the presidential inaugural committee, shot down the request, the source said. Their reason was twofold. Some were concerned about the optics of having tanks and missile launchers rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue. But they also worried that the tanks, which often weigh over 100,000 pounds, would destroy the roads. "I could absolutely see structural support being a reason [not to use tanks]," a Department of Defense official said. "D.C. is built on a swamp to begin with."
There will, however, be five military flyovers representing each wing of the armed forces—which are not typical for inauguration parades.
Stephen Kerrigan, a top official in both of President Barack Obama's swearing-in ceremonies, said he was "shocked" to hear about the flyover plans. "It seems unnecessary and the optics don't seem appropriate....It's very Red Square," he said.If he weren't set to break Nebraska's all-time receiving record this season, Kenny Bell knows exactly how he'd be enjoying college football games this fall.
And it wouldn't be at the stadium.
"It's way easier to sit on your couch in your underwear and sit on Twitter," Bell said. "Then when there's a commercial, play a game of Halo, then go back to the game. There's no question."
Purdue defensive end Ryan Russell tried to remember the last time he watched any sporting event without checking social media. He finally came to the conclusion that it must have been before he signed up for Twitter.
Explaining why he thinks students wouldn't attend games, he said: "Why would I go when I can get it on my phone or my iPad?"
In Champaign, Illinois |
harmed. If you step back for a minute about the precaution of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, as a precaution: well, if clean, green energy is the same price as dirty energy, I think people would naturally prefer to use the cleaner source of energy. I mean, that's just--I think people prefer clean energy. But they don't want to sacrifice the abundance or the ready availability of the energy; and they don't want to pay too much more for it. So, until we figure out how to make sure the clean energy would be abundant and cost competitive, I think it's going to be a very tough sell. Are we going to sacrifice the availability--especially in the developing world? There is a very different problem in the United States. They don't have enough power as it is, and part of their--a key element--of their development goals is more abundant power. And there's no obvious way to provide all that they need with purely green energy. Although some countries like India are making really good progress in terms of implementing solar power and things like that, it's just a very tough thing to do. So we have to look at the unintended consequences. When you are implying the precautionary principle, it's a mistake just to look at one piece of it and not consider the unintended consequences. Again, that's one of the hallmarks of the wicked problem framing, is that no matter what you propose to do, there are unintended consequences and you have to ask, is the cure worse than the disease? Even with--until we get better battery storage for wind and solar, it's not clear that those power sources are actually--at least, say, in the United States--helping us reduce CO 2. Because when the wind dies out you have to quick crank up the gas burners. And the spin-up for that--using as much fossil fuels as you might have been saving from when you did the wind energy. So, you know, what the actual savings are isn't always obvious. And what the unintended consequences are need to be looked at. So, again, the key issue is if we can figure out technologies and infrastructures to make clean energy available at approximately the same costs as fossil fuels, then we are ready to make the transition. But until then, it's hard to justify this on a very massive scale. Various regions, experiments--some things will work and some things won't. I think it's very interesting what California is trying to do, etc. Again, that's a very wealthy state. They can afford to experiment in ways that Africa may not want to experiment, because they are desperate for energy and coal is the cheapest and most obvious way to provide them with that energy. So, how do make those calls? When you balance all the various issues? Again, I'm just waffling and saying, you know, complex problem, uncertainty, whatever. But at the end of the day I think we are transitioning to cleaner energy, and there are lots of reasons beyond greenhouse warming to transition to cleaner energy. Especially coal burning and the small particulate issue. That's a major health issue. It's a huge health issue in Asia, in China, in Bangladesh, in India. It's just a huge issue in terms of air quality. It's a massive health issue. So I think they are motivated to try to get away from coal burning as a public health issue. Not only are they poisoning the air but also even the water and the soils. Their soils are losing productivity because of all the pollution. So, if you have another reason for moving to clean, green energy besides just the greenhouse warming issue, then I think you have, I think, a winning solution. So, trying to bring in other aspects--whether it's economics or environmental quality, public health, national security. If those issues are also drivers for going to clean energy, then it doesn't seem like such a potential risk, just going to clean energy over the global warming issue. That's my take on how to think about the problem. And again, it's mushy but I think it's consistent with global warming and energy issues as being wicked problems.
43:17 Russ: So, you've been--I want to wander to a broader topic; we'll get back to some climate issues in a minute. You've been out of graduate school for about 25 years or so. That's how long I've been out. When you come out of graduate school, I think inevitably you have some romance about the enterprise you are involved in. There are many, many nonmonetary aspects of being an academic that are inspiring and exciting. But I wonder how you feel about how your particular field has changed as you've grown up in it and been out for 25 years. Do you think that the academic world as it's currently constituted, the returns to publishing and the way that academics are successful--are they conducive to truth-seeking? Do you feel that we are making progress in the scientific world on this particular topic? Or are we in trouble? Guest: I think we're in big trouble. When I left graduate school, nobody called themselves a climate scientist. They were an atmospheric dynamicist or a geochemist or a physical oceanographer or things like that. And we were all focused on increasing fundamental understanding. And that was the focus. It was the breakthrough in understanding, changing the way people think, was what mattered. And somebody who published too many papers was probably looked at with suspicion--they are doing the quick and easy stuff; they are not really digging in. It was potentially superficial. The other thing that was looked down upon, say in the 1980s, was doing something that was too applied, working to deal with regional problems or something like that. That was viewed as soft core; it was what the people did who couldn't really make fundamental contributions to understanding, so they moved on to some of these applied topics, which were useful in some way to regional decision-makers. I would say in 2000--it was a gradual transition, but I think circa 2000 there was a switch to people finding it beneficial to self-label them as a climate scientist. There was a lot of money, research dollars in this area; there was a lot of influence to be had, in terms of sitting on panels and boards and committees and being interviewed by journalists and being invited to testify in front of Congress. And so the value and the influence of the scientist sort of switched into that dimension where your measure of influence was not so much how you increased our fundamental understanding of how the oceans worked, but it was really to what boards and committees you sat on, your press, and your influence in policy, being invited to testify in front of Congress, and whatever. So I've seen that switch. The problem is, the concern that I have for the health of our field, is that there's still a lot of fundamental things that we don't understand. The climate models aren't good enough. We need to go back to basics, increase our understanding about the non-linear dynamics of all these ocean oscillations and complexity of the system and things like that. There are a lot of fundamental things that are getting short shrift, that the sex appeal in our field right now and a lot of funding is to do what I call mock[?] 'climate model taxonomy', where people are analyzing the output of climate models and finding something interesting, alarming, or using them to infer that we won't be able to grow grapes in California in 2100 or something like this. This is the stuff that gets published in Nature and Science and PNAS (the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences). People get a press release. Russ: The New York Times. Guest: Yeah. They get a press release and there's a lot of funding in this area. And I call this climate model taxonomy because I don't have confidence in climate models on regional spatial scales, so I think the whole impacts game related to climate models is rather pointless. And also they really don't get that natural internal variability so they can't really say anything on time scales of 50 years. So I think there's this whole field of climate model taxonomy that's very well funded and gets all the headlines that is pointless scientifically. It's not increasing our understanding of anything and I think is fundamentally misleading to decision-makers because the climate models aren't good enough on those space- and time-scales. And so the newer generation of climate scientists broadly defined are seeing a lot of rewards in the climate taxonomy area, and it's relatively easy work. And I think it's, personally, pointless. It's not fundamental useful to the decision-makers and it's not increasing our fundamental understanding. So I'm not happy with the way all this is going. I have been Chair of the School of Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech since 2002, and I've tried to do my hiring in what I would call the fundamental areas, trying to increase our fundamental understanding rather than what I would call climate model taxonomy. And there is pressure for me to hire 'climate modelers', not so much people who are working to develop fundamentally new types of climate models--I'd be definitely interested in that--but people who are just using the output of climate models. And I don't think that's a useful way for our science to go. So, I fight that on my own little square of turf. But it's very hard to find even good people to hire who are doing fundamental work. There's a lot of people in what I would call the 'chemistry aerosol cloud interactions' doing very fundamental work that I think is very exciting; and I think this is where a lot of the good physicists and chemists who are interested in climate are working in that area. So that area is very vibrant. But what I would call the more climate dynamics, the fundamental more fluid dynamics of the atmospheres and oceans, I've found it very hard to find good people who are making fundamental advances in our understanding. Russ: Well, I'm not surprised. Right? Those are the hard problems. When you are fresh out of graduate school you are told, 'Don't work on those; you won't get tenure. You might work for 10 years and get nothing and you're going to be out of a job. Guest: Exactly. You can get lots of publications and lots of citations by doing climate model taxonomy. So that's a concern that I have. And it's the older--I never thought I'd live to see the day when I am one of the old farts, the older generation, but a lot of the fundamental wave dynamics and fluid dynamics that was emphasized in the 1970s and 1980s--those people are on the verge of retirement. And in terms of even educating the new students in these areas--I'm just wondering where that's going to come from. So I am concerned about--and the awards that are given in professional societies. This past year I was on the Fellows Award Committee for the American Geophysical Union, and the first knee-jerk reaction is the look at the number of publications in the so-called H Index, which is related to people's scientific citations. Russ: That makes it scientific. Guest: Yeah, right. It's quantifiable. But the people who are working on the very hard problems and don't have that same kind of productivity or citations, it's harder to push them through. It's a lot harder to make the case. And personally I work hard to make the case for people who I think are doing a good job in those areas. But again, the recognition is skewed towards number of publications, citations; and people who are doing something that catches the attention of the media. And again, climate model taxonomy is a very easy path to fame and fortune in climate science. But it's not getting us where we need to go, ultimately in terms of increasing our fundamental understanding and really giving decision makers something that they can use.
53:47 Russ: So, let's look at the other side. So, same thing happens in economics. If you can make a case for government intervention you are usually going to get invited to the better cocktail parties and you are going to be more--politicians are going to pay more attention to you and you are more likely, perhaps, to get quoted in the media, which is always pleasant and adds to your pocketbook in various ways--not directly but indirectly. And the grant-making obviously has something to do with that as well. And I look at climate science and I see that phenomenon and I see people who have the opportunity to be on the right side, the side that has the moral high ground right now, and I understand the incentives that people face in how to think about what to work on and what side they come down on, what evidence to consider. But on the other side, the climate advocates, the people who advocate intervention and action, they say, Well, it's just as bad or worse; they'll say it's worse on the climate skeptic side. Those folks, people who are skeptical about climate or think we don't know what we're talking about or talk about complexities as you do, they are just pawns of industry. They are people who get a lot of money from, typically, the fossil fuel industry and they are just saying what they are paid to do, and of course being paid by an oil company is much worse than being paid by the EPA or a government agency in terms of prestige. So, what's your response to that? Maybe you are one of them. Maybe you are a pawn of industry, Judy. I like you, you seem nice; and I want to believe what you say; but maybe you have the same issues. Is that true? And do you think that's true--people who generally are skeptical about climate? Guest: Okay. I think this whole 'pawns of industry' thing is just a red herring. The Merchants of Doubt, a book by Naomi Oreskes--she identifies some people like Fred Singer and people that really aren't big players in the public debate on climate change at this point. The only person that I know that's making money off of being a climate skeptic is Pat Michaels. He's managed to make money off of it. That's not his primary motivation, but he has managed to make money off of it. Russ: And it doesn't mean he's wrong, by the way. I think it's always important when you point out these things--it's an interesting argument; it's not decisive. Guest: It doesn't mean he's wrong. He's just sufficiently, how shall I say, stubborn, loose cannon, say-what-he-thinks. He's not going to be bought by anybody. But what he says is found attractive by certain people and he's attracted some money that way. So, Pat Michaels is the only person that I know of that makes money off of this. In the interest of disclosure, I--my company, Climate Forecast Applications Network--the target of a lot of what we do is the energy sector. But it's really short-term weather forecasting, time scales of days to weeks. And so there's nothing that I do for the energy sector that has anything to do with climate change and I don't think any of my clients have ever actually even asked me about climate change, although I know a few of them follow the blog. So, I do have some contracts with regional power providers and even one big energy company to do short range weather forecasting--of heat waves, of hurricane landfalls, things like that, that are of relevance to the energy sector. But my position either way, the one big oil company--actually this contract started in 2006; and we got this contract, they were attracted to our position on hurricanes and global warming, a big paper that we had published from Georgia Tech where we saw an increase in the percentage of Category 4 and 6 hurricanes; and they thought that we had some new insights to understand how to predict hurricanes. So that actually attracted them to us in the first place. Although what we ended up doing for them actually had nothing to do with global warming. And since then my position has shifted to be more skeptical about the global warming issue. So ironically the contract that we have with a big oil company was originally attractive by the position that we had that warmer temperatures were causing an increase in hurricane intensity. So, that's a full disclosure of my connection with oil companies. But my opinion about global warming obviously has nothing to do with the fact that I have some oil company clients. So I think that to me that is a big red herring, this issue, that the scientists that I talk to--and there are many people that do not make public statements about global warming but remain quite skeptical of the IPCC, but they don't speak publicly because, among other reasons, they have no inclination to. But they also see what happened to me when I spoke out on this issue, in terms of being labeled a denier and a heretic, and they don't want to, you know, bring that sort of thing down upon their own head. Russ: I think the whole issue of the social factors are quite significant, beyond the monetary ones. The IPCC is just the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, for those of you who want to look it up on the web. It issues reports on the state of the climate and makes policy recommendations as well.Corners of the Internet are cheering the hugely popular British fashion store Asos for featuring photos of unedited swimsuit and underwear models with visible stretch marks.
Asos—an online retailer launched in 2000 that’s known for its trendy, inexpensive clothing and accessories—did not immediately respond to Fortune when asked how long the photos have been on its site, but consumers Tweeted out praise for un-retouched images of the models last week. Some stated that the more realistic portrayals of the female form could help promote body positivity.
One user thanked Asos for not photoshopping a model’s stretch marks. “[T]his will help girls embrace theirs,” she tweeted. “I am!!”
Courtesy of Asos
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The brand already has a reputation for body inclusivity, with a vast array of plus-size, tall, and maternity clothes for women. In January, it also launched plus-size and tall sections for men. In April, Asos raised its sales growth guidance for the full year for a second time in three months, to 30-35%.
But Asos is not without its critics. In May, the company faced a body-shaming backlash for labeling a U.K. size 10 (or U.S. size 6) as “large.” (Asos said the classification was due to a “technical glitch.”) In addition, labor conditions in its warehouses also came under scrutiny last year, after a BuzzFeed investigation said workers in an England facility were “treated like machines.”
But in embracing un-retouched models, Asos (asomy) joins a growing stable of fashion brands that are abstaining from airbrushing. Target (tgt) launched un-retouched swimsuit ads in March, and American Eagle launched a Photoshop-free ad campaign for its Aerie lingerie line in 2014. With a subsequent sales growth of 20%, business at Aerie has been booming since, buoying American Eagle (aeo), as sales have slipped at the rest of the retailer’s brands.Just added a page to the blog, My 2016 most anticipated releases. I know, I know, a little late. Things have been rough, but hey better late than never right! I hope everyone checks out the list. Let me know what you think, and let me know if I missed anything!
Thanks!
James – MightyThorJRS
My 2016 most anticipated releases
JAN.
5th – Path of Gods: The Valhalla Saga: Book 3 by Snorri Kristjansson
5th – The Force Awakens (Star Wars) by Alan Dean Foster
19th – Warriors of the Storm: (Saxon Tales) by Bernard Cornwell
26th – The Bands of Mourning by Brandon Sanderson
FEB.
2nd – Blood of Innocents (Sorcery Ascendant 2) by Mitchell Hogan
2nd – Chains of the Heretic: Bloodsounder’s Arc Book Three by Jeff Salyards
9th – Dragon Hunters: The Chronicle of the Exile, Book Two by Marc Turner
16th – Calamity (The Reckoners 3) by Brandon Sanderson
MAR.
15th – The Last Mortal Bond (Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne 3) by Brian Staveley
29th – The Mortal Tally (Bring Down Heaven series Book 2) by Sam Sykes
APRIL.
7th? – The Silent Army: Seven Forges Book IV by James A. Moore
19th? – Fall of Light: Book Two of the Kharkanas Trilogy by Steven Erikson
26th – Sharp Ends by Joe Abercrombie
MAY.
JUNE.
7th – The Wheel of Osheim: The Red Queen’s War 3 by Mark Lawrence
7th – An Affinity for Steel: The Aeon’s Gate Omnibus by Sam Sykes
7th? – Saint’s Blood (The Greatcoats 3) by Sebastien de Castell
28th – Age of Myth: Book One of The Legends of the First Empire byMichael J. Sullivan
JULY.
5th – The Waking Fire: The Draconis Memoria by Anthony Ryan
5th – The Dinosaur Knights by Victor Milán
12th? – Wrath (The Faithful and the Fallen 4) by John Gwynne
21st? – The Thorn of Emberlain (Gentleman Bastard Sequence 4) byScott Lynch
AUG.
9th – The Guns of Empire: Book Four of The Shadow Campaigns byDjango Wexler
SEPT.
13th? – A Shattered Empire (Sorcery Ascendant 3) by Mitchell Hogan
OCT.
NOV.
DEC.
6th? – Dead Man’s Steel: The Grim Company 3 by Luke Scull
SOMETIME THIS YEAR?
The Olympian Affair (The Cinder Spires #2) by Jim Butcher
Wings of the Storm (God of Vengeance #2) by Giles Kristian
Sins of Empire (Gods of Blood and Powder #1) by Brian McClellan
The Lost Metal (Mistborn #7) by Brandon Sanderson
The Blood Mirror (Lightbringer #4) by Brent Weeks
I would REALLY like to come out this year, but I know they will not.
The Winds of Winter (A Song of Ice and Fire #6) by George R.R. Martin
Doors of Stone (The Kingkiller Chronicle #3) by Patrick Rothfuss
Oathbringer (The Stormlight Archive #3) by Brandon Sanderson
AdvertisementsTrump rescinds DACA, putting 800,000 youth at risk of deportation
By Genevieve Leigh
6 September 2017
The Trump administration is ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the government program that offered limited protection from deportation to nearly 800,000 immigrants brought to the US as children. The administration plans to phase out the program over the next six months.
The Department of Homeland Security will not consider any new applications for legal status. Those with a DACA permit expiring before March 5, 2018, will be eligible to apply for a two-year renewal that must be requested by October 5, 2017. For all others, legal status will end as early as March 6, 2018.
If Congress fails to act, nearly 300,000 people will begin losing protections in 2018, and more than 320,000 from January to August 2019. Once their DACA status expires, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, in collusion with local and state law enforcement, will have free rein to carry out detention and deportation.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, well known for his decades-long career of attacking immigrants and minorities, announced the end of the program on Tuesday. His speech combined vicious law-and-order and anti-immigrant demagogy with outright lies aimed at scapegoating immigrants for “crime, violence, and terrorism” in the US.
“The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty [DACA]...contributed to a surge of minors at the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences,” Sessions claimed. “It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same illegal aliens to take those jobs.”
Trump echoed Session’s remarks on Twitter Tuesday morning following the announcement: “We are a nation of laws. No longer will we incentivize illegal immigration. Make no mistake, we are going to put the interest of AMERICAN CITIZENS FIRST!”
The Trump administration cites the “rule of law” to justify its attack on immigrants barely a week after Trump pardoned the notorious anti-immigrant Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who was found guilty of criminal contempt charges for defying a federal judge’s order to stop racially profiling Latinos. Trump is himself the personification of the corporate and government criminality that operates with impunity in the United States.
As for the claim that the measures against immigrant youth are necessary to defend “American jobs,” this is an exercise in lying demagogy. The Trump administration is composed of billionaires intent on destroying public education, health care and other social programs, while its main domestic agenda is a massive tax cut for corporations and the wealthy.
While Democrats have issued criticisms of Trump’s actions, the anti-immigrant policies of his administration are based on the actions of his predecessors, particularly the Obama administration.
In a Facebook post on Tuesday, Obama wrote that preserving DACA was “about basic decency…about whether we are a people who kick hopeful young strivers out of America, or whether we treat them the way we’d want our own kids to be treated.” He went on to assure layers within the ruling class that these young people could possibly add to the economy, “start new businesses” or even “serve in our military.”
The DACA program was initiated by Obama in June 2012, largely as a cynical maneuver to court Hispanic voters in time for the 2012 election. It was also intended as a cover for his massive crackdown on immigrants, including through the expansion of “Secure Communities,” the further militarization of the border, and institution of the mandatory nightly bed quota of ICE detention facilities.
Implementation of the DACA program—done under the pretenses of a turn toward a more “humane” immigration policy— was carried out by the Obama administration while it oversaw the largest deportation operation US history, resulting in the expulsion of almost 3 million immigrants in his eight years in office. This included the rounding up and deportation of child immigrants fleeing Central America in 2014.
Discussions are taking place within ruling circles of combining some form of a DACA renewal with “comprehensive immigration reform,” which if passed would be part of a reactionary bipartisan measure to increase the militarization of the border and place even more onerous requirements on anyone seeking citizenship rights. The ending of DACA is part of a broader anti-immigrant offensive of the Trump administration that has gone unopposed by the Democratic Party, which has spent the past seven months denouncing Trump for being too “soft” on Russia. The Democrats have hailed moves to strengthen the grip of the military over the administration, including through the elevation of retired general John Kelly, Trump’s former Homeland Security Advisor, to chief of staff.
Kelly, who directly oversaw Trump’s anti-immigrant measures before taking on his new post, was selected by Obama in 2012 to lead the US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), the military organization responsible for Central America, South America and the Caribbean. Kelly was confirmed in his first position in the Trump administration by a bipartisan 88-11 vote in the US Senate.
The ending of DACA marks a major escalation of Trump’s war on immigrants and will have far-reaching consequences. The tools and methods of oppression being forged in the attack on immigrants under the banner of “law and order”—the massive surveillance apparatus, the collection and sharing of data, the integration of all law enforcement agencies, and the arming of the police forces with military equipment—will be used against the working class as a whole.
There is widespread opposition to the anti-immigrant policies of the Trump administration. This opposition cannot be channeled back behind the Democratic Party, which is no less beholden to the corporate elite than the Republicans.
The defense of immigrant workers requires the independent mobilization of the entire working class, in the United States and internationally, based on a program that advances its own solution to the world economic crisis: the reorganization of global economy to meet social need, not private profit. This unity must begin with the rejection of all attempts to divide native-born and immigrant workers, regardless of their legal status, and upholding the freedom of all workers to live and work in the country of their choice with full and equal rights.
Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus.The last light of the day is reflected on Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, California May 17, 2009. REUTERS/Robert Galbraith
By Steve Gorman
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A 2,400-ton chunk of granite broke loose last week from the towering Half Dome formation in Yosemite National Park, altering one of North America's most popular rock-climbing routes, but no one was hurt and casual visitors will probably never notice.
The fallen slab, estimated to have measured about 800 cubic meters in volume, is believed to have crumbled from the middle the northwest face of Half Dome some time very late on July 2 or early July 3, park spokeswoman Jodi Bailey said on Wednesday.
No one saw the giant hunk of rock plunge to the valley floor in the heart of the park, located in California's Sierra Nevada range about 200 miles (320 km) east of San Francisco, and no climbers were affected when it fell.
Word has it a gap from the missing slab was discovered a day or two later by a group of mountaineers making their way up the northwest face of the iconic 4,700-foot-tall (1,432-meter) granite dome.
"This is probably one of the 50 classic climbs in North America," Bailey said, adding that the northwest route remains open with signs warning climbers they must navigate around the altered section due to loose remaining rock.
Park officials lack firm numbers for how many people scale Half Dome each year because no permits are required for technical rock climbing there. But one local mountaineering expert estimated that some 300 to 400 climbers ascend the northwest route annually, according to Bailey.
Hiking trails around Half Dome and the famed cable route up the back side have not been affected, and the general public is unlikely to detect any visual difference due to the immense scale of the granite formation as seen from the ground.
"There's already a boulder field at the base of it. You couldn't pick out the pieces that came from this slab," she said.
The uneven-shaped granite chunk that came down was about 2- to 3-feet (60 to 90 cm) thick and measured about 100 feet (30 meters) in length on one side and 200 feet (60 meters) along the other.
Rock falls due to constant weathering are common in Yosemite Valley year-round, with events of this size occurring about once a year. But this one stood out because it sloughed off the face of Half Dome, Bailey said.
Heavy rains that swept Yosemite Valley on Thursday and Friday may have contributed to the latest fall, she said.
(Editing by Eric Walsh)Here’s what the president said back in June 2013, while reassuring the American people about the National Security Agency’s collection of their phone metadata: “When it comes to telephone calls, nobody is listening to your telephone calls. That’s not what this program’s about. As was indicated, what the intelligence community is doing is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls. They are not looking at people’s names, and they’re not looking at content.”
And indeed, the NSA was analyzing the metadata it was collecting from all of us. Only one small problem (shades of the Bush era): it was also listening in and reading, too. To be exact, without warrants and using a “backdoor loophole” in the law, the agency repeatedly plunged into massive databases that, while gathering emails and phone calls from "foreign targets," swept up prodigious numbers of American ones in the process. (Evidently, the CIA and the FBI were using similar backdoors to similar ends.) It’s true that, strictly speaking, those calls and emails were being collected by a different program than the one the president was referring to; so, if you’re a stickler for details, he didn’t exactly, officially lie. In any case, it’s nothing you or I should really worry our little heads about, not when it turns out that whatever was done was perfectly "legal."
We know this thanks to a legal expert of the first order, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who communicated as much to Senator Ron Wyden by letter recently. Who, after all, should know better than Clapper, the man in charge of overseeing a secret world that has its own “parallel supreme court” renowned for only listening to one side of any case? Here’s his statement on the subject of those warrantless searches of our phone conversations and emails: “There have been queries, using U.S. person identifiers, of communications lawfully acquired to obtain foreign intelligence targeting non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United States. These queries were performed pursuant to minimization procedures approved by the FISA court and consistent with the statute and the Fourth Amendment.”
If you don’t understand that, consider yourself English-challenged. In fact, you should just stop fretting about government surveillance entirely and, while you're at it, cut back on the overblown paranoia, too. Americans, it's time to go back to full-scale online shopping and banking, and to stop telling pollsters you’re doing less of it because of the NSA!
Really, there's no point in making such a fuss about perfectly legal operations. Isn't it simpler just to stop paying attention to what the president, his top officials, and the guardians of our secret world tell us about what they’re doing? After all, in the end, by hook, crook, or secret “law,” they will find a convenient justification for doing just what they want to do anyway. Right now, we have a partial picture of what one agency in the U.S. intelligence community, the NSA, has been doing in these years, thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden. Someday, perhaps, we’ll have a fuller picture of what the other 16 agencies have been doing and it will surely take your breath away.
In the meantime, it’s rare that we ever get a glimpse of how our expanding secret state really works. But every now and then, a single case can suddenly illuminate an otherwise dark landscape. Such is Rahinah Ibrahim's case, carefully laid out by TomDispatch regular Peter Van Buren today. It should chill you to the bone. Former State Department whistleblower Van Buren has, by the way, just published quite an original, nitty-gritty novel, Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the #99Percent, which is highly recommended. Tom
Ibrahim was no threat to anyone, innocent of everything, and ended up on that list only due to a government mistake. Nonetheless, she was not allowed to reenter the U.S. to finish her studies or even attend her trial and speak in her own defense. Her life was derailed by the tangle of national security bureaucracy and pointless “anti-terror” measures that have come to define post-Constitutional America. Here's what happened, and why it may matter to you.
Rahinah Ibrahim is a slight Malaysian woman who attended Stanford University on a U.S. student visa, majoring in architecture. She was not a political person. Despite this, as part of a post-9/11 sweep directed against Muslims, she was investigated by the FBI. In 2004, while she was still in the U.S. but unbeknownst to her, the FBI sent her name to the no-fly list.
The No-Fly List
On September 10, 2001, there was no formal no-fly list. Among the many changes pressed on a scared population starting that September 12th were the creation of two such lists: the no-fly list and the selectee list for travelers who were to undergo additional scrutiny when they sought to fly. If you were on the no-fly list itself, as its name indicated, you could not board a flight within the U.S. or one heading out of or into the country. As a flight-ban plan, it would come to extend far beyond America's borders, since the list was shared with 22 other countries.
No one knows how many names are on it. According to one source, 21,000 people, including some 500 Americans, are blacklisted; another puts the figure at 44,000. The actual number is classified.
On January 2, 2005, unaware of her status as a threat to the United States, Ibrahim left Stanford for San Francisco International Airport to board a flight to Malaysia for an academic conference. A ticket agent saw her name flagged in the database and called the police.
Despite being wheelchair-bound due to complications from a medical procedure, Ibrahim was handcuffed, taken to a detention cell, and denied access to medication she had in hand. Without explanation, after extensive interrogation, she was allowed to board her flight. When she tried to return to America to resume her studies, however, she found herself banned as a terrorist.
Suing the United States
Stuck in Malaysia, though still in possession of a valid student visa, Ibrahim filed a lawsuit against the U.S. government, asking to be removed from the no-fly list and allowed back into the country to continue her architectural studies.
Over almost nine years, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) employed an arsenal of dodges and post-9/11 tricks to impede her lawsuit, including invoking the "state secrets doctrine” to ensure that she would never have access to the records she needed. “State secrets” is not a law in the U.S., as it is, for example, in Great Britain, where the monarch also retains “Crown Privilege,” the absolute right to refuse to share information with Parliament or the courts. Here, it is instead a kind of assumed privilege and the courts accept it as such. Based on it, the president can refuse to produce evidence in a court case on the grounds that its public disclosure might harm national security. The government has, in the past, successfully employed this “privilege” to withhold information and dead-end legal challenges. Once "state secrets" is in play, there is literally nothing left to talk about in court.
A related DOJ dodge was also brought to bear in an attempt to derail Ibrahim’s case: the use of made-up classification categories that dispatch even routine information into the black world of national security. Much of the information concerning her placement on the no-fly list, for instance, was labeled Security Sensitive Information (SSI) and so was unavailable to her. SSI is among hundreds of post-9/11 security categories created via memo by various federal |
was she such a threat?” He asked.
The woman’s sculpted mouth frowned. “Let’s just say…her family used to be important in the supernatural world. Strong in their magic. And against everything we believed in. With her magic gone, she can no longer have magic children.”
Terrance smiled, sensing this woman’s glee. “What if she has children with someone that has magic?” He asked. She stood back and looked at him.
“She is your fiance and you don’t have magic. You better make sure that she doesn’t wander.” She hissed. Terrance flinched.
And you might think i’m bulletproof, but i’m not.
“Of course. I’ve had her broken for years. Nothing will change now,” He murmured, moaning as she leaned in and kissed his neck. She nicked it with her teeth to draw out another moan. “Take it.” He whispered, pulling her into the bedroom.
You took a swing, I took it hard
I walked into the house to noise. It made me pause as I quietly shut the door. A strangled moan came from the bedroom. Without thinking of grabbing a weapon, afraid that Terrance was in trouble I rushed into it, throwing the door open. The scream for Terrance died in my throat. Instead, a distraught noise escaped.
The bed stopped moving, and a woman with glowing gold eyes emerged, staring at me. “Fix this, fool.” She hissed, before disappearing, the door behind me slamming. I stood frozen, my eyes watching Terrance as he threw the covers back.
And down here from the ground I see who you are
“How long?” I finally choke out as Terrance walks towards me.
“How long what?” He asked.
“I’m not an idiot Terrance! How long have you been fucking her!” I scream, not even shocked at myself for cussing. My numbness was disappearing, slowly revealing the shattering that was going on in my chest.
I’m sick and tired of your attitude
I’m feeling like I don’t know you
“Babe, chill. It was only this time. Promise. It’s just, you’ve been gone so much. When you get home you’re too tired to do anything.” He said.
I laughed, it sounded foreign to my own ears. “I don’t want your damn excuses.” I hissed, venom seething from it. “Did you ever even love me?” I knew the answer as soon as I asked.
You tell me that you love me then you cut me down
And I need you like a heartbeat
But you know you got a mean streak
Makes me run for cover when you’re around
“Baby, hey now, calm down,” He said, reaching for me. I pulled back.
“Don’t touch me.” I growled. Suddenly his soft eyes turned as hard as they had ever been.
“You don’t make the rules Athena. You’re mine, and I own you. You have no one to run to.” He threatened, moving towards me with his hand raised. I ran out the door and into the bathroom, slamming the door behind me. I locked it quickly and pulled out my phone. I dialed Taylor’s number and waited for what seemed like hours. Suddenly Terrance was beating on the door and her phone went to voicemail.
“No! Taylor! Dammit answer your phone!” I cry, scrambling to the other side of the bathroom. “Help, please, please, help me.” I begged before the phone beeped, signalling the end of the message.
And here’s to you and your temper
Yes, I remember what you said last night
And I know that you see what you’re doing to me
I scrambled up the wall as he bust the door in, doing my best to replace the fear in my eyes with anger. Was this it? After all these years was he finally going to turn this abuse physical?
“Athena.” He growled, cornering me. I defiantly put a pissed look on my face.
“Terrance.” I hiss back, consciously trying to keep myself from shaking. I couldn’t let him see my fear. If he did, he would win.
Tell me why..
Suddenly his hand impacted with the side of my face. The bathroom flashed, my vision was replaced for a second with pops of light. When I opened them back up I was on the floor, looking up at him, my head against the tiled wall. I felt a warm trickle down my chin and the back of my neck. As I looked up at Terrance, I had never seen so much hate in his eyes.
Why..do you have to make me feel small
So you can feel whole inside
He pulled me up and stepped back. It took all I head to hold myself against the wall and meet his eyes.
“I’m leaving you.” I whispered, not caring if he saw me shaking.
“Nobody leaves me.” He hissed. His hand went back again and I flinched, closing my eyes, waiting for the hit. But suddenly I heard a scream, and a struggle. I opened my eyes to find Taylor flying into the room and knocking Terrance out.
“The police are on their way.” She said. Her voice was level, but that seemed to make it worse than if she had yelled. “And if I ever catch you near Athena again, you won’t have the cops to worry about.” Without even the check and see if he was moving she turned to me.
“Oh, honey.” She whispered, scooping me up. Suddenly my tears came, a flood breaking through a dam. She held me while I cried. I didn’t notice the cops come in, or Terrance leave. Eventually we ended up in the living room, and I couldn’t tell you how may people and cops came and went. I couldn’t tell you how long it took for everyone to leave. When I finally began to pay attention to my surroundings again it was just Taylor and I.
“I’m tired.” I whispered, my voice hoarse. I moved my hand to my pounding head only to feel it bandaged. I guess at some point I had had someone treat me.
I take a step back, let you go
I told you i’m not bulletproof
Now you know
Taylor pulled me into a hug. “Let’s go to sleep. I’ll stay with you. I’ll keep you safe. He won’t ever come near you again.” I nodded silently and let her tuck me into the bed. As I fell asleep to the smell of fresh linen I felt Taylor running her hands through my hair. “I got all new sheets and a mattress for you.” She whispered, quietly.”I’ll get rid of everything that was his and get you all new stuff. Sleep, and don’t worry about anything. You’re safe now.”
AdvertisementsREADER COMMENTS ON
"'Do It For Your Country': Conservative Columnist Calls For Palin to Leave Ticket"
(11 Responses so far...)
COMMENT #1 [Permalink]
... FreedomOfInformationAct said on 9/27/2008 @ 12:52 am PT...
Stick a fork in her, she's done! 'I'll get back to ya' - sp
COMMENT #2 [Permalink]
... mick said on 9/27/2008 @ 5:45 am PT...
COMMENT #3 [Permalink]
... me said on 9/27/2008 @ 9:43 am PT...
Too late. McCain / Palin FAIL This pick by McLame shows what a lousy prez he would have made. Its up to Obama to lose the election. He could stop campaigning now if he wanted.
COMMENT #4 [Permalink]
... GWN said on 9/27/2008 @ 11:23 am PT...
I am stealing a quote (about Palin) from RenoAnne, Americablog, "She should really just focus on her strengths and lay down on the stage with her legs in the air." Sexist, YES, Funny YES!
COMMENT #5 [Permalink]
... mswhyte said on 9/27/2008 @ 12:53 pm PT...
I am all for Palin staying on the ticket. It will remind us about McCain's inability to make intelligent decisions. Go Sarah! But I do love the quote about B.S. it is spot on!
COMMENT #6 [Permalink]
... lottakatz said on 9/27/2008 @ 3:14 pm PT...
Obama should have made sure her name came up when McCain started in on his lack of experiance during the debate. He could have done it by omission. I can't imagine his reasons for letting it go by.
COMMENT #7 [Permalink]
... doug richards said on 9/28/2008 @ 7:00 am PT...
Palin was put on the ticket to energize and mobilize the far right evangelical base, which McCain could not. She is doing just that. They are pumped. They do not care in the least what she says or how badly. You can't win the majority of voters by going to the far far right with the VP pick, but with this revitalized base you can get close enough. Purged voter rolls, missing voting machines, and exit polls that no longer work [with electronic voting systems] will make up the difference and then some --- like in 2004. The Palin pick was a clear indication of their strategy --- unless stopped, the fix is in.
COMMENT #8 [Permalink]
... FreedomOfInformationAct said on 9/28/2008 @ 10:44 am PT...
It looks like Johnny McLAME has another trick up his sleeve. Say so long to sarah p, and hello to rudy g! http://bagnewsnotes.type.../09/mccain-sticks-i.html
COMMENT #9 [Permalink]
... Marsha West said on 9/28/2008 @ 10:37 pm PT...
Sarah, you really should have stayed in school and gone for a higher degree. You don't know enough to do this job properly. Take some geography, history, political science, philosophy, logic, public speaking courses - get an M.A. at least - maybe a Ph.D. - in a field that has something to do with running a government. Go home, raise the kids, and try later when all this has been forgotten.
COMMENT #10 [Permalink]
... Diane said on 9/29/2008 @ 8:27 pm PT...
McSame chose Palin for only two reasons --- to get the vote of the Hillary supporters and to energize the anti-choice ultraconservative base. He didn't take the time to properly evaluate her knowledge. Ordinarily the vice-presidential pick isn't that critical, but McSame is 72 years old and has had four bouts with cancer. Palin is truly a heartbeat away from the presidency.
COMMENT #11 [Permalink]
... charles said on 10/4/2008 @ 2:37 pm PT...In 1935, Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen1 argued that quantum mechanics is incomplete when assuming that no physical influence can be faster than the speed of light and that the properties of physical systems are elements of reality. They considered measurements on spatially separated pairs of entangled particles. Measurement on one particle of an entangled pair instantly projects the other particle onto a well-defined state, independently of their spatial separation. In 1964, Bell2 showed that no local realistic theory can reproduce all quantum mechanical predictions for entangled states. His renowned Bell inequality proved that there is an upper limit to the strength of the observed correlations predicted by local realistic theories. Quantum theory’s predictions violate this limit.
In a Bell experiment, one prepares pairs of entangled particles and sends them to two observers, Alice and Bob, for measurement and detection. Alice and Bob observe correlations between their results that, for specific choices of their measurement settings, violate the Bell inequality and hence force abandonment of local realism.
It is common that in an experiment, some particles emitted by the source will not be detected3,8. In such a case, the subset of detected particles might display correlations that violate the Bell inequality although the entire ensemble can be described by a local realistic theory. To achieve a conclusive Bell violation without assuming that the detected particles are a ‘fair’ sample, a highly efficient experimental set-up is necessary. This efficiency need not be perfect3.
Experimental limitations have made it necessary to assume fair sampling in nearly every Bell experiment performed to date, with a few exceptions9,10,11,12,13. In particular, owing to the lack of efficient sources and detectors, this assumption has always been unavoidable in Bell experiments on entangled photon pairs.
Since the first experimental Bell test14, a satisfactory laboratory realization of the motivating gedankenexperiment has remained a challenge15,16. The two other main assumptions include “locality”17,18 and “freedom of choice”19. Invoking any of these three assumptions renders an experiment vulnerable to explanation by a local realistic theory. The realization of an experiment that is free of all three assumptions—a loophole-free Bell test—remains an important goal for the physics community20. An important step has been the realization of quantum steering experiments that have also addressed the issue of loopholes21,22,23. Our experiment makes photons the first physical system for which all three assumptions have been successfully addressed in a Bell test, albeit in different experiments.
In our experiment, we employ Eberhard’s inequality, a Bell inequality that inherently does not rely on the fair-sampling assumption4. Our scheme is characterized by a number of technical improvements over previous experiments. Each such improvement contributed crucially to reaching the high collection efficiency and visibility necessary for violating the inequality. Our source of photon pairs uses spontaneous parametric down-conversion in a Sagnac configuration, which has proved to be efficient5,6. For photon detection, we use superconducting transition-edge sensors (TESs), which not only have a high detection efficiency but are also intrinsically free of dark counts7. These two characteristics are essential for an experiment in which no correction of count rates can be tolerated.
Eberhard’s inequality, which was proposed almost two decades ago4, is a Clauser–Horne-type Bell inequality24 that explicitly includes undetected (inconclusive) events. Therefore, its mere violation directly implies that the fair-sampling loophole is closed. Also, the derivation of Eberhard’s inequality includes pairs not detected on either side (and can be generalized for those not even produced), which means that no post-selection on the created pairs is necessary to violate the inequality.
Eberhard’s inequality requires the lowest known symmetric arm efficiency for non-maximally entangled qubit states, namely η = 2/3 ≈ 66.7%. This arm efficiency (that is, the collection efficiency in one arm of the experiment) incorporates all losses, not least those in the source and the measurement set-up (including the detector). Thresholds lower than 2/3 have been reported for asymmetric efficiencies or higher-dimensionally entangled states25,26. For the most widely used Bell inequality, proposed by Clauser, Horne, Shimony and Holt27, at least η = 2√2 − 2 ≈ 82.8% is necessary in the symmetric case. For polarization-entangled photon pairs, Eberhard’s inequality considers three possible outcomes: o (‘ordinary’) and e (‘extraordinary’) for the two recorded outcomes of a polarization measurement, and u (‘undetected’) if no photon is detected (see Fig. 1). Two different measurement settings are used, (α 1, α 2 ) on Alice’s side and (β 1, β 2 ) on Bob’s side. Let n kl (α i, β j ) denote the number of pairs with the outcome k for Alice’s photon and l for Bob’s photon, where k, l ∈ {o, e, u}, when measured in settings α i and β j with i, j ∈ {1, 2}. Eberhard’s inequality can then be written as:
Figure 1: Principle of the experiment. Violation of an Eberhard inequality involves a source of polarization-entangled pairs as well as polarization measurements. Each measurement device can rotate the photon’s polarization according to one of two settings (α 1, α 2 and β 1, β 2 ) before projecting the photon into the ‘ordinary’ (o) or ‘extraordinary’ (e) output of a polarizing beam splitter and detecting it. All lost photons are also included in the derivation of the inequality as ‘undetected’ (u) events. The different terms of the inequality are photon counts recorded in the different settings. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Local realism allows J to take only non-negative values. Quantum mechanically, the maximal violation is given by J/N = (1 − √2)/2 ≈ –0.207 (ref. 15), where N denotes the number of entangled particle pairs produced per applied setting combination. This bound is attainable for a symmetric arm efficiency of η = 1 and maximally entangled states. For the largest possible violation of Eberhard’s inequality with η < 1, non-maximally entangled states must be used. These have the form: where 0 < r < 1 and H and V denote horizontal and vertical polarization of Alice’s and Bob’s photons. Depending on the background count rate, efficiencies higher than η = 2/3 may be needed4. Interestingly, for η < 82.8%, non-maximally entangled states are not only optimal but even necessary for a violation of Eberhard’s inequality.
In an experiment, one records measurements of ‘singles counts’ S (number of detection events on one side) and ‘coincidence counts’ C (number of detected pairs) for the four combinations of settings (α 1, β 1 ), (α 1, β 2 ), (α 2, β 1 ) and (α 2, β 2 ). The number of events for which one of the outcomes is undetected follows directly from the measured rates. For a given measurement length, we denote the measured coincidence counts by C kl (α i, β j ) and the single counts by S k A(α i ) for Alice and S l B(β j ) for Bob (k,l ∈ {o, e}). All the terms in Eberhard’s inequality are then given by the following measured quantities: Inserting these expressions into Eberhard’s inequality yields: where the coincidence counts C oe (α 1, β 2 ) and C eo (α 2, β 1 ) have dropped out. The resulting inequality, which is used in our experiment, now contains only directly available detection events related to the ordinary beams of Alice and Bob. Remarkably, this implies that Alice and Bob each need only one detector to test Eberhard’s inequality, whereas they each require two detectors for testing a Clauser–Horne–Shimony–Holt inequality. This characteristic can be intuitively understood: consider detectors that monitor ‘e’ outcomes and whose detection efficiencies decrease gradually to zero. This will just move events from ‘e’ to ‘u’: that is, from n oe (α 1, β 2 ) to n ou (α 1, β 2 ) and from n eo (α 2, β 1 ) to n uo (α 2, β 1 ). Only their sum appears in Eberhard’s inequality, so the value of J does not change.
The entangled photon pairs at 810 nm are produced in a Sagnac source5,28 pumped by a 405-nm-wavelength laser. The source is based on type-II spontaneous parametric down-conversion using a nonlinear crystal (periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate). In each arm, a cut-off filter and a 3-nm interference filter with near 99% transmission are used to suppress counts from the pump laser and reduce the background counts. The source can be tuned to produce non-maximally entangled states with the form expressed by equation (2) for any r by setting the polarization of the pump light with half- and quarter-wave plates.
The measurement set-up (see Fig. 2), containing a rotatable half-wave plate in a high-precision rotation mount and a calcite polarizer, is positioned in front of the fibre coupler on both Alice’s and Bob’s sides to facilitate measurement of the desired polarization (α and β). The measurements require only one output of the polarizer, so only the transmitted ordinary beam of the polarizer is coupled into the fibre; the extraordinary beam is blocked after transmission. We couple the 810-nm photons into an optical fibre (SMF-28), which guides the photons to the sensitive areas of the detectors. To achieve a high coupling efficiency in both arms, we optimized the focusing of the pump laser and the fibre couplers.
Figure 2: Measurement set-up. The source, based on spontaneous parametric down-conversion in ppKTP (periodically poled potassium titanyl phosphate) in a Sagnac configuration, produces polarization-entangled photons with a wavelength of 810 nm. A measurement setting is implemented in each arm by rotating a half-wave plate to the desired angle in front of a calcite polarizer. Photons transmitted through the calcite polarizer (ordinary output beam) are spectrally filtered and coupled into an optical fibre (SMF-28), which leads them to TESs for detection. The output signals from the detectors are amplified by SQUIDs and further electronics before being digitized and processed by an algorithm that identifies photons and time-correlated photon pairs. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
To achieve highly efficient photon detection, we used TES calorimetric detectors that owe their sensitivity to operation at the superconducting transition, a regime characterized by a steep dependence of resistance on temperature7. By exploiting a wavelength-optimized optical structure, these detectors have been reported to demonstrate detection efficiencies of up to 98% (including losses from packaging and fibre coupling)6,7. Superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs)29 amplify the nanoampere-level TES current signal, which is subsequently digitized and stored for later analysis. Without requiring any additional information about the data, algorithms identify photon signatures in the analogue output signal, determine an arrival time for each event, and count two-photon coincidences.
As a guide for the experimental settings needed to observe a violation of local realism, we used numerical simulations and optimization to determine an optimal non-maximally entangled state. For input, the model used the estimated background rate, the observed visibility, and the overall efficiencies η A and η B on Alice’s and Bob’s sides. The model estimated a value for r but also appropriate measurement settings α 1, α 2 on Alice’s side and β 1, β 2 on Bob’s side.
We set the state with a value of ∼0.3 for r and measured for a total of 300 s per setting at each of the four settings α 1 β 1, α 1 β 2, α 2 β 1 and α 2 β 2, where α 1 = 85.6°, α 2 = 118.0°, β 1 = −5.4° and β 2 = 25.9°. The relevant single and coincidence counts obtained appear in Table 1 and yield J = −126,715.
Table 1: Measurement results and J value for a total measurement time of 300 s per setting. Full size table
After recording for a total of 300 s per setting we divided our data into 10-s blocks and calculated the standard deviation of the resulting 30 different J values. This yielded σ = 1,837 for our aggregate J value of J = −126,715, a 69-σ violation (see Fig. 3). Note that this calculation does not assume Poisson counting statistics or any error propagation rules. We estimate the number of produced pairs to N = 24.2 × 106 per applied setting, yielding a normalized violation of J/N = –0.00524 (±0.00008).
Figure 3: Eberhard J value computed from up to five measurements of recorded data. Any negative J value violates the inequality and refutes all local realistic models that exploit the fair-sampling loophole. Error bars represent ±1 standard deviation calculated from the binned raw data. Full size image Download PowerPoint slide
Under the assumptions of locality and freedom of choice, a negative J value refutes local realism without the fair-sampling assumption or post-selection on created pairs, regardless of the states and angles used for the measurement or any error in their implementation. Nonetheless, additional measurements can provide further insight into the obtained value. The directly measured arm efficiencies (each a ratio of observed coincidence and singles counts without any correction) measured in the HV-basis were η A = 73.77% (±0.07%) in Alice’s arm and η B = 78.59% (±0.08%) in Bob’s arm. We attribute these imperfect coupling efficiencies to various possibly arm-dependent effects including optical losses in the source, coupling, fibre splices, and detectors. We estimate our r value and visibility to be about 0.297 and 97.5%, respectively. Using these values, our numerical model (used for the abovementioned optimization) agrees very well with our measured J value.
Using photons, we have demonstrated an experimental Bell inequality violation that closes the fair-sampling loophole. Without relying on any assumed error distribution, we statistically verify a violation of Eberhard’s inequality by nearly 70 standard deviations and thus clearly demonstrate the necessity of abandoning all local realistic theories that take advantage of unfair sampling to explain the observed values. Moreover, because the derivation of Eberhard’s Bell inequality even includes events not detected on either side, no post-selection is necessary to violate the inequality. To achieve a loophole-free Bell test as described above, it will be necessary to introduce space-like separation sufficient to prohibit unwanted communication between Alice, Bob, the measurement decisions, and the photon emission event. This will require fast random-number generators, precise timing, and efficiency gains to offset the propagation losses introduced by the increased distance. We do not find this unreasonable.Barry’s Silbert’s New York Agreement (NYA) has received fresh criticism in the form of a dedicated blog post from Bitcoin core developer Luke-jr.
The post appeared the day before SegWit2x - the code to bring about the roadmap agreed upon at Silbert’s New York meeting - entered beta phase.
“4–8MB block sizes are not sane. Even 1MB blocks are already clearly dangerous to Bitcoin,” he commented on Bitcoin’s future with SegWit2x.
“I cannot foresee myself consenting to the hardfork proposal under almost any circumstances, except perhaps with a softfork to limit the size to something reasonable.”
Adding the whole SegWit2x phenomenon was a “distraction from the upcoming BIP148 softfork, which is already irreversibly deployed to the network,” Luke-jr is another high-profile source of criticism against the increasingly popular scaling solution.
Silbert had faced an uphill struggle from the beginning, as even participants in the meeting, specifically Roger Ver subsequently began showing signs of a U-turn.
In an explanatory aside, Luke-jr was careful to note that any scheming behind SegWit2x would likely begin and end with NYA participant Bitmain, rather than Silbert or another party.
“I don’t mean to imply that all the participants to the NYA have this goal [distraction from BIP148] in mind! But rather that the design of SegWit2x is such that it fits this purpose,” he concluded.
“Bitmain may very well have done this intentionally, but it seems unlikely anyone else intended it.”
The post sparked a lengthy debate on Twitter, with the developer rebuffing multiple retaliations from online commentators.In place of 'boots on the ground,' US seeks contractors for Iraq
A member of the U.S. Mount Sinjar Assessment Team talks with locals near Sinjar, Iraq, on Aug. 13, 2014.
Wary of putting combat troops in Iraq, the U.S. government is gauging contractors’ interest in advising the Iraqi Defense Ministry and Counter Terrorism Service in a range of capacities, including force development, logistics and planning and operations.
The U.S. Army Contracting Command posted a notice last month seeking contractors willing to work on an initial 12-month contract, who should be “cognizant of the goals of reducing tensions between Arabs and Kurds, and Sunni and Shias.”
They would focus on administration, force development, procurement and acquisition, contracting, training management, public affairs, logistics, personnel management, professional development, communications, planning and operations, infrastructure management, intelligence and executive development, the notice stated.
Those services “fall within the existing mission” of the Office of Security Assistance-Iraq, “which is to help build institutional capacity of Iraq’s security ministries,” Defense Department spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said in an email.
The rapid advance of Islamic State militants in Iraq in recent months has spurred the deployment of almost 1,000 American troops to protect U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq’s capital Baghdad and the northern city of Irbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.
Almost 100 additional servicemembers are there as advisers with the Office of Security Assistance–Iraq, and civilian advisers may not be far behind.
President Barack Obama last month authorized airstrikes against Islamic State militants, who have overrun large swathes of Iraq, when their advances threatened U.S. personnel in Baghdad and Irbil. But he has ruled out deploying ground combat units to Iraq less than three years after bringing the last of U.S. forces home from there.
Analysts say hiring contractors is a way to avoid deploying such forces.
David Johnson, a former Army lieutenant colonel who is executive director of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, said contractors aren’t considered “boots on the ground” in conflict zones.
“The government always seeks to minimize boots on the ground to reduce domestic political risk,” he said in an email. “The American people and media do not consider a paid contractor to represent them in the same way that they do a soldier.”
Using contractors, who, most studies show, are cheaper than soldiers, trims the official presence and still accomplishes the logistical and security objectives, he said.
Defense contractors have plenty of experience in Iraq. During the U.S. occupation, thousands of armed security contractors and support personnel worked alongside foreign and Iraqi troops to help stabilize the country.
U.S. Central Command public affairs director Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder said in an email that the notice posted by the Army last month merely seeks to roll over a contract for civilian mentors and advisers in Iraq that has existed since 2012.
“The basic services being requested (go) back… to when there was a significant U.S. military presence in Iraq,” he said.
The contract is not a vehicle to increase U.S. presence in Iraq while avoiding the deployment of additional military forces or “boots on the ground,” he said.
Allison Stanger, a professor of international politics and economics at Middelbury College and author of a book on wartime contracting, said new Pentagon contracts for Iraq differ from security contractors hired by the State Department, which is seeking support “for a diplomatic mission, not a military one.”
“When the Pentagon does the same, it is another matter,” said Stanger, author of the book: “One Nation Under Contract: The Outsourcing of American Power and Future of Foreign Policy.” “In the era of contractors wars, there are many ways to avoid putting boots on the ground, while committing significant U.S. resources and actually being very much militarily involved.”
Michael O’Hanlon, of the Brookings Institute, said the U.S. government has employed as many contractors as it has deployed troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“As the political premium seems always to be placed on how many troops we have abroad, the pressure to have contractors do as much as possible only grows,” he said in an email.
Incidents such as the killing of civilians by Blackwater employees in Baghdad in 2007 remind policymakers of the dangers of having contractors as trigger pullers, but the pressure to minimize troop deployments means the ratio of contractors to troops may grow, he said.
Contractors are carrying a greater share of the load in Afghanistan these days as well. The U.S. plans to reduce the number of troops deployed there to fewer than 10,000 by year’s end but, according to a Congressional Research Service report, the number of contractors in Afghanistan ballooned to 108,000 last March at a time when 65,700 U.S. troops were there.
Johnson said vast numbers of contractors would likely remain in Afghanistan as troop levels declined.
The contractors provide services that local nationals wouldn’t be able to sustain in an impoverished, illiterate country, he said.
Stars and Stripes reporter Josh Smith contributed to this report.
robson.seth@stripes.com
Twitter: @SethRobson1
This article has been updated to include a comment from the public affairs director of U.S. Central Command.The Electronic Intifada reported that Israeli occupation authorities issued an arrest warrant for a 4-year-old child, Muhammad al-Majid, a Palestinian Jerusalemite, on November 28.
EI reported that the Wadi Hilweh Information Center reported in Arabic:
Amid their frenzied campaign of arresting children in Jerusalem, Israeli forces raided the home of Zine al-Majid in the Saadia area of the Old City last week in order to arrest his son Muhammad, who is four years old.
The boy’s father told Wadi Hilweh Information Center:
“A big force raided our house at dawn on Thursday, and demanded to know the names of my children. So I told them and they said, ‘we have an arrest order for Muhammad.’ I was shocked and asked one of them if he was sure. Muhammad is only four years old! But the officer was not convinced and asked me to wake him up, and after he saw him he backed down from carrying out the arrest.
The father added: “I told the officer, ‘you want to arrest him; should I send milk and diapers with him?’”
He said that the officer questioned him about his son and his son’s friends and if he was in the neighborhood, under the pretext that an Israeli settler had been injured. He threatened to summon and interrogate the child if the accusations were establishedOxford University has slipped in the international league table of the world's top universities - in a study which shows the advance of academia in Asia that will soon pose a challenge to the Ivy League and Oxbridge.
The study, from Times Higher Education and QS Top Universities shows that overall the UK still punches above its weight, second only to the US. The UK has four out of the top 10 slots and 18 in the top 100. But there has been a significant fall in the number of North American universities in the top 100, from 42 in 2008 to 36 in 2009.
However, the number of Asian universities in the top 100 increased from 14 to 16. The University of Tokyo, at 22, is the highest ranked Asian university, ahead of the University of Hong Kong at 24.
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Data summaryImage copyright Reuters Image caption The disappearance of the 43 Ayotzinapa Teacher Training College students has shocked Mexicans
Some bodies found in shallow graves near the Mexican town of Iguala are not those of students missing after clashes with police, the state governor says.
The 43 students were last seen being pushed into police vans after a protest in Guerrero state on 26 September.
"I can say that some of the bodies, according to the work of forensics experts, do not correspond to the youths," said Governor Angel Aguirre.
Prosecutors believe police turned over the students to a drug gang.
The gang was linked to the family of Iguala's Mayor Jose Luis Abarca Velazquez.
He, his wife and his head of security went on leave after the clashes and have not reappeared.
A formal search has been launched for them.
Mr Aguirre has promised new developments in the investigation over the next few days.
"I have big hopes of finding our young students alive. That is why we have now entered a new phase in the search for them," he said.
The clandestine graves were located in the outskirts of Iguala following an anonymous tip off.
Twenty-eight burnt bodies were retrieved from the pits. Forensic experts are still working to identify all of them, said Mr Aguirre.
'No impunity'
The students all attended a local teacher training college with a history of left-wing activism.
Image copyright AFP Image caption Federal forces have disarmed local police and taken over security in the town of Iguala
Image copyright AFP Image caption Parents of the students joined the search for their loved ones, but many fear the worst at this stage
Six students were killed in two separate shooting incidents during the protests in Iguala, which lies some 200km (120 miles) south of the capital, Mexico City.
But it is not clear whether they were targeted for their political beliefs.
Some think that they may have angered a local drug gang called Guerreros Unidos by refusing to pay extortion money.
Thousands of people have taken to the streets across Mexico to demand government action to locate the students.
President Enrique Pena Nieto went on national television to promise to identify and punish those responsible for the disappearance.
He described the incident as "shocking, painful and unacceptable" and said there will be "no impunity".Getty Images
Since his return from career-threatening neck surgeries in 2011, Peyton Manning has maintained a stoic disposition when discussing his status. No injury was too serious, and nothing would prevent him from regaining his form among the NFL's best quarterbacks.
Now that he has the stats to prove himself right, Manning is ready to admit he's far from 100 percent healthy.
In an interview with MMQB's Peter King, the Broncos quarterback admitted he does not have any feeling in his fingertips:
I can't feel anything in my fingertips. It's crazy. I've talked to a doctor recently who said, Don't count on the feeling coming back. It was hard for me for about two years, because one doctor told me I could wake up any morning and it might come back. So you wake up every day thinking, Today's the day! Then it's not.
At once, Manning's admission helps explain his occasional struggles while making it all the more amazing he remains one of the game's best. It's likely hard to throw a perfect spiral 100 percent of the time without feeling in your fingertips—Manning has often been criticized for his wobbly "duck" |
you're trying to do here, but KNOCK IT OFF. This is tone deaf and foolish. https://t.co/YcWoH0Iaim — Gwendolyn Ann Smith (@gwenners) August 22, 2017
Does this mean @TheDemocrats’ next presidential candidate will absolutely guarantee they will #BuildTheWall? https://t.co/Z39723UFXD — Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) August 22, 2017
DNC: "And when is he going to shoot someone on 5th Avenue?" https://t.co/3dDkrAEAWe — Adam ⚡️ Sneed (@atsneed) August 22, 2017
Since Democrats aren't giving them any money, I guess they decided to try something different. https://t.co/CgWeAIaJK1 — Rory Cooper (@rorycooper) August 22, 2017
Real Talk: That's the smartest thing the Democrats have done since January. Much more productive than screaming "RUSSIA!!" https://t.co/F8Q3SrIVQ6 — Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) August 22, 2017
what on earth is this messaging https://t.co/wZ5fm4pEoO — Maya Kosoff (@mekosoff) August 22, 2017
Sooooo DNC goes after DJT for something dems don't want instead of holding him accountable for things he's actually doing NOW 😑😑😑😑 https://t.co/4DuudaE6al — Elizabeth Kiefer (@lizabeth_kiefer) August 22, 2017
folks, if you're frustrated by the lack of follow-through on racism, vote Democr--wait, that's not--lemme start over https://t.co/Dkuk97wicz — Simon Maloy (@SimonMaloy) August 22, 2017
if your strategy requires you to twist yourself into this big of a pretzel, it might be time for a better strategy. https://t.co/m3iMi5TbfD — mike casca (@cascamike) August 22, 2017
Can someone explain the strategy behind this? https://t.co/qquV7W4s9Z — Dara Lind (@DLind) August 22, 2017
"Trump is incompetent at being a full-blown fascist" is not a morally compelling argument imo https://t.co/ZAKrr1GDsD — Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonNYC) August 22, 2017
NOW WATCH: We went inside the Charlottesville winery Trump bragged about during the press conference
More From Business InsiderEven as a law student, the very idea of who owned the copyright in the written notes I took in class was not something that ever occurred to me, let alone whether I was actually committing an infringing act by lending the notes to one of my friends.
Admittedly, this was way before copyright permeated into nearly everyone’s lives via the internet.
Now, a student’s class notes are just as likely to be uploaded to blogs, websites and forums, or even distributed as e-books.
They can be shared, not just between a few friends in class, but with an infinite number of people on the World Wide Web.
This has led some US states and universities to take steps limiting just what students can do with their class notes, which raises the question of whether students, or lecturers own the copyrights?
Universities and Publishers Clamp Down On Class Notes
This clampdown seems to be partially in response to the widespread and lucrative business of students selling their class notes to website publishers who make this material available to others for a price.
It is now such a problem that universities have been updating their policies on intellectual property and student codes of conducts, with some establishments even going so far as to sending cease-and-desist orders to offending websites.
This prompted at least one website to stop accepting notes from students attending these establishments.
While lecturers can rightly claim copyright over notes, articles, and books they write or publish, to extend this to what students write in class would seem to be tenuous at the very least.
What students write down are their notes. They have written them, used their own skill and knowledge to interpret what has been said, and they can claim ownership of them.
If infringement of copyright law extended to summaries or interpretations then journalists and reviewers would be out of work.
Knowledge not copyrightable. Knowledge expression in tangible form is.
This also raises the issue of ‘knowledge’ in relation to copyright. Students come to university to learn and to acquire knowledge…from their lecturers. The lecturers cannot then prevent them from using that knowledge.
Furthermore, where did the lecturers receive their knowledge from? Knowledge is not copyrightable. It is the expression of knowledge in an original, tangible format that is copyrightable.
For copyright to even exist at all the work must be fixed in a tangible medium. While the notes that a professor uses to deliver his lecture may be fixed, the oral delivery of the notes are not.
For an oral lecture to receive copyright protection, it would have to be delivered verbatim from the previously written script (the written script being the tangible medium), or it would need to be recorded or fixed in some other way.
Although I do not doubt that teaching methods have changed since my university days, I am sure that lecturers pressing the play button on their iTunes folder, while settling down to do The Times Crossword, or reading parrot-style from a full script, without any interaction with students is still not the way things are done.
So, to claim copyright exists in a lecture would seem to fall at the very first hurdle.
So, if a lecture is not fixed in any tangible medium, can it be considered a performance for the purposes of copyright?
Well, perhaps, but in order for a lecturer to claim copyright, the lecture would have to be recorded in some way…and so we are back to the tangible medium problem again.
Pre-Printed Notes are an Exception
Just to clarify here, we are talking about the notes a student makes in class and lectures.
We are not talking about any notes or pre-printed or pre-recorded materials that a lecturer may distribute to students, which are protected by either the lecturer’s or others’ copyrights because they have been fixed.
In 1996 the University of Florida embarked on a lawsuit against A-Plus Notes – a note-taking company which allowed students to upload their class notes – claiming this infringed upon professors’ copyrights. The US Court of Appeals disagreed, ruling against the University of Florida.
University of California at Berkeley Tried to Prevent Students from Profiting from Notes
While one can understand the need for universities to protect their professors’ intellectual property rights, it is wide of the mark to suggest that their students’ notes infringe their copyrights.
Still, even with the 1996 case setting a precedent, universities are still doing their utmost to prevent students from profiting from their class notes.
The University of California, Berkeley in its policy on course note taking updated earlier this year maintains that:
Instructors’ Copyrights. Individual instructors retain copyrights to lectures and class presentations, class materials they create, and related material pursuant to U.S. copyright law, California Civil Code § 980 (a)(1), and the University of California’s Policy on Copyright Ownership.
Omitting to mention, of course, that it is already established there is no copyright in lectures per se.
It also forbids students not to reproduce, share or distribute notes for commercial purposes or compensation, or to share notes with students currently not enrolled in the same class.
Berkeley’s Own Law Professor at Odds with University Stance
Not only do these measures seem rather Draconian, but in the University of California Guardian it was reported that the policy infringed student rights and detracted from an ‘open’ learning atmosphere.
It also pointed out the irony of UC Berkeley hosting the 2008 Students for Free Culture convention, a conference focusing on public access to knowledge, civil liberties and freedom of expression.
Furthermore, one of Berkeley’s own professors of law maintains that federal copyright laws and the rights to free speech in the First Amendment would take precedence over the California Education Code.
Last year, there was another case regarding copyright of class notes. Dr. Michael Moulton, who teaches wildlife ecology and conservation at the University of Florida and his publisher Faulkner Press have been involved in a lawsuit with Class Notes dba Einstein’s Notes.
Tangible Expression is the Key to Copyright Infringement
Dr. Moulton had compiled his lecture notes into an electronic textbook, which was published by Faulkner Press.
Students enrolled in Dr. Moulton’s class were required to purchase the $90 CD, which included study guides, practice exam questions and other audiovisual material.
Class Notes was in the business of collecting material and class notes from students, and the lawsuit alleged that they were infringing Dr. Moulton’s copyrights.
The copyrights in question were Dr. Moulton’s lecture notes, including lecture outlines, exams and film study questions and the sound recordings of Dr. Moulton’s lectures.
The court decided in Dr. Moulton’s favor, but the difference between this and the earlier case is that Dr. Moulton’s copyrights had been fixed in a tangible medium.
Perhaps the most salient point from the judgment, and the one that university lecturers should take note of, was with regard to the content of Dr. Moulton’s copyrights:
‘…his film study questions and practice questions are factual compilations. Copyright protection extends only to the selection and arrangement, not to the underlying facts themselves’
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About the Author: Amanda Duffy has a degree in law from the University of Westminster, London. She has had a successful career in music copyright and publishing at the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society, the BBC and FremantleMedia. She is now a freelance writer.New York City is in the grips of an intense winter storm -- a foot of snow or more is expected to arrive once night falls. Many flights are cancelled, public transportation is at risk of being suspended, and a population is preparing for power outages.
Now, imagine today is Super Bowl Sunday.
This is the risk the NFL is taking by granting MetLife Stadium hosting duties for the 2014 Super Bowl next winter. A blizzard in the region doesn't happen that often, but the NFL could hit the weather lottery next Feb. 2 when New York and New Jersey are slated to host the league’s championship game.
“We know New York City and New Jersey will be prepared,” said NFL spokesperson Greg Aiello.
Al Kelly, the president and CEO of the New York and New Jersey Super Bowl host committee, released a statement Friday as the blizzard bore down on the area.
“The main objective of the NFL and the host committee is to be prepared for any and everything, with regard to weather. We have been planning for all possibilities and are creating various contingency plans to deal with each potential situation.”
Some fans like the idea of a cold weather game, where the conditions add a layer of difficulty to the competition. Last week in New Orleans, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell addressed the possibility that the roofless northeast Super Bowl could make it more challenging.
“The game of football is made to be played in the elements,” Goodell said. “Now, we hope they're not extreme, on one hand. But we’ll be prepared for that if that's the case. Some of our most classic games were played in extreme weather conditions. You know them all: The Ice Bowl. Some of the games that I look back as a fan and say, ‘That was fun.’”
But it would take a lot of work just to get the field at MetLife playable in conditions that could potentially include two inches of falling snow per hour or 50-mile-per-hour winds across the icy Meadowlands.
“As it pertains to a clean-up effort, MetLife Stadium has excellent snow clearing procedures,” Kelly said in his statement. “The host committee is currently working with stadium officials to enhance its current top-notch capabilities. Both states -- New York and New Jersey -- and New York City have strong track records preparing for and handling adverse weather conditions and we have every confidence that we will be prepared.”
Run-of-the-mill NFL fans aren’t currently able to buy tickets to the Super Bowl. The 80,000 or so seats in MetLife will be reserved for the two teams and their season ticketholders, as well as NFL business partners and sponsors. How many of those people would even consider using public transportation to get to the game, or sitting in the cold? The suites and plush clubs can only handle so many people comfortably.
Even private planes can’t land when an airport is closed due to a blizzard.
In 2011, the NFL postponed a preseason Jets-Giants game due to Hurricane Irene’s forecast path. The storm didn’t end up doing the kind of damage that was anticipated, although a year later Hurricane Sandy devastated the region.
A bigger issue may be, how could you prioritize a football game during a weather event that puts citizens at risk? If the Rockaways flood during a tidal surge, the city will need to send emergency responders to the more imminent threat.
In front of Nemo, New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg’s office issued a weather advisory, and the first recommendation was that the public stay off the roads. A report from Reuters already noted that Sandy-wearied New Yorkers were lining up to get gas in anticipation of another possible shortage.
The odds that a blizzard will hit during the Super Bowl are slim, but the challenges of hosting the game in this weather would be daunting.
Just ask Dallas.There were times last season when Dioner Navarro would call a pitch for Marco Estrada, and you could detect verbal and non-verbal raising of eyebrows from former catchers-turned broadcasters Buck Martinez, Joe Siddall and Gregg Zaun.
You should have seen and heard the Toronto Blue Jays dugout. There were times, manager John Gibbons said, when he and bench coach DeMarlo Hale or pitching coach Pete Walker would exchange audible ‘what the hells?’
“Navvy … he was a little creative back there with Marco on the mound,” Gibbons said with a smile. “He’d call for a pitch and we’d have no idea what he was doing. Damned if it didn’t nearly always work out, though. Sometimes, you see things like that. It just clicked.”
Navarro, a switch-hitting, sublime clubhouse presence, has moved on to the Chicago White Sox leaving Russell Martin essentially on his own – Josh Thole won’t likely see the light of day unless R.A. Dickey is pitching – which means it will be up to Martin to continue the magic that developed between Navarro and Estrada, the Blue Jays pitching revelation of 2015.
It’s become a part of the folklore that was 2015: Navarro and Estrada had a ‘thing’ that saw Estrada’s earned run average and opponents average against be much better with Navarro behind the plate (2.63 and.181, respectively) than with Martin (4.11 and.244). Navarro started all three of Estrada’s post-season appearances, including that signature performance in Game 5 of the American League Championship Series against the Kansas City Royals in which Estrada tossed 7 2/3 innings of one-hit ball.
Estrada is still scheduled to make his first appearance of the spring on Sunday, but Saturday’s rainout of the scheduled Grapefruit League game against the Philadelphia Phillies meant that in order to keep everybody in turn – and with an off-day on Monday – Gibbons was determining who would instead take their turn pitching in minor-league camp. Gibbons wants everybody who was scheduled to pitch Saturday to pitch Sunday without knocking back Sunday’s pitchers. Gavin Floyd was scheduled to work in Saturday’s game against the Phillies.
This is what a rainout does to you at this point in the spring – beyond also creating mystery story-lines such as Kevin Pillar’s status as lead-off hitter, which was was apparently confirmed Saturday even though neither Pillar nor Gibbons figured there was anything to confirm. Estrada was due to pitch two or three innings Sunday against the Pittsburgh Pirates, instead of perhaps five innings at the Bobby Mattick facility, after he’d told Walker it was time to see some Major League hitters following a spring hampered by a back strain suffered during off-season training.
Estrada has yet to work with Martin this spring, but he isn’t unduly concerned and believes people have made a little too much of the connection between himself and Navarro.
“I thought Russ and I had it, also,” Estrada said. “Navarro was great back there but Russell … he’s just as good, man. He calls a great game but when he caught me last season I wasn’t pitching as great as I was later in the year because I just wasn’t ready.”
Estrada, of course, started the year in the bullpen after a spring in which he’d sustained a mild ankle sprain. His first start came on May 5, when he lasted 4.2 innings. Martin caught that game and his next seven starts before Navarro took over on June 19, in a 5-4 win over the Baltimore Orioles in which Estrada tossed a one-hitter over seven innings.
“It was coincidence, more than anything,” said Estrada. “Once I was ready to start, they just switched catchers on me. I think Russ remembers enough from working with me that we’ll be able to pick it up quickly. I’m not worried about that.”
Estrada acknowledged that one difference between Navarro and Martin was that Navarro “called for my cut fastball more often (than Martin.)”
It was a pitch that Estrada – who signed a two-year, $26-million deal with the Blue Jays in the off-season- used in 2011 and then shelved until he started to wonder whether a drop in velocity meant he should resurrect the pitch.
“I showed it a bit in spring training, worked on it in the off-season, but it really wasn’t until a start against Houston (May 16, in a game started by Martin) that I found a (cutter) grip I liked. Russell and I will get lots of opportunity to use it this season.”
Estrada is adamant that starting the season on the 15-day disabled list – something that seemed to be an option a week ago – is no longer on the table. He will be ready for Opening Day, he said, and Gibbons seems inclined to go along with it even though the battle between Aaron Sanchez and Floyd surely suggests the Blue Jays ought to err on the side of caution, since the loser of that battle could easily fill in for Estrada early. Estrada came to camp a little behind the norm – by design. After breaching the 200-inning mark including playoffs last season, he was told to ease off. So where in the past he would have throw five bullpen sessions by the start of spring training, this season he hadn’t thrown any.
“We’ve talked a bit about the off-days early in the season, and how you might not really need a fifth starter much early in the season,” Estrada said, shrugging. “But I don’t want to miss any starts.”
The Blue Jays are said to be quietly making inquiries about catching depth, because as one club source said: “The drop-off from Russell to everybody else is so huge.” Thole is the nominal backup by virtue of his comfort with Dickey; A.J. Jimenez and former Pittsburgh Pirates first-rounder Tony Sanchez are just so-so, and have been found wanting offensively to various degrees. Navarro was the topic of frequent trade rumors last season, but the truth is he was more valuable to the Blue Jays than anything they would have received in return. There are reasons to want the Blue Jays to upgrade their depth behind the plate, but none of them should focus on Martin’s ability to work with Estrada. If the pitcher himself isn’t worrying about it, neither should the rest of us.Harvard researchers have identified a whole new class of high-performing organic molecules, inspired by vitamin B2, that can safely store electricity from intermittent energy sources like solar and wind power in large batteries.
The development builds on previous work in which the team developed a high-capacity flow battery that stored energy in organic molecules called quinones and a food additive called ferrocyanide. That advance was a game-changer, delivering the first high-performance, non-flammable, non-toxic, non-corrosive, and low-cost chemicals that could enable large-scale, inexpensive electricity storage.
While the versatile quinones show great promise for flow batteries, Harvard researchers continued to explore other organic molecules in pursuit of even better performance. But finding that same versatility in other organic systems has been challenging.
“Now, after considering about a million different quinones, we have developed a new class of battery electrolyte material that expands the possibilities of what we can do,” said Kaixiang Lin, a Ph.D. student at Harvard and first author of the paper. “Its simple synthesis means it should be manufacturable on a large scale at a very low cost, which is an important goal of this project.”
The new research is published in Nature Energy.
Flow batteries store energy in solutions in external tanks — the bigger the tanks, the more energy they store. In 2014, Michael J. Aziz, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Roy Gordon, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science, Alán Aspuru-Guzik, Professor of Chemistry and their team at Harvard replaced metal ions used as conventional battery electrolyte materials in acidic electrolytes with quinones, molecules that store energy in plants and animals. In 2015, they developed a quinone that could work in alkaline solutions alongside a common food additive.
In this most recent research, the team found inspiration in vitamin B2, which helps to store energy from food in the body. The key difference between B2 and quinones is that nitrogen atoms, instead of oxygen atoms, are involved in picking up and giving off electrons.
“With only a couple of tweaks to the original B2 molecule, this new group of molecules becomes a good candidate for alkaline flow batteries,” said Aziz. “They have high stability and solubility and provide high battery voltage and storage capacity. Because vitamins are remarkably easy to make, this molecule could be manufactured on a large scale at a very low cost.”
“We designed these molecules to suit the needs of our battery, but really it was nature that hinted at this way to store energy,” said Gordon, co-senior author of the paper. “Nature came up with similar molecules that are very important in storing energy in our bodies.”
The team will continue to explore quinones, as well as this new universe of molecules, in pursuit of a high-performing, long-lasting and inexpensive flow battery.
Harvard’s Office of Technology Development has been working closely with the research team to navigate the shifting complexities of the energy storage market and build relationships with companies well positioned to commercialize the new chemistries.
The paper was authored by Lin, Aziz, Gordon, Aspuru-Guzik, Rafael Gómez-Bombarelli, Eugene S. Beh, Liuchuan Tong, Qing Chen, and Alvaro Valle.
This work was funded by a Department of Energy ARPA-E award, the National Science Foundation and the Massachusetts Clean Energy Technology Center. The research was also supported by the Odyssey Cluster and Research Computing of Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences.Image caption Maria Vigo says North Kensington's working class are being pushed out by affluent outsiders
Maria Vigo has lived opposite Grenfell Tower for 11 years, and she's upset.
Not just with the fire that claimed so many lives in the block she can see from her kitchen window.
She's also upset with how expensive her local playgroup has become, and how the people of North Kensington can't afford the properties in the area.
But - most of all - she's upset that she's not being listened to.
"There was a lot of anger on the school run this morning," she says.
"There's a lot of separation between classes and people are telling me that it's down to social cleansing."
Maria says people are angry that things didn't work in the tower, and that there weren't any sprinklers.
"They need to train us how to get out of buildings safely, not just put up a fire notice," she says.
The mother of two, whose children both have special needs, talks of how, years ago, the affluence of Knightsbridge spilled into parts of Kensington, then Notting Hill, then Holland Park.
She puts her hands into a circle. "We feel like we're being surrounded."
How house prices compare £1,369,708 Average in Kensington and Chelsea £220,094 Average for UK £66,384 Increase in average Kensington and Chelsea price since 2016 Getty Images
Maria was born in the area, and talks about how local playgroups have been privatised.
"If they were £2 and now they're £7.50, then no-one can afford to take their kids there."
She speaks without drawing breath, frustration spilling out.
"This area's always been working class. It's starting to become a bit less so now, and the working class are feeling that they're being left without a voice.
"The council isn't listening to us. We don't want a pretty building. They should ask us 'What do we need? or 'What would we like?'"
Maria also says a desire for profits is encroaching on the lives of working-class locals.
"Properties are being built in this area that aren't being bought by people in the local community."
The area around Grenfell Tower is busy, especially near Latimer Road tube, but voices are low and sombre.
People stand huddled in groups, looking downcast. Some don't want to talk to the press.
Others take photographs of the blackened block; a scar in the sky that dominates everyone's thoughts.
Young men in sports gear and oversized caps, old men in shirts and trousers, and women in hijabs, all pull out their phones to take photographs of the soot-stained tower, bits of which float onto the street.
People's faces screw up as they look up. No-one can believe what they're seeing.
Image caption Some North Kensington locals say they are being priced out of their own area
Snatches of conversation can be heard in the streets.
"Can you imagine how desperate..." says one man to a woman as they walk.
People drive to various churches and buildings that are now refuge centres, trying to hand over bundles of clothes, but they're politely turned away.
One man pulls up to Latymer Community Church in a van, with two big bags of clothes. He's turned away as there are too many clothes being donated now.
He sticks them into his white van, explaining that he's from Essex but was passing and wanted to help. He grins, helplessly.
In the streets, it looks like a mass house move is under way - cars are stuffed with bin liners. Their drivers call out to pedestrians and police officers for directions to drop-off centres.
They too are told their kindness can't be accepted, that so much has been donated, but that nappies are still needed.
Father Bisrat Berhanu, 55, is an Orthodox priest and lives in Lancaster Way. He's been around here for 19 years.
He would visit people in Grenfell Tower, knew families there, and is shocked at what's happened.
"The community is dynamic, it's close," he says.
"The people in the tower blocks knew each other, they were like a family. I've met people who lived there. We've cried together.
"We're feeling shock. Everyone's been ringing me, even people from overseas, asking just what has happened."
He too says that locals feel like they're being pushed out by affluence, that numbers mean more than people do.
"There are conspiracy theories but I don't get into that. We need love and kindness, to try and cure the wound, and cure people's hearts."
Image caption Christina Simmons says she hopes the community will come closer together now
Christina Simmons, 56, lives in a street close to the tower and has been a local for 27 years. She's disabled and has difficulty walking.
"People are coming together and rallying together," she says.
"I didn't realise we had so many Eritreans and Somalians, they've all come out to offer support."
She too believes that "they aren't listening to us," a phrase she repeats several times.
"Roads were closed recently because of gas works apparently. Well, I didn't see any works. It creates chaos and I can't walk very far. No-one told us they were closing the roads.
"They don't listen to us. We're being neglected and ignored. I'm bloody angry."
But she does soften her tone, after expressing sympathy for the horrors for those caught up in the fire.
"I'd like to see some community meetings," she says. "Maybe this'll all bring us closer together."Arkansas may retry a man for murder even though jurors in his first trial were unanimous that he was not guilty, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
Alex Blueford, who is accused of killing his girlfriend’s 1-year-old son, is not protected by the Constitution’s Double Jeopardy Clause, the court ruled in a 6 to 3 decision.
Because the judge dismissed the jury when it was unable to reach agreement on lesser charges, Blueford was not officially cleared of any of the charges, the majority said, and thus may be retried.
“The jury in this case did not convict Blueford of any offense, but it did not acquit him of any either,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote.
The decision brought a sharp dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who was joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan.
“Blueford’s jury had the option to convict him of capital and first-degree murder, but expressly declined to do so,” Sotomayor wrote. “That ought to be the end of the matter.”
The Double Jeopardy Clause is found in the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment and commands that no person shall be “twice put in jeopardy of life or limb” for the same offense.
Blueford was tried for the death of Matthew McFadden Jr., who died in 2007 from head injuries. Arkansas prosecutors said Blueford intentionally caused the boy’s death, while Blueford maintained that he had accidentally knocked the child to the ground.
Blueford was charged with capital murder, although the state waived the death penalty. At trial, the judge instructed jurors that if they had reasonable doubt about whether he was guilty of capital murder, they should next consider the charge of first-degree murder. If they found reasonable doubt about that, they should then consider manslaughter, they were told, and after that, negligent homicide.
The jurors’ final option was to acquit Blueford of all charges.
After a few hours of deliberations, the jury reported that it might not be able to reach a decision. The forewoman told the judge that the jurors were unanimous against capital and first-degree murder, had split 9 to 3 against manslaughter and did not vote on negligent homicide.
The judge sent the jurors back for more deliberations, but half an hour later the forewoman reported no verdict. The court declared a mistrial.
All agree that Blueford can be retried on charges of manslaughter and negligent homicide, but Blueford claimed the murder charges were off the table because a jury had rejected them.
The Supreme Court majority disagreed. “The foreperson’s report was not a final resolution of anything,” Roberts wrote. “The fact that deliberations continued after the report deprives that report of the finality necessary to constitute an acquittal on the murder offenses.”
He was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, Stephen G. Breyer and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Sotomayor’s dissent said the ruling weakens the founders’ concerns about allowing the state to bring repeated charges against those it disfavors.
“This case demonstrates that the threat to individual freedom from reprosecutions that favor states and unfairly rescue them from weak cases has not waned with time,” she wrote. “Only this court’s vigilance has.”
The case is Blueford v. Arkansas.[Haskell] Applicative translucent functors in Haskell
ML is known for its sophisticated, higher-order module system, which is formalized in Dreyer-Crary-Harper language. A few months ago Ken Shan showed a complete translation of that language into System Fw: http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~ccshan/xlate/ Ken Shan has concluded that languages based on Fw, such as Haskell with common extensions, already support higher-order modular programming. In fact, his paper showed a sample Haskell translation of the most complex and interesting ML module expression: a translucent, applicative functor. Different instantiations of the functor with respect to type-compatible arguments are type-compatible; and yet the functor hides the representation details behind the unbreakable abstraction barrier. Dreyer-Crary-Harper language and System Fw are deliberately syntactically starved, to simplify formal analyses. Therefore, using the results of Ken's paper _literally_ may be slightly cumbersome. This message is an attempt to interpret some of Ken's results in idiomatic Haskell with the full use of type classes. We will also show that type sharing constraints can be expressed in a scalable manner, so that the whole translation is practically usable. Thus we can enjoy the sophisticated, first-class higher-order module system in today's Haskell. No new extensions are required; furthermore, even undecidable instances (let alone overlapping instances) are not used. This message has been inspired by Ken Shan's paper and has greatly benefited from several conversations with him. Throughout this message we will be using an example of polymorphic sets parameterized by an element-comparison function. Our example is an extended version of the example in Ken's paper. We will also be using OCaml syntax for module expressions, which, IMHO, makes a little bit more sense. We abuse the terminology and use the word'module' to also mean what ML calls'structure'. This message is both Haskell and OCaml literate code. It can be loaded in GHCi or Hugs -98 as it is. To get the OCaml code, please filter the text of the message with "sed -n -e '/^}/ s/^} //p'" > {-# OPTIONS -fglasgow-exts #-} > module Functors where Our goal in this message is to produce implementations of a SET interface: } module type SET = sig } type element } type set } val empty : set } val add : element -> set -> set } val member : element -> set -> bool } end;; This is the OCaml declaration of a type of a collection made of two type declarations and three value declarations. Such collections are called structures (or, modules, by abuse of the terminology) and their types are called signatures. The concise description of the OCaml module language can be found at http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/htmlman/manual004.html We should point out that the types 'element' and'set' are abstract -- the right-hand side of the corresponding type declarations is empty. In ML, a single colon adds a type annotation whereas a double colon is a list constructor -- in Haskell, it is just the opposite. The corresponding SET signature in Haskell is well-known: > class SET element set | set -> element where > empty :: set > add :: element -> set -> set > member :: element -> set -> Bool We shall build an implementation of SET parameterized by the element comparison function. The comparison function's interface is to be described by its own signature, ORD. We shall define two different instances of ORD and instantiate the SET functor with those two instances. To make the game more interesting, our implementation of the ORD interface will itself be parameterized by the ENUM interface, which maps elements in a totally ordered domain into integers. So, the comparison function will use that mapping to derive the element comparison. Thus our game plan is: - introduce the ENUM interface, - define two implementations of the ENUM interface, - introduce two different ENUM->ORD transparent functors, - instantiate the functors yielding four implementations of the ORD interface, - introduce a translucent ORD->SET applicative functor, - instantiate it obtaining different implementations of SET - run a few tests, to illustrate applicativity of the functor and the abstraction barrier We start with the ENUM interface: } module type ENUM = sig } type e } val fromEnum: e -> int } end;; and its two implementations. One of them is } module IntEnum : (ENUM with type e = int) = struct } type e = int } let fromEnum x = x } end;; We wrote a module expression -- a collection of one type definition and one (functional) value definition, and told the compiler its explicit type, ENUM. The stuff after 'with' is a type sharing constraint: the type of IntEnum is ENUM such that the type ENUM.e is int. The explicit type annotation can be dropped: } module CharEnum = struct } type e = char } let fromEnum x = Char.code x } end;; The corresponding code in Haskell is <empty> Indeed, the standard Enum type class in Haskell serves our purpose. The class declaration plays the role of the signature declaration, with instances providing the implementation. It's all part of the Prelude, so we have nothing to write here. One may ask -- what if I want several instances that correspond to the same type? How to do that in Haskell? Please read on. We use the ENUM module to build element comparison functions -- or modules of the signature: } module type ORD = sig } type el } val compr: el -> el -> bool } end;; The interface includes the type 'el' and the value of the comparison function. Our comparison function is actually an equality predicate -- but this is enough for our purposes here. This message isn't about the efficient implementation of sets. We promised to build two implementations of ORD, both of which parameterized by ENUM. The first implementation is: } module Ord_LR(Elt: ENUM) : (ORD with type el = Elt.e) = struct } type el = Elt.e } let compr x y = (Elt.fromEnum x) = (Elt.fromEnum y) } end;; The type sharing constraint became more interesting: the result of the Ord_LR functor (a mapping from modules to modules) is the module of the signature ORD whose type 'el' is not explicitly specified and remains abstract. Yet the type is constrained to be the same as the element type of the argument ENUM module -- whatever that happens to be. The other functor is: } module Ord_LE(Elt: ENUM) = struct } type el = Elt.e } let compr x y = ((Elt.fromEnum x) mod 2) = ((Elt.fromEnum y) mod 2) } end;; Now, our ML code gives two different implementations of ORD, both of which may have the same element type. How can we do that in Haskell? |
suddenly in need of one,” a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist wrote Wednesday night.
The pain. It stings. What if it’s just that the Caps had some good chances but didn’t convert on them oh look I died and am now dead.
“We have chances; we just didn’t score the goal,” Ovechkin said after Game 5 of the Halak series.
“We got great looks and we missed chances,” Boudreau said after that series.
“We kind of played the way we wanted, too,” Tom Wilson said after Game 3 last year. “A couple of bad breaks ended up in our net, and that’s the way the games go sometimes. … If we play like that, we’re going to give ourselves a good chance.”
“We had a really good push in the third and we had lots of opportunity,” Trotz said after Game 1 of this series. “I mean, we put, I think, 80-plus pucks at their net tonight. They put 40 at ours. So we did a lot of good things, but we didn’t obviously do enough.”
“We had a lot of zone time, we had a lot of chances,” Trotz said after Game 4. “Fleury was a big player today. I look at the 5-on-5 chances, they didn’t have much. They really didn’t have a whole heckuva lot. We had some good chances and we didn’t bury ’em.”
Sheesh. What’s that old saw again? That the definition of insanity is running into a brick wall again and again and again until there is blood running down your face and little flecks of flesh flying off your cheeks and all you can think about is about how you had some good chances and ran into a hot goalie and needed some lucky bounces and can’t get frustrated and it will turn eventually and maybe this time if you run into that brick wall your body will actually fly through it to the other side like you are a supernatural ninja rather than just a sad sports fan. Maybe that will happen. It’s possible.
“We’ve seen this movie before,” poor Al Koken said on CSN’s post-post-post-post-post game show late Wednesday night. Then he started comparing this series to the 17th “Fast and Furious” sequel.
“This is the Freaking Frustrated Eight,” he went on. “You always see this. They play well enough to win. We see momentum, we see puck possession, we see them outshooting everybody, but they make the dumb plays at the wrong time and it always comes back to bite ’em.”
Anyhow you already knew all this. If you watched that Caps game Wednesday night, you absolutely — deep in your bones — felt like you had watched that exact same Caps game 15 times before. Plenty of shots, too many mistakes, a disparity in goaltending, too many missed chances, trust the process, get ’em next time.
So Jaded Jerry from Jessup was right all along, eh?
“There’s only one stat that matters at the end of the night, and it’s the one up on the scoreboard,” Trotz said at some point, and damned if that isn’t the truth.SECTION 1. The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:
(a) Worldwide, human trafficking is a $32 billion per year industry.
(b) After drug trafficking and counterfeiting, human trafficking is the world’s most profitable criminal activity.
(c) Although previously believed to be an international problem, current statistics show that human trafficking is increasingly a domestic issue.
(d) According to estimates by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), human trafficking or the commercial sexual exploitation of children in the United States currently involves over 100,000 children. The San Francisco Bay area, Los Angeles, and San Diego metropolitan areas comprise three of the nation’s 13 areas of “high intensity” child exploitation in this country, as described by the FBI.
(e) Studies have estimated that anywhere from 50 to 80 percent of victims of commercial sexual exploitation are, or were formerly, involved with the child welfare system.
(f) Smartphones are increasingly becoming a weapon of choice for criminals and criminal organizations involved in human trafficking and sexual exploitation of children.
(g) In 2014, smartphones with full-disk encryption (FDE) became available on the market.
(h) On smartphones with FDE, when a user creates a password, that phrase generates a key that is used in combination with a hardware key on a chip inside the phone, which blocks access to all “data at rest” stored in the device.
(i) “Data at rest” on a smartphone is data that is parked, stored, and no longer in motion, such as pictures and text messages.
(j) Only the password holder can unlock the FDE-equipped smartphone and provide access to all “data at rest.”
(k) Before 2014, when smartphones without FDE were used in crimes, law enforcement obtained and served a court order on the phone manufacturer and was able to have access to “data at rest” on the device, to aid in an investigation.
(l) In order to successfully access “data at rest” on smartphones in a criminal investigation, law enforcement must have physical possession of the phone.
(m) Since the introduction of FDE on smartphones in 2014, “data at rest” on FDE-equipped smartphones has become virtually impossible to access.
(n) A smartphone belonging to one of the shooters in the County of San Bernardino mass shooting, which left 14 people dead and many more injured, is equipped with FDE and has prevented law enforcement from accessing the phone’s content for evidence.
(o) Since 2014, FDE in smartphones has created a public safety crisis that has armed criminals and criminal organizations with a powerful weapon to conduct illicit activities while simultaneously providing a shield to conceal crimes and remain out of reach of law enforcement.
(p) Since 2014, FDE in smartphones has rendered court orders to access critical evidence on smartphones useless.
(q) Since 2014, FDE in smartphones has interfered with law enforcement human trafficking investigations and prosecutions.
(r) Smartphones play an essential role in facilitating cases of domestic minor sex trafficking. Human traffickers text logistical information, such as time, place, pricing, types of services, and descriptions of exploited minors using smartphones.
(s) Human traffickers rely on smartphones to communicate with each other, organize, and advertise their illicit business.
(t) Technology-facilitated sex trafficking networks rely upon anonymity of victims and traffickers in order to operate. Fully encrypted smartphones, immune to search warrants, make this possible.
(u) Individuals suspected of crimes are, upon the issuance of a court order, subject to search of their homes, vehicles, and even their bodies, but not their smartphones that are equipped with FDE.William "Willie" Merideth, who shot down a drone in Hillview, Ky. He said he feared it was spying on his teenage daughter. (Photo: Provided)
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — He calls himself the “Drone Slayer.” And William Merideth, who shot down a drone over his Hillview home last summer, says he’d “do it again, with a smile.”
Dismissing criminal charges against him for firing a gun within city limits, a judge said Merideth was within his rights when he took out the $1,800 unmanned aircraft, which Merideth said he feared was peeping on his teenaged daughters on the back porch.
But a lawsuit filed this month by the drone’s owner, John David Boggs, could settle an issue that experts say has never before been addressed by the courts: the conflict between a homeowner’s right to privacy and the federal government’s exclusive sovereignty over the skies.
The Federal Aviation Administration says it has sole authority over the national airspace, while Kentucky law gives landowners the right to use force necessary to prevent trespassing.
The Supreme Court hasn’t addressed the issue since 1946 when it ruled that a North Carolina farmer could assert property rights up to 83 feet in the air — and win compensation for military aircraft that were flying so low they were disturbing his cows and chickens.
But that was long before the advent of drones, which are now used for everything from law enforcement to land surveys, from search and rescue to wildlife tracking. Best Buy offers 50 models just for photo hobbyists, while more than 50 companies produce 155 models in the U.S., with wingspans ranging from 6 inches to 246 feet.
“We can all agree that if Southwest Airlines flies over your backyard at 30,000 feet, you have no right to privacy,” John Villasenor, a visiting law professor at UCLA and a nonresident fellow at the Center for Technology at the Brookings Institution, said. “But what about a drone flying at 3 feet?”
Critics say misusing a drone to spy on a neighbor is no different than climbing a ladder to look into their upstairs window.
Boggs says in his lawsuit that he wasn’t peeping and that he filed his suit Jan. 4 to win “clarity to protect the right to fly responsibly without fear of being shot at.”
The last image shot by the drone that was shot down. Its owner says it shows he wasn't peeping on his father's neighbor. (Photo: Boggs v. Merideth, U.S. District Court)
Merideth also says he looks forward to the court’s resolution of where private property ends and the open sky begins.
Boggs’ Nashville lawyer, James Mackler, a former Army Blackhawk helicopter pilot who specializes in drone law, says much is at stake, including for companies like Amazon, which plans to deliver packages to customers via drones that would touch down on their lawns.
“If every property owner has a right to take a shot at them, that pretty much ends that business model,” Mackler said.
Boggs asks for damages for his aircraft and for U.S. District Judge David J. Hale to resolve the “boundaries of the airspace surrounding real property, the reasonable expectation of privacy as viewed from the air, and the right to damage or destroy an aircraft in flight.”
The litigation comes as the use of drones, and the potential for disasters proliferates.
Reports of drone sightings by pilots grew from 238 in all of 2014 to 780 in the first eight months of 2015, the FAA says, and firefighters had to ground their aircraft in the Western U.S. last summer because of the presence of multiple sightings. The Secret Service went on high alert after one man flew a drone over the White House and another crash-landed one on the White House lawn.
Hobby drones also were shot down last year in New Jersey and California, leading to the arrest of shooters in both states.
State and local governments also are moving swiftly to regulate drones, despite the FAA’s claim to sole authority over aircraft operations. Last year, 45 states considered 168 bills to regulate them, and 26 states enacted new laws.
In the Kentucky General Assembly, at least two bills are pending, including one filed by Rep. Linda Belcher that would prohibit the use of drones for harassment, voyeurism or to aid burglaries.
“We need to protect both sides and let everybody know what the law is.” Kentucky state Rep. Linda Belcher
Belcher said she doesn’t know Merideth or Boggs and isn’t taking sides.
“We need to protect both sides and let everybody know what the law is,” she said in an interview.
Hillview Mayor Jim Eadens said the absence of clear laws has left his department “twisting in the wind.”
“I know one thing — if we start having open season on drones, somebody is going to get hurt,” he said.
The 175,000-member Academy of Model Aeronautics, founded in 1936, says it welcomes guidance from the federal courts but that states already have enough laws on the books that make harassment and peeping a crime.
The group, based in Muncie, Ind., says its policies already ban members from flying directly over unprotected people or houses or flying near an airport.
And Rick Hanson, its government and regulatory affairs representative, notes Congress in 2012 enacted a law that bars drones and model aircraft owners from interfering with other aircraft and says they must be operated within direct sight of the owner.
The group successfully lobbied California Gov. Jerry Brown in September to veto a state law that would have prohibited flying a drone less than 350 feet above private property without the property owner’s permission. Brown said the law, while well-intentioned, would expose hobbyists and commercial users to “burdensome litigation.”
The drone model that was shot down (Photo: DJI)
In Kentucky, the drone dispute began on July 26, when Merideth used a shotgun to blast Boggs’ DJI Phantom 3 Pro from the air.
Bogg says in his suit that he was flying it at about 200 feet — and neither trespassing nor spying on Merideth’s family — when his unmanned aircraft system, or UAS, as they are known, was taken out two minutes into its flight.
In an exhibit attached to his suit, Boggs presents the last image shot from the drone — a photo of forests, streets and rolling hills.
“At no time was plaintiff capturing video or still images of defendant or anyone on his property,” the suit says.
But Merideth, who goes by Willie, has said he saw the drone about 10 feet over the roof line by his neighbor’s house, looking under a canopy, and later hovering over his own property.
He told WDRB.com after the shooting that Boggs, with three other men, later confronted him, asking, “ 'Are you the SOB that shot my drone?' and I said, 'Yes I am.’ I had my 40mm Glock on me and they started toward me and I told them, 'If you cross my sidewalk, there's gonna be another shooting.' "
Hillview Police charged Merideth with wanton endangerment and criminal mischief for firing a gun within city limits, but District Judge Rebecca Ward later dismissed the charges.
Merideth and his supporters have embraced the notoriety, selling "Drone Slayer" T-shirts that show a drone in the cross-hairs over the words, “We the People... have had enough.”
Merideth says that he called police on two previous occasions when he saw the drone hovering over his property, but he said they told him they couldn’t do anything about it. He said that led him to take matters into his own hands.
“At some point,” he said, “Enough is enough.”
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1Rt8V9ERinspeed presents the clever urban “Oasis” runabout at the CES in Las Vegas and the NAIAS in Detroit in January 2017
Garden plot on wheels for the urban jungle
You can count on Swiss automotive visionary Frank M. Rinderknecht when it comes to reimagining mobility. With the Rinspeed concept vehicle “Oasis,” the ingenious self-driving electric vehicle for the city and surrounding areas, he refutes the deeply ingrained notion of the urban jungle that requires SUVs the size of battle tanks for the daily struggle for survival. His alternative concept: a maneuverable speedster with an integrated small garden plot behind the windshield.
The Rinspeed boss therefore challenges the martial appearance with mobile urban gardening. With its large glazed areas and shrouds on the front wheels, the refined and swift two-seat runabout looks rather futuristic and is somewhat reminiscent of a modern interpretation of famous Star Wars icon R2D2. They both can turn on their wheels with almost a zero radius. In the case of the “Oasis,” thanks to a special steering angle, two in-wheel electric motors and torque vectoring, all developed by ZF on Lake Constance.
The self-driving Swiss vehicle is not a wallflower or strictly functional like the Google Car, but rather “next gen” – with a host of technical and visual treats inside. Because in keeping with a great tradition, the twenty-third Rinspeed concept car was again engineered by Swiss company 4erC and executed by Esoro.
Speaking of inside: The ultimate eye-catcher is the small garden with enough space for growing radishes or even little Bonsai trees. Automotive supplier Kostal adds the element of nature to the car to make it a true third space. “Home+Garden” becomes “Car+Garden” – brought together by a custom removable planter.
The small garden plot is just one of features that creates a new living space in the interior of the car. Armchairs, sideboard and TV provide a modern living room ambience in white. Everything looks welcoming and inviting, thanks to the efforts of the innovative Swabian textile developers at Strähle+Hess, and Dutch company Stahl, the world market leader in leather and synthetic surfaces in automotive interiors. Together, they created a remarkable ensemble of natural, functional leather with various designs and surfaces complemented by textiles with bright edging highlights. For this purpose, Schoeller Spinning Group supplied an all-new highly elastic wool yarn. Also worthy of note are the elegant aluminum seat bases from GF Automotive in bionic lightweight design, the futuristic retractable air vents, and the multi-purpose storage box from Dr. Schneider Unternehmensgruppe. The floor is made from real wood, and created by the specialists from MeisterWerke. All adhesive bonds in and on the “Oasis” are realized with innovative adhesives from Sika Automotive.
Always a step ahead: In the “Oasis,” the journey becomes the destination
An eerie quiet around the football arena, but the activities on Twitter show: Injury time is almost up and tens of thousands of fans will soon flood the streets. The Rinspeed “Oasis” is equipped with Harman LIVS technologies (Life-Enhancing Intelligent Vehicle Solutions), which put it always a step ahead, and its finger on the pulse of the social web – the “Oasis” has long since planned the alternative route.
The “Oasis” lets its driver know that several Facebook friends with similar tastes have recently liked a new restaurant that just opened nearby. A quick ‘Ok’ signaled to the personal assistant of the “Oasis,” and the table has been reserved. That fast.
To interact with the Harman system, the occupants use a slightly curved 5K widescreen display with voice- or gesture-control that spans the width of the “Oasis” in front of its passengers. In manual mode, it presents the most important information in condensed form. The images of the electronic rearview mirrors are dimmed when not needed.
The steering wheel from ZF folds flat and thus turns into a keyboard or work surface. The car thus becomes a self-driving office on wheels, complete with Office productivity software and Skype video telephony with live translation. The personal assistant not only knows which of the occupants is talking to it at the time, but also in what language the occupant speaks. The “Oasis” passengers are able to exchange and share interesting news on social media channels by using swiping gestures. In keeping with a ten-year tradition, a mechanical Carl F. Bucherer watch is integrated on the steering column. What is more: On the “Oasis,” the new Manero Flyback is rewound by the steering motions.
The next business trip begs. After dropping its owner off at the airport, the “Oasis” chauffeurs a nice couple who had searched for a ride on Facebook into the city. After dropping them off at their destination, the “Oasis” goes on Twitter to let the owners’ friends know that it is available for use at any time. They are able to summon it via WhatsApp and other social media apps. Two days later, the “Oasis” returns to the arrivals terminal of the airport, thanks to Harman LIVS punctual to the minute and unperturbed by potential flight delays, traffic jams and long lines at the baggage claim.
Curtains up for the evening entertainment with viewing enjoyment in CinemaScope, accompanied by the Harman Kardon 24-channel sound that virtually follows the passenger as the seat glides into the fully reclined position. The personal assistant takes a photo of the stunning sunset in passing – the “Oasis” keeps a diary and if desired also acts as a travel blogger to keep the Instagram followers up to date.
Feeling like taking back the wheel? Gladly – after passing an automatically administered fitness and alertness test.
By the way, the personal assistant is also at the driver’s disposal outside the car. Thanks to a link to the Harman Ignite Cloud Platform, it allows controlling the owner’s smart home from the “Oasis,” for example. Always a step ahead, it takes care of the lights and the wellness climate as the situation demands. BlackBerry QNX supplies an integrated and certified secure and protected software platform for self-driving vehicles.
The windscreen serves as a giant display for virtual and augmented realities. Holographic laser projection technology developed by WayRay allowed to make area covered by displays significantly larger than in conventional head-up display used today. US Company Techniplas, a specialist for cognitive and networked products, developed the multi-functional rear window. It integrates not only the usual lights at the back of a car; it also serves as a display panel for the integrated clever micro delivery box. It can even be cooled or heated as needed. As a special touch, the box was sized to fit a power bank form EVA Fahrzeugtechnik, which increases the range of the “Oasis” when circumstances demand.
When it comes to automotive lighting, Rinspeed relies on proven Osram quality. The manufacturer supplies the powerful LED headlights and the two projectors in the front surround. The LED ambience lighting with reading lights integrated into the headliner comes from Forster Rohner.
The who’s who in the use of the vehicle
Who will own the car, who will operate it and what will it be used for? Rinspeed boss Rinderknecht has designed and equipped the car to keep all conceivable options open – if society is willing to share goods in a beneficial way. “Oasis” can be a shopping cart in the morning, a shipping services counter for a parcel service in the afternoon, and a pizza delivery vehicle at night. A digital access system from German supplier Huf makes it possible.
Apart from consulting firm EY, which contributed a study on the individualization of mobility, the masterminds behind the “Oasis” also include TOG-Tübitak. The Turkish research center – an institution not unlike the German Fraunhofer Institute – examines issues of tomorrow’s transport in its own mobility lab.
However, even the “Oasis” does need a dash of masculinity: Futuristic 20-inch Borbet Aero Design rims with laser-engraved “Oasis” logo underscore the vehicle dynamics.
Transmitting large volumes of data and information requires perfect connections and consequently is of fundamental importance for autonomous driving in particular. The intelligent antenna systems from Vites integrated into the roof play a crucial role in this regard.
Intelligent traffic management solutions from Siemens help optimize the traffic flow and thereby are a factor in providing more comfort in traveling, minimizing emissions, and enhancing the safety of all road users – for example, by warning road users of an approaching emergency vehicle. The “Oasis” uses different sensors based on NXP technology to capture a 360-degree view of its surroundings with pinpoint precision. Thanks to vehicle-to-vehicle communication, it can even look around corners and obstacles. This sensor fusion is then used to compute the safe driving maneuver.
An innovative app from MHP allows choosing potential passengers by interest or profession. For passionate car enthusiasts who just met, this can make the long drive to the vintage car event a sheer pleasure. The “Mini Mica” from connectivity specialist Harting is a scalable and flexible computing architecture, which uses different modules for adapting the “Oasis” to the particular requirements of the vehicle user, and installs the corresponding technology features. This makes an individualization of the “Oasis fleet” with efficient use of resources possible. The secure transmission of data and information was tested and certified by independent and impartial certification specialist Dekra. Axa Winterthur provides insurance and peace of mind if the unthinkable happens.
Urban gardening on wheels as a new trend? A little bit out there? Maybe. But as always, the creation of Swiss mobility innovator Frank M. Rinderknecht is an oasis for inspiration in the otherwise rather expansive automotive wasteland. On display at the CES in Las Vegas and the NAIAS in Detroit in January 2017, and in spring 2017 – in a manner of speaking, in the Swiss national own front garden – at the Geneva Motor Show. As always, put in the best light by Vollmond Advertising Agency from Saarland, Germany.
The „Oasis“ will be exhibited at the CES Las Vegas in the Hard Rock Hotel in the Harman Venue from January 4th thru 7th, 2017 and from January 9th thru 22nd, 2017 at the NAIAS in Detroit in the ZF booth.If you have been watching any of today's NFL action on CBS, you may have mistakenly thought that every play has been called for some sort of penalty, thanks to the yellow portion on their ticker. Yeah, don't worry, you're not alone. Usually, a yellow section on our screens have been solely reserved for letting us know that there was a "flag" on the previous play. However, the network has used the same exact color to let viewers know of a final score. Either way, the damn thing is confusing.
Luckily, according to Deadspin, this is going to be the last week we have to deal with all of this confusion. Here's a comment on their site from John Koblin:
A guy at CBS tells me: "CBS is changing their graphics next week. They are aware of the problem. They can't fix on the fly."
In response to this news, we only have two words: Thank. You.
RELATED: The 50 Biggest Sports Commentator Fails
[via Deadspin]The Center for Responsive Politics has an important post about the campaign donations of Massey Energy, the company that owns the West Virginia coal mine where at least 25 miners were killed in a methane explosion on Monday. There is still faint hope that some survivors might be saved; this should indisputably be the focus of attention right now. But there is also a political dimension to the story.
The vast majority of Massey's federal campaign donations go to Republicans -- no surprise, since Republicans are dead set against climate change legislation that might begin to tamp down our country's addiction to dirty coal energy. Massey's CEO, Don Blankenship, has taken to lecturing Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi about climate change, saying, according to the Washington Post, that they "don't know what they're talking about." In this sphere Massey's actions can at least be understood, from the point of cold corporate calculation, and ignorance.
But Massey also has a long history of safety violations, including 50 in March at the deadly Upper Big Branch mine. And it's also dead set against allowing more of its workers to unionize, preventing workers from standing up for their own safety. The Upper Big Branch is a non-union mine.
If Massey Energy's name sounds vaguely familiar to you, there may be a good reason. Just a few years ago their CEO played a critical role in a cynical -- and halfway successful -- scheme to put the company's very own judge on the West Virginia Supreme Court, where they had a case pending. Again from the Washington Post:
[Blankenship] has also thrown his weight around West Virginia, shelling out more than $3 million of his own money for ads to help defeat a West Virginia state Supreme Court justice. Blankenship expected the justice to rule against Massey in an appeal of a $50 million award for a small coal company owner, who convinced a jury that Massey had driven his company into bankruptcy. The new judge cast the deciding vote against the $50 million award. The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled that the new judge should have recused himself.
While of course Monday's devastation was an accident, accidents have causes, and at this preliminary point it's not irresponsible to ask if Massey's abysmal safety record at the Upper Big Branch had something to do with the explosion. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has received $13,550 from "people and PACs associated with Massey Energy," according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This is not a company America's leaders -- the ones tasked with writing our mining and climate change laws -- should be doing business with. Senator McConnell should return all of that money.1 / 9 9. Kansas City, MO-KS
<span><strong>> Pct. of population living in segregated areas:</strong> 37.8%<br> <strong>> Black poverty rate:</strong> 26.4%<br> <strong>> White poverty rate:</strong> 8.3%<br> <strong>> Black unemployment rate:</strong> 13.4%<br> <strong>> White unemployment rate:</strong> 5.6%</span> <span>Roughly 765,000 Kansas City residents — or 37.8% of the city’s population — live in a homogeneous zip code, or where at least 80% of residents share the same skin color or ethnicity, the ninth </span>highest proportion in the country. Out of the 166 zip codes that make up the Kansas City metro area, 123 are <a href="http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/08/19/americas-most-segregated-cities/2/"><span>home</span></a> to predominantly white residents. White city residents have very little interaction with the city’s black residents. Of all the people a white person comes into contact with in the area, only 5.5% are black, significantly less frequent than the similar figure of 12.8% of contacts across the 50 largest metro areas. <span>Segregation like this can have very discernible consequences. White households earn nearly twice the median income of black households. Three of the area’s zip codes are home to 15.9% of the metro’s black population, and the <a href="http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/08/19/americas-most-segregated-cities/2/"><span>median household income</span></a> in each is less than $30,000 annually. More than 26% of the metro area’s black population lives in poverty, slightly less than the national poverty rate among black Americans but more than three times as high as the poverty rate among the city’s white residents of 8.3%. School systems are also affected by segregation. While one-third of all metro area residents have at least a bachelor’s degree, in zip codes that are home to predominantly black residents, less than 12% of adults have a college degree.</span> <a href="http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/08/19/americas-most-segregated-cities/">Read more at 24/7 Wall St.</a>
24/7 Wall St.Baltimore Orioles: How long can one of the best infields in the league stay together?
Baltimore Orioles: How long can one of the best infields in the league stay together? by Brian Pinter
The Ravens have a lot of needs to address in the NFL Draft, but their interest in drafting a wide receiver in the first round is growing.
The NFL Draft is rapidly approaching, and the Ravens have plenty of issues they need to address. Some of their roster needs they’ve addressed through free agency, such as the signings of Brandon Carr and Tony Jefferson, and some they’ll have to address through the draft.
One of their most glaring needs is at the wide receiver position. Since Steve Smith Sr. has retired and Kamar Aiken has left for the Indianapolis Colts, the Ravens are in need of some depth.
While the team has Mike Wallace and Breshad Perriman as options, neither of them seem to be true number one receivers.
The team could elect to just add depth, allow Wallace and Perriman to be the number one and two, and grab a receiver in the later rounds.
However, the likelihood that the team will draft a wide receiver with their 16th overall pick seems to be growing.
The team has already hosted Clemson’s Mike Williams, per NFL Network’s Mike Garafolo, and they’ve also hosted Washington’s John Ross, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter.
Ross is most notable now as the player who broke Chris Johnson’s 40-yard dash record with his 4.22 time.
Per ESPN’s Jamison Hensley, it also seems that Ravens general manager Eric DeCosta likes some of the potential first round receiver targets:
“Obviously, Mike Williams is a great player…I think John Ross from Washington is an explosive playmaker. Those would be two guys who are very good players that probably warrant that sort of a draft grade [at No. 16 overall].”
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DeCosta also mentioned Corey Davis in a similar breath, saying, “Corey Davis from Western Michigan would be a guy that I think teams like.”
We wrote about the top ten wide receivers the Ravens should target in the NFL Draft, and Williams, Davis, and Ross are numbers one, two, and three on that list.
We’ll see what the Ravens ultimately decide to do with their first round pick, but it’s starting to seem more and more likely that they’ll be looking at a wide receiver, depending on who’s available.AUGUSTA — Gov. Paul LePage has joined a coalition of governors supporting offshore drilling and exploration for oil and natural gas.
The Outer Continental Shelf Governors Coalition announced Thursday that LePage had become the first governor from the Northeast to join the group. The coalition receives support from the Consumer Energy Alliance, a Houston nonprofit formed in 2006.
Additional Images Gov. Paul LePage
CEA represents over 200 corporate interests, including oil companies such as Shell, Chevron and BP, and has received significant funding from the American Petroleum Institute, the American Gas Alliance and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, according to its 2011 and 2012 tax records.
Adrienne Bennett, LePage’s spokeswoman, said Thursday that the governor “believes we must secure energy independence and he is particularly interested in the exploration of natural gas.”
She added, “We’ve got to move toward a low-carbon energy future. He believes natural gas is a good choice and it can play an important role in lowering Maine’s energy costs, particularly heating costs for Mainers.”
The LePage administration has not announced specific initiatives related to the offshore drilling of oil and natural gas. However, the coalition that LePage joined Thursday has been a leading advocate in encouraging the Obama administration to open portions of the Atlantic coast to drilling.
POTENTIAL FOR DRILLING OFF MAINE
On Jan. 27, the Obama administration agreed when the Department of the Interior announced the 2017-2022 Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Draft Proposed Program, which includes 14 potential lease sales for drilling in eight planning areas, including 10 in the Gulf of Mexico and one in the mid- and south Atlantic.
The Gulf of Maine is not in the Obama administration’s planning area. However, Richard Charter, a senior fellow at The Ocean Foundation, a national organization that opposes offshore drilling, said the governor’s move to join the coalition could embolden the oil and natural gas industry to again target a region it has long coveted.
“This is a dangerous path for the governor to be following if anyone cares about the Gulf of Maine,” said Charter, who has worked to oppose offshore drilling for 35 years.
Charter said the Obama administration’s lease project is in its infancy, meaning it’s possible that it could be changed or expanded if a governor supported it. He noted that the U.S. House of Representatives passed several bills in the last session that would have allowed governors to request entry into the lease program for their states. Those proposals failed in the Senate, which was controlled by Democrats at the time, but they could be revived now that Republicans control both houses of Congress.
“What a governor advocates for his or her coastal waters absolutely has an effect on the (White House) as to where they consider drilling or an effect on the Congress,” said Charter. He noted that one of the reasons the North Atlantic and Pacific regions were exempted from the Obama administration’s lease project is because officials in those states had united to oppose offshore drilling.
PRESSING FOR EXPANDED ACCESS
Environmentalists have fought to limit offshore oil exploration and drilling because of the use of seismic testing, in which explosives are detonated to locate oil and gas deposits, as well as the threat of widespread damage from spills. The signature catastrophe in offshore drilling has been the Deepwater Horizon well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
The largest marine oil spill in the nation’s history – the blowout released an estimated 4.1 million barrels of crude into the gulf – continues to have environmental impacts. At a conference on the spill’s effects this week in Houston, researchers presented data showing that marine life was killed throughout a 1,500-square-mile area, affecting whales and other creatures, according to the Houston Chronicle.
The Obama administration’s announcement in January was considered a victory for the governors’ coalition. In November, the Center for Public Integrity reported that governors in the coalition had met directly with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to convince her to expand offshore drilling.
It’s unclear if LePage’s move to join the coalition will lead to his advocacy for offshore drilling in the Gulf of Maine. However, Charter said it made sense that the coalition would seek to recruit new members.
“They are highly motivated,” he said.
JOB CREATION, ENERGY SECURITY
Data from the Institute on Money in State Politics shows that governors in the coalition, including its founder, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, have benefited from contributions from the oil and gas industry.
North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory, chairman of the coalition and a former executive with Duke Energy, sent a statement defending the group’s advocacy for offshore drilling.
“Responsible exploration and development of oil and gas reserves off our coast would create thousands of good-paying jobs, spur activity in a host of associated industries, generate billions of dollars in tax revenue and move America closer to energy independence,” he said.
In a news release, McCrory said the addition of LePage “broadens the coalition’s geographic representation.” He added, “I look forward to having a new voice and perspective at the table as we continue to push for responsibly expanding the use of our offshore energy resources.”
LePage joins the governors of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia as members of the coalition.
“I’m pleased to join the OCS Governors Coalition and eager to get to work,” LePage said in a written statement. “Safe, responsible development of our offshore energy resources will create jobs, boost our economy and enhance our national energy security.”
DO FISHING, TOURISM, DRILLING MIX?
LePage voiced support for offshore oil drilling during the 2010 Republican gubernatorial primary. He was heavily criticized for that by environmental groups and his opponents in the election.
Dylan Voorhees, the |
a lot to do here. The game also comes with 48 achievements, but with no official achievement system on the Switch, it's unclear why you would want them.
Rive has its share of flaws, including one really infuriating one, but otherwise it's a well-made and very entertaining space shooter. If you enjoyed any of the classic shooters, this one should tickle your fancy as well. It's solid space shooting gameplay with some clever additions to it, with plenty of content to keep you coming back. Just be careful of those checkpoints.
Final score: 8.5 out of 10
A copy of this game was provided by the publisher for review.NEW YORK (Reuters) - Japanese officials may only have hours to cool reactors that have been disabled by Friday’s massive earthquake and tsunami or face a nuclear meltdown.
The Fukushima nuclear plant in Fukushima prefecture in northeastern Japan is pictured in a 2008 file photo. REUTERS/KYODO/Files
Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO) (9501.T) is racing to cool down the reactor core after a highly unusual “station blackout” — the total loss of power necessary to keep water circulating through the plant to prevent overheating.
Daiichi Units 1, 2 and 3 reactors shut down automatically at 2:46 p.m. local time due to the earthquake. But about an hour later, the on-site diesel back-up generators also shut, leaving the reactors without alternating current (AC) power.
That caused Tepco to declare an emergency and the government to evacuate thousands of people from near the plant. Such a blackout is “one of the most serious conditions that can affect a nuclear plant,” according to experts at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a U.S. based nuclear watchdog group.
“If all AC power is lost, the options to cool the core are limited,” the group warned.
TEPCO also said it has lost ability to control pressure at some of the reactors at its Daini plant nearby.
The reactors at Fukushima can operate without AC power because they are steam-driven and therefore do not require electric pumps, but the reactors do require direct current (DC) power from batteries for its valves and controls to function.
If battery power is depleted before AC power is restored, the plant would stop supplying water to the core and the cooling water level in the reactor core could drop.
RADIATION RELEASE
Officials are now considering releasing some radiation to relieve pressure in the containment at the Daiichi plant and are also considering releasing pressure at Daini, signs that difficulties are mounting. Such a release has only occurred once in U.S. history, at Three Mile Island.
“(It’s) a sign that the Japanese are pulling out all the stops they can to prevent this accident from developing into a core melt and also prevent it from causing a breach of the containment (system) from the pressure that is building up inside the core because of excess heat,” said Mark Hibbs, a nuclear expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
While the restoration of power through additional generators should allow TEPCO to bring the situation back under control, left unchecked the coolant could boil off within hours. That would cause the core to overheat and damage the fuel, according to nuclear experts familiar with the Three Mile Island accident in Pennsylvania in 1979.
It could take hours more for the metal surrounding the ceramic uranium fuel pellets in the fuel rods to melt, which is what happened at Three Mile Island. That accident essentially frozen the nuclear industry for three decades.
Seven years later the industry suffered another blow after the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded due to an uncontrolled power surge that damaged the reactor core, releasing a radioactive cloud that blanketed Europe.
The metal on the fuel rods would not melt until temperatures far exceed 1,000 degrees F. The ceramic uranium pellets would not melt until temperatures reached about 2,000 degrees F, nuclear experts said.
If it occurred, that would ultimately cause a meltdown, with the core becoming a molten mass that would melt through the steel reactor vessel, releasing a large amount of radioactivity into the containment building that surrounds the vessel, the Union of Concerned Scientists said.
The main purpose of the building — an air tight steel or reinforced concrete structure with walls between four to eight feet thick — is to keep radioactivity from being released into the environment.
While there has not been any indication of damage that would undermine the building’s ability to contain the pressure and allow radioactivity to leak out, there is a danger that if pressure builds too much then the walls could be breached.Share this
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Email You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. University Duke University
DUKE (US) — Video game players capture more information faster for visual decision-making, but lose information as quickly as non-gamers do.
Hours spent at the video gaming console not only train a player’s hands to work the buttons on the controller, they probably also train the brain to make better and faster use of visual input.
“Gamers see the world differently,” says Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. “They are able to extract more information from a visual scene.”
[sources]
It can be difficult to find non-gamers among college students these days, but from among a pool of subjects participating in a much larger study in Stephen Mitroff’s Visual Cognition Lab, the researchers found 125 participants who were either non-gamers or very intensive gamers.
Each participant was run though a visual sensory memory task that flashed a circular arrangement of eight letters for just one-tenth of a second. After a delay ranging from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds, an arrow appeared, pointing to one spot on the circle where a letter had been. Participants were asked to identify which letter had been in that spot.
The study, which appears in the June edition of the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics, found that at every time interval, intensive players of action video games outperformed non-gamers in recalling the letter.
Earlier research by others has found that gamers are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than non-gamers. When playing a game, especially one of the “first-person shooters,” a gamer makes “probabilistic inferences” about what he’s seeing—good guy or bad guy, moving left or moving right—as rapidly as he can.
Appelbaum says that with time and experience, the gamer apparently gets better at doing this. “They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster.”
Both groups experienced a rapid decay in memory of what the letters had been, but the gamers outperformed the non-gamers at every time interval.
The visual system sifts information out from what the eyes are seeing, and data that isn’t used decays quite rapidly, Appelbaum says. Gamers discard the unused stuff just about as fast as everyone else, but they appear to be starting with more information to begin with.
The researchers examined three possible reasons for the gamers’ apparently superior ability to make probabilistic inferences. Either they see better, they retain visual memory longer, or they’ve improved their decision-making.
Looking at these results, Applebaum says, it appears that prolonged memory retention isn’t the reason. But the other two factors might both be in play—it is possible that the gamers see more immediately, and they are better able make better correct decisions from the information they have available.
To get at this question, the researchers will need more data from brainwaves and MRI imagery to see where the brains of gamers have been trained to perform differently on visual tasks.
The Army Research Office, the Department of Homeland Security, DARPA, and Nike Inc. funded the study.
Source: Duke UniversityIn the world of sports entertainment, no name is more prominent or recognizable than Hulk Hogan. Over his 30+ year career in wrestling, Hogan has become one of the most recognizable celebrities in the world. His persona, famous red and yellow ring gear, and many trademark sayings such as “whatcha gonna do brother” have delighted and entertained millions of fans.
Hogan’s influence on wrestling is unquestionable, he brought a worldwide audience to the business and made the global event of WrestleMania legendary. His contribution to what today is a billion dollar industry cannot be understated. With his unmatched draw in event ticket sales and some of the highest merchandise sales in WWE history, it seems that everyone wants a piece of Hulkamania.
When Hogan originally listed his exquisite celebrity estate at 130 Willadel Drive in Belleair, Florida for $25 million in 2006, no one expected the US real estate market to suffer a housing crisis and come crashing down. Unsold and re-listed since then, the estate is currently still listed for sale at $8.87 million (UPDATE: Sold on April 17, 2012 for $6,200,000).
Showcased on the hit VH1 realty TV show “Hogan Knows Best” between 2005 and 2007, this majestic gated property offered Hulk Hogan and his family of then-wife Linda Hogan, daughter Brooke Hogan, and son Nick Hogan an unprecedented 17,145 square feet of liveability.
After body slamming Andre the Giant at WrestleMania III in front of 93,173 screaming fans at the Pontiac Silverdome in 1987, Hulk Hogan, whose real name is Terry Bollea, purchased the 130 Willadel Drive property for $2 million in 1992 with plans of building a permanent residence for his family.
When Hogan originally purchased the property in 1992, he had the existing structure demolished and cleared. The next four years were spent constructing a grand European-inspired estate with German influence. Construction of the estate was completed in 1996.
The estate Hogan created enthralls a welcoming pathway to the cobblestone entrance of the opulent custom built home.
During Hulk Hogan’s 12-time World Heavyweight Championship career in Vince McMahon’s World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and Ted Turner’s defunct World Championship Wrestling (WCW), the wrestling superstar battled the likes of “The Nature Boy” Ric Flair, “The Icon” Sting, and the late “Macho Man” Randy Savage – earning “Hulkamania” a spot in the WWE Hall of Fame class of 2005.
Today, Hulk Hogan is back in the wrestling business, working side-by-side with TNA Wrestling President Dixie Carter for the Total Nonstop Action Wrestling promotion. He can be seen on the company’s flagship program “IMPACT WRESTLING” every Thursday night on Spike TV. Hogan also manages Micro Championship Wrestling (MCW) on truTV every week.
What made Hulk Hogan want to get back into the professional wrestling entertainment business again, full-time?
There are many contributing factors. Was it the much televised and bitter divorce from former wife Linda Hogan? Or was it the US recession that deeply affected the luxury housing market in Florida which caused Hogan to reduce the price of this multi-million dollar home several times?
The answer is probably both, but the fact that the median price of the 88 homes sold in Bellair, Florida over the past 12 months was $181,400 (Blockshopper.com) probably illustrates the point very well.
Originally listed for $25 million dollars in 2006. The home was re-listed three years later with a 45% price cut, down to $13.9 million after being taken off the market during his divorce proceedings in early 2009.
The luxury Belleair estate features a waterfront pool with a two-tier waterfall set on a flagstone terrace overlooking stunning views of Sand Key and Clearwater Beach. In December 2010, Hogan married his current wife, Jennifer McDaniel at his home.
Built with detailed architectural features and obvious craftsmanship, Hogan’s custom built home also has views of the world renowned Intracoastal Waterway and Clearwater Pass to the Gulf of Mexico.
The seventeen thousand square foot home includes a guest apartment and boat house to facilitate a comfortable luxury lifestyle. The estate features over 1.5 acres of manicured landscaping with century oaks and a gentle rolling lawn that leads to the property’s private beachfront with a dock that has two boat lifts and parking with a lift for jet skis and a boathouse.
With a warm and comforting enviroment, this home provides a wonderful gourmet kitchen with an adjoining butler’s pantry.
The kitchen offers an accommodating breakfast bar, high exposed wood beam ceiling, and spacious layout.
Adjoining the spacious kitchen is the dining area. This design gives the home owner and visitors a comfortable restaurant style dining area, away from the chef’s area of cooking and meal preparation.
This one-of-a-kind manor home, with its many architectural details, is patterned after the look of northern Bavarian country homes.
The spacious environment of the estate endows the ample living areas with a comfortable feel that would be ideal for a variety of homeowners.
Each room was designed to feel open with an inspiring style of luxury country living in the unlikely location of Florida, which makes this estate truly unique for its location.
Fireplaces are a common feature found inside the home of wrestling’s most famous superstar, Hulk Hogan, who also starred in several Hollywood films, including 1982’s Rocky III as the infamous “Thunderlips” character against “Rocky Balboa,” played by Sylvester Stallone.
Two lavish bedroom suites and a large private exercise room with an adjoining glass enclosed spa to relax after working out is also included in this celebrity home.
With the size of the estate you would expect a large master bedroom, and you get one. The incredible two-level master suite features an extraordinarily large living area of its own.
Private spare rooms are included as part of the oversized master suite.
A grand and luxurious master ensuite bathroom, with separate his and her baths, is also included in the master suite.
This 17,145 square foot celebrity estate comes with an abundance of space that includes a four bedroom guest apartment located over the four-car garage and even a two-room playhouse.
Located on an exclusive tree lined street in the residential town of Belleair, this exquisite home owned by television personality Hulk Hogan is a European country-style luxury showpiece for the state of Florida.
Day or night, this luxury home at 130 Willadel Drive in Belleair, Florida glistens with beauty for the artistically inclined buyer who appreciates antique-inspired architecture and design.
The many levels of expression this home offers, from its majestic exterior exotic feel with its surrounding treed and landscaping lot, to the interior warmth and country-style comfort, along with a marvelous pool, all take advantage of the stunning waterfront with Intracoastal Waterway and Clearwater Pass views, making this home one of the true gems in today’s Florida luxury real estate market.
Quick Facts About this Property:
Address 130 Willadel Drive, Belleair, FL 33756 Country United States Finished Size 17,145 sq. ft. Year Built 1996 Type Single Family Home Bedrooms 5 Bathrooms 10 Former Celebrity Owner Hulk Hogan (1992-2012)
Property Location:
The luxury estate property is located in the exclusive Belleair area, north of St. Petersburg and west of Tampa, Florida.
Listing Price History:
Date Event Price Source Apr 17, 2012 Sold $6,200,000 Public Record Apr 6, 2012 Listing removed $8,871,527 MLS #U7472567 Sept 10, 2011 Price Change $8,871,527 MLS #U7472567 May 7, 2011 Price Change $9,242,000 MLS #U7472567 Aug 5, 2010 Price Change $10,900,000 MLS #U7472567 May 7, 2010 Price Change $11,805,917 MLS #U7472567 Jan 28, 2010 Price Change $12,810, 240 MLS #U7472567 Dec 10, 2009 Price Change $13,165,000 MLS #U7472567 Aug 28, 2009 Re-listed $13,900,000 MLS #U7472567 June 2006 Listed $25,000,000 MLS Feb 1, 1992 Originally Sold $2,000,000 Public Record
Update:
@ThePinnacleList this is not my home anymore and I have no idea what type of condition it is in. HH — Hulk Hogan (@HulkHogan) September 19, 2013
This property was for sale at $8,871,527 as of October 15, 2011 when this article was published. It was originally listed for sale at $25,000,000 in June 2006, taken off the market in early 2009, re-listed on August 28, 2009 for $13,900,000 and removed again on August 6, 2012 with a selling price of $8,871,527. The property was sold on April 17, 2012 for $6,200,000 and is no longer owned by Hulk Hogan.
References:Image: Sen. Dianne Feinstein via Youtube
CISPA is back for a third time—it has lost the 'P,' but it's just as bad for civil liberties as ever.
The Senate Intelligence Committee is considering a new cybersecurity bill that contains many of the provisions that civil liberties groups hated about the Cybersecurity Information Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA). Most notably, under the proposed bill companies could not be sued for incorrectly sharing too much customer information with the federal government, and broad law enforcement sharing could allow for the creation of backdoor wiretaps.
The bill, called the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014 (embedded below), was written by Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and is currently circulating around the committee right now but has not yet been introduced. Right now, the bill is only a “discussion draft,” and the committee is still looking to make revisions to the bill before it is officially introduced.
In any case, the bill will look familiar to anyone who has followed the trials and tribulations of CISPA: The general premise of the bill is to allow the federal government to share classified “cyber threat” information with companies (which is good), but also allows companies to share “cyber threat” information about their customers with the federal government—which could be bad, depending on how it’s implemented. Any programs created by the bill would be under the authority of the Department of Homeland Security, which is important, because it's a civilian, not military group such as the National Security Administration.
If you'll remember, the Senate is where the last CISPA went to die, and other Senate cybersecurity bills have limited the circumstances under which data can be shared with law enforcement. Not so in Feinstein's new bill. The language of the draft would give companies a wide latitude to share information, in real time, with state, local, and federal law enforcement, a move that's concerning to civil liberties experts.
"I think the Senate bill was much much better placed when this issue came up before—it limited law enforcement use to very specific circumstances, such as when there was the threat of imminent death or bodily injury," Greg Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told me. "This very broad criminal purpose creates the possibility that cybersecurity information sharing becomes a backdoor wiretap, because law enforcement would be receiving information it otherwise would not get unless it showed probable cause. You don’t want a world where very robust cybersecurity information sharing turns into a law enforcement tool that’s used to prosecute people for completely unrelated crime."
It’s clear in the draft language that Feinstein is trying to assuage the concerns of civil liberties groups, but they’re still not going to be terribly happy with many of the provisions. The bill generally requires that companies strip identifying information from any information shared with the government that could pertain to a person not directly involved with a “cyber threat” and also calls for the attorney general to meet with civil liberties groups to devise the final policies and procedures for how the whole thing would work within 30 days of the bill’s passage.
But even those provisions don't go far enough or have loopholes, according to Amie Stepanovich of the civil liberties group Access. While any information that goes from the government to private companies would have identifying information in it stripped, Stepanovich says there's a "loophole large enough to drive a semi-truck through" that would allow companies to leave identifying information if someone tangentially relates to a cyber threat.
"A 'cyber threat' could mean you're just on a spam email list," and are therefore subject to having your information shared with the government, she said.
The bill also calls for the government to create some sort of “notification system” to let companies know when they’ve shared data that doesn’t pertain to a specific cyber threat.
But that’s all it’d be—a notification. Like CISPA, the bill gives companies nearly complete liability protection—they can’t be sued for the information they share with the federal government as long as they act with “good faith.” According to the bill, companies that act with “gross negligence” or “willful misconduct” would still be subject to legal sanctions. That clause is still problematic, Stepanovich said.
"It fails to encourage good information practices, it’s a crutch instead of encouraging proper cybersecurity. They're saying that some information shouldn’t be transferred, but even if it is transferred, it cannot result in a lawsuit even if it’s intentionally shared," she told me. "It takes away the ability for the public to have any say in how their information is shared."
In any case, this is the major hangup that civil liberties groups and CISPA’s author, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), couldn’t reconcile. Rogers has said that, without liability protection, any information sharing is “a hard problem to work.”
“You have liability issues with sharing information, and you have, my fear would be, this unwieldy cooperation of competition between companies, and so, yes, we put liability protection in the bill, and again we did that because it has to be in my mind a voluntary process,” Rogers said at an event discussing CISPA last year. “We don’t want any mandates telling people, ‘you must give us information, or you must cooperate.’”
To get around that, then, you remove any sort of responsibility from companies who overshare; you “notify” them that they’ve overshared instead of holding them responsible, and whoever’s privacy gets violated along the way just has to deal with it.
Rogers often takes most of the heat for CISPA and other cybersecurity bills, but this isn’t the first time that Feinstein has introduced something like this. In 2012, she introduced similar legislation that ended up dying in committee.
Again, this is just an early draft—it’s possible that the civil liberties provisions get toughened up before the bill is introduced, but as it now stands, the bill is certainly problematic.
Meanwhile, progress has stalled on any bills that would overhaul how groups like the NSA collect information.
"I can't believe this is coming out now. Congress can’t pass a law to limit NSA surveillance, but they seem to be actively working to increase the amount of surveillance," Stepanovich said. "They haven't been transparent in drafting this law."
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act of 2014By Staff
The UAE has told its fishermen to stop hunting sharks for their fins in line with an international convention enforced in many countries worldwide.
The decision, which will be enforced through the UAE from September 1, also bans the hunting of sharks within areas of less than five nautical miles from the UAE coastline and three miles from the shores of the country’s islands.
The decision was issued this week by minister of environment and water Rashid bin Fahd and is the latest in a series of rules to regulate fishing and hunting and stop malpractices against animals on land and in the sea.
“Hunting of sharks will not be allowed within marine areas of less than five nautical miles from the UAE shores,” the circular said.
“Fishermen are also not allowed to hunt sharks just for their fins and to dump the animals or their remains into the water…the whole bodies of the sharks, dead or alive, must be brought to port……dealing in live sharks caught in the UAE’s territorial waters is also banned without a prior permission from the ministry.”
Shark finning refers to the removal and retention of shark fins while the remainder of the living shark is discarded in the sea.
Sharks returned to the water without their fins are often still alive and are unable to move effectively. As a result, they sink to the bottom of the sea and die of suffocation or are eaten by other fish or predators.
Shark finning at sea enables fishing vessels to boost profitability and increase the number of sharks harvested, as they only have to store and transport the fins, by far the most profitable part of the shark.
Some countries have banned this practice and require the whole shark to be brought back to port before removing the fins.A phrase used to describe those who gather in the Vtech's name to worship and adore its "Variable Valve Timing and Lift Electronic Control". People of the Vtec nation (often male in gender between the ages of 16- 20), gather in large groups of Integra's, Honda’s, and of course the fabled Prelude. The people of the Vtec nation come together to "pop their hoods" and trade various goods such as ram intakes, and large mufflers (which also go by their trade names as fart cannons). When many people gather in the Great Vtec's name a common ritual takes place within the group of males causing them to challenge those who question the word of the Vtec. A challenging Vtech male can often be seen “cruising " night and day looking for weak vehicles to prey upon to feed it's ever growing ego.Just in time for the holidays, a refreshed version of Rocket League: Collector's Edition will start rolling out to retail stores next week.
In partnership with our new distributor, Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment, Rocket League: Collector’s Edition for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One will soon be updated with cool new content, featuring Wheels and a Player Banner inspired by DC Comics’ The Flash! As an added bonus, players will also receive a DC Comics Player Banner. You can check 'em out below!
Along with the new DC Comics content, the Collector’s Edition will also include the same DLC (Supersonic Fury, Revenge of the Battle-Cars, and Chaos Run) and Premium DLC Battle-Cars (Aftershock, Marauder, Esper, and Masamune) as the previous retail version, along with the same limited Art Print created by Psyonix concept artist, Jay Zhang.
Players in North America will find the new Collector’s Edition on store shelves as early as November 14 for $29.99 USD, with a rolling launch of December 7 in all other regions (excluding Japan). Expect more info regarding the physical retail version of Rocket League for Nintendo Switch in the coming weeks.The controversial website filtering systems operated by the UK's major Internet service providers have wrongfully blocked many sites, this one included, since their introduction in recent months. In response to the problem the government now says it will introduce a website white-list system so innocent domains aren't automatically blocked in future.
Once it became evident that Prime Minister David Cameron was dead set on the introduction of a “think of the children” approach to web censorship in the UK, those who understand the Internet knew there would be problems.
Filters of most kinds are incredibly blunt instruments that lack the finesse to deal with the complex nature of the online world. Sadly, it didn’t take long for them to live up to that billing.
During the past few months dozens of innocent sites have been blocked – TorrentFreak included – a situation that really hits the credibility of what the government has been trying to achieve.
Blocking entities such as charities and drug advice sites obviously leads to terribly bad publicity, so the government has been looking at ways to deal with the problem. According to the BBC a working group has been looking into accidental blocking with a view to finding a solution. They believe one has been found.
The idea is that some kind of master white-list will be drawn up containing sites that have already been wrongly blocked or might find themselves subjected to wrongful blocking in the future. That list would then be passed around Internet service providers so that filters could be tweaked to avoid the censorship of innocent domains. Charities are involved in the creation of the list so it appears public service sites may be a priority.
Also under discussion is the creation of a mechanism which would allow the owners of regular but wrongly-blocked websites to contact ISPs in order to have their sites added to the white-list.
“There’s a feeling that some sites sit in a gray area and more needs to be done for them,” a spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association told the BBC.
While it is commendable that the government is looking into the problem of over-blocking, one has to question why the filtering mechanisms being put in place aren’t erring on the side of caution. If some sites are in a “gray area” then they should be given the benefit of the doubt, not found guilty until proven innocent.
If a system can’t tell the difference between a sex education charity and a porn site there must be something seriously wrong. A white-list is probably just a Band-Aid.An experimental drug combination cured 70 percent of patients with hepatitis C in early trials, offering hope of a simpler remedy for the chronic liver disease, US researchers said Tuesday.
The phase II trial described in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) studied the effectiveness and safety of an experimental drug, sofosbuvir, taken with the licensed antiviral drug ribavirin.
The drugs were administered orally, an improvement over the current treatment which involves weekly injections with interferon-alpha and can cause depression, flu-like symptoms and anemia.
Ten patients with early to moderate liver disease were treated with 400 milligrams daily of sofosbuvir and weight-based doses of ribavirin for six months.
All nine who completed the regimen had no virus detectable 12 weeks after therapy ended. No hepatitis C was found even 24 weeks after finishing therapy.
According to study co-author Shyamasundaran Kottilil of the National Institutes of Health, a patient is considered cured of hepatitis C if no virus is detectable for 12 weeks after the therapy ends.
A second study group of 50 people were divided into two groups to test weight-based versus low fixed doses of the experimental drug, sofosbuvir, manufactured by Gilead Sciences in California.
“We saw an overall cure rate of about 70 percent using regimens that did not include interferon,” said Dr. Kottilil. “This is an encouraging result.”
The 60 patients studied all had genotype-1 HCV, with varying levels of liver disease. Fifty of the 60 were African-American men.
The combination regimen was deemed safe and well tolerated, with side effects including mild to moderate headache, anemia, fatigue and nausea.
Chronic hepatitis C, which is passed through contact with contaminated blood affects more than three million Americans. It is a leading cause of cirrhosis and liver cancer, killing about 15,000 people every year in the United States.
“There is a pressing need for hepatitis C virus treatments that are less burdensome to the patient, have fewer side effects and take less time to complete,” said study co-author Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“Building on previous work, this trial provides compelling evidence that interferon-free regimens can be safe and effective.”A money changer counts out US 100-dollar banknotes at a currency exchange shop in Jakarta on October 07, 2008. Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said there was no danger of a repeat of the Asian financial crisis as the sharemarket took its biggest hit in a decade and the currency nosedived. AFP PHOTO / Bay ISMOYO (Photo credit should read BAY ISMOYO/AFP/Getty Images) (credit: BAY ISMOYO/AFP/Getty Images)
SANTA CLARITA (CBSLA.com) — A Valencia bank employee faced possible felony charges Wednesday in thefts of more than $24,000 from two customers, authorities said.
Samuel Godinez, 25, was arrested July 2 and was booked on suspicion of felony commercial burglary, theft by access card and passing checks with known insufficient funds, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Deputy Joshua Dubin said.
Authorities were first notified about the thefts when a Newhall resident told investigators with the Santa Clarita Valley Sheriff’s Station that an unknown person used his bank card number for over $8,000 in charges without his permission, according to Dubin.
In May, another bank customer told deputies that more than $16,000 was taken from her checking account in April.
“As the investigation progressed, detectives found similarities in both cases,” Dubin said.
Banking staff supervisors assisted investigators toward identifying Godinez, who worked for the same bank used by both victims, said Dubin.
Godinez was arrested and terminated by his employer, according to Dubin.
Authorities are not releasing the name of the banking institution until Godinez is arraigned on criminal charges.
(©2014 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Wire services contributed to this report.)A Liberal Defence of Money
by William Davies
Friedrich Hayek described it as “one of the greatest instruments of freedom ever invented by men”. The sociologist Georg Simmel noted that it “means more to us than any other object of possession because it obeys us without reservation”. Yet if some marketing gurus are to be believed, its pre-eminent position in the psychology of consumers is on the wane. The object in question is money.
It is not just the lending of money that is in crisis. A variety of business models are emerging which look set to challenge the previously unquestioned role of monetary prices in the relationship between retailers and consumers. Where products are intangible or experiential in nature, it is these models that look set to survive the current bout of creative destruction sweeping the high street.
The eyeballs of London commuters are now fought over by the distributors of free newspapers, London Lite and Thelondonpaper. Radiohead released their highly acclaimed album In Rainbows, on a pay-what-you-want basis via their website. Michael O’Leary of Ryanair has said that his goal is to offer all flights for free in the future. Google terrifies various publishing and software industries by making free what was previously sold, probing the limits of copyright. Examples such as these have led Chris Anderson, business guru and editor of Wired magazine, to declare that “$0.00 is the future of business”.
‘Free’ products have existed for some time, thanks to various forms of cross-subsidy, either through certain consumers being subsidised by others or certain products being subsidised by others. The Ryanair proposal, for example, would only work through significant increases in additional charges (such as the rumoured toilet fee) and tie-ins with other products.
What is more exciting to the prophets of ‘free’ is the prospect of a commercial product that is experienced as a gift. Wherever the marginal cost of production is close to zero – as with software or music recordings – there is the option to give the product away in order to gain as much attention as possible. Once this attention has been won, it can be used in order to sell advertising – the Google example – or simply build reputation (the Radiohead example). Even where the marginal cost of production isn’t zero, if it’s sufficiently low the model can still work (the free newspaper example).
Marketing specialists are now seeking to extend this model in all directions. When Anderson’s book on the topic comes out later in the year, expect a surge in idealistic declarations that post-recession businesses will be virtually philanthropic in their generosity to customers. If we are not paying for this blizzard of gifts out of our pockets, what are the costs? The problem is that they may not be economic at all.
Richard Stallman, founder of the free software movement, coined an oft-cited distinction between ‘free as in beer’ and ‘free as in speech’. Stallman was struggling to remind people that ‘free software’, as he meant it, was software that couldn’t be restricted in use, not software that had no monetary price. It was ‘free as in speech’ not ‘free as in beer’. If someone wanted to adapt and sell it, they were free to do so.
But when marketing gurus use the word ‘free’, they mean it ‘as in beer’. This then raises an urgent political question: does a business model such as Google’s offer us more free stuff, in exchange for less freedom? Is there perhaps a trade-off between ‘free as in beer’ and ‘free as in speech’? In political terms, the twentieth century offered two dominant responses to this question.
The social democratic response is that there isn’t a trade-off. This is why commitment to a National Health Service ‘free at the point of use’ is such an important point of political honour for the British Labour Party. Because prices exclude certain individuals from goods, political citizenship and free public goods are conditions of one another. If we want to safeguard ‘free as in speech’ then we must also provide ‘free as in beer’.
The neo-liberal response is adamant that there is a trade-off. According to the critique outlined by Hayek and Milton Friedman, societies that pursue socialist economic goals gradually lose political freedoms. If we want to safeguard ‘free as in speech’, we must abandon the pursuit of ‘free as in beer’. Of course prices prohibit those who can’t afford them, but the price system is guaranteed to preserve some element of choice, even for the poor.
The political fear, if “$0.00 is the future of business”, is that the neo-liberals are right on this occasion, just as their credibility is on the wane elsewhere. There are various respects in which corporate gifts are paid for through microcosmic restraints on freedoms and privacy rights.
A number of contemporary controversies centre around exactly this trade-off. It emerged last year that certain British internet service providers were partnering with a company called Phorm to analyse their customer’s online behaviour and help personalise advertising without the user’s consent. The fact that the web contains primarily free content would not prevent its gatekeepers extracting commercial value in other ways. The scheme was potentially in breach of European law, until various privacy safeguards were introduced.
This sort of example, together with the brewing fear of how Google will remain accountable in the future, is the archetypal dilemma of the post-money economy. Orthodox regulatory tools such as competition policy are weak in this area, given that their purpose is to defend consumer welfare in an economic sense. It’s hard to claim that £0.00 is a rip-off.
Yet this scarcely conforms to Hayek’s fears of the society that abolishes prices and freedom in one fell swoop. It may be more helpful to come at this from a different perspective altogether and ask – what sort of cultural device is money and why may we want to preserve it?
It is an enigma of all technologies that we only come to understand their latent cultural function |
by no means through the same mechanic as the class. The class actually feels more heavily inspired by the Grey Wardens of Dragon Age fame, in that it’s more focused around the slayage of fey, fiends and undead rather than witches. It’s also similar to the Witchers of the series by the same name.
First, though, let’s talk about the movie. Because the movie does deserve to be talked about.
I am of the opinion that The Last Witch Hunter is the most perfect D&D movie to date. This might be confusing to some people. After all, it takes place in the modern day, doesn’t it? And it doesn’t exactly have a traveling “adventuring party.”
The thing is, you’re looking at it from the wrong angle. You’re trying to reconcile the surface of the film with D&D. And while the movie does have witches and swords and magic and whatnot, it doesn’t feature some of the hallmarks of the game.
Take a step back, though, and it all becomes clear.
The Last Witch Hunter is a one-on-one D&D game between the DM, a 16 year old boy who believes he has crafted the greatest story of all time around his one player, probably his best friend. This player is playing the most badass Mary Sue of ever. He knows all the things, can manipulate magic even though he’s not a mage, and has enough… “charisma” …to talk anyone into helping him along his journey. He meets a beautiful, punk-rock witch NPC who’s totally into him. But they don’t ever do the sex, or even kiss, because that would be awkward at the gaming table. He meets a host of strange characters who have one defining trait (the blind warlock with moths everywhere for some reason, the witch who uses illusions to turn burn victims into supermodels, etc.), and there’s even a heel-turn from a “good” NPC at the end with the most flimsy excuse possible. And, of course, the final battle with the main villain is extremely underwhelming and contrived.
Oh, and the bad guy for most of the movie goes by the name “Belial.” And the movie takes this 100% seriously.
My point is that, if you have a sense of humor about D&D, and the people who play it, then this movie is amazing. It is perfectly written to reflect a bad D&D campaign written by a teenager who thinks they’re the most epic storyteller of all time. And believe me, I’ve been there. My first major villain was a half-elven dark knight named “Killian Darkleaf.” Oh, and he was secretly the brother of one of the PCs.
For no reason.
The Witch Hunter Class
Download the class HERE.
First things first, HUGE props to Matthew Mercer, who designed this class. TL;DR version? It’s awesome, and Mercer has great design chops. He’s also the Voice of Leon Kennedy in Resident Evil 4 (and beyond. But mostly 4, because it’s RE4) and DMs for the D&D show Critical Role.
As I said before, this class actually seems to have little to do with the movie itself. The general theme is that of a secret society of monster hunters who take weird and dark energies into themselves in order to wield them against those that threaten the peace of the world. Effectively, they’re Witchers or Grey Wardens. Mutant monster hunters born out of a dark ritual and alchemy that would leave anyone else a drooling mess, if not dead.
Though the theme is more specific, this actually reflects a lot of what I wanted to do with my ranger. These are wanderers who are as feared as they are necessary—untrusted as they are untrustworthy of others. They’re strange and confusing and do things that are unacceptable in common society.
Basic Statistics
1d8 hit points is the first indication that this class is not nearly as big and beefy a Vin Diesel himself. Light and medium armor enforces this idea (notably, the Witch Hunter also doesn’t get shield proficiency). You’ll see more justification for this later, but this class is a glass cannon. It hits hard, but can’t really get hit back. D8 hit dice is the median die size. D6 is for dedicated arcanists, d10 (or d12) is for martial classes, and d8 is for everything in-between. This puts the witch hunter in interesting company. Not only does it share hit dice with the Rogue, but also the monk, warlock, cleric and druid. And thematically, that makes a lot of sense. The witch hunter isn’t just a warrior. It’s got a bit of warlock and rogue in it. Thematically, it’s totally a shadowy, self-loathing monk. Overall, it’s interesting to see an ostensibly martial character (judging by its extra attack) get the d8 hit die.
The rest of the statistics are about what you’d expect. They reinforce the dark, studied warrior vibe.
Hunter’s Bane
This ability is chock-full of flavor and thematic fulfillment. If only it was…well, better. It’s effectively Favored Enemy, but specifically directed at Fey, Fiends, and Undead. At 6th level, it improves, but not much. I would like to see something a bit more here.
Blood Rite
This is the core feature of the witch hunter, and I love it. You sacrifice max hit points in order to give yourself a bonus to attack and damage rolls. (+1 to attacks + elemental damage). It improves at a good rate, increasing damage at 5th, 9th, 13th, and 18th level, and giving additional damage types at 6th, 9th, and 13th level. Overall, it’s a really strong core feature that ties the rest of the class to this idea of being a mystical warrior who must sacrifice a piece of themselves for their power.
Witch Hunter Order
You get to choose between Order of the Ghostslayer, Profane Soul, or Mutant. I’ll get to them later.
Rune of Binding
I’ve noticed some backlash against this feature, as it doesn’t really fit into the rest of the class, thematically. And that’s fair. It talks about learning forgotten magics, but that isn’t really part of the core aspect of the Witch Hunter. They’re dark warriors who gain power through sacrifice, and the rune of binding really doesn’t jive with that.
Mechanically, I think it’s fine. In fact, it’s pretty damn cool. Being able to cast Hold Person on any creature as a bonus action is pretty wicked (and probably a little too powerful for level 6, which is supposed to be a cooldown level).
For my home games, I’d probably re-skin this feature into something semi-psychic, and connect it to the Hunter’s Bane. Ingesting the magical, poisonous bane has changed your very being, and you can now establish a connection with other creatures in order to hold their actions. Perhaps give them a limited form of telepathy at level 1 with the initial bane in order to make this an evolving feature.
I also worry that this feature might be a bit overpowered against solo bosses, but playtesting will bear this out.
Dark Velocity
And we come to level 11. The big feature that really ties the class together and proves your mastery. And it’s pretty disappointing. Really? The Mobility feat in 3.5? No, seriously. All opportunity attacks have disadvantage against you. Disadvantage amounts to a -4 on the attack roll, which equates to a +4 to AC, which is the MOBILITY FEAT FROM 3.5. And, on top of that, opportunity attacks are much rarer in 5e than in previous editions.
Sure, if you’re playing a switch-hitter, it can be a good feature to dart in and out of range. Except that the witch hunter doesn’t gain any bonus to its speed. It would have been better off gaining the ability to disengage as a bonus action. Which, I’d remind you, the rogue can do at 2nd level. This is supposed to be the capstone to your first arc in a class, and it just comes up lacking.
Hardened Soul
I like hardened soul. Some people have been saying that it’s a little under-powered for 14th level, but I think with the peak-and-valley progression of 5e, it’s a nice feature to begin the build-up toward the final capstone.
Enduring Form
Magical effects should not be able to age you if this feature is coming in at 17th level. This is a problem with the druid, as well, where it gains a feature at an exceptionally high level that effectively amounts to a ribbon (a feature with no mechanical value on any pillar). It’s a super cool feature, thematically, but I don’t see a lot of use coming out of it. And hell, why not give advantage on death saves (the normal kind) and saves against death effects. If you’re supposed to be this being who has spent their lives living close to the black, then I feel like it should rub off on them in some kind of tangible way that can get a player excited.
Sanguine Mastery
Perfect for 20th level. I see no need to change this feature.
Subclasses
Like I said, there are three subclasses. The Ghostslayer feels like the “champion” of the three; fairly standard, and the most “good guy” option available. The Profane Soul is an effective way of creating a 5e Hexblade without going down a specific warlock path. And finally, the Mutant is just…just awesome. I’ll get to why later.
Order of the Ghostslayer
Ghostslayers begin with Cleansing Rite, which…makes your blood sacrifice a holy offering, I guess. You gain bonus radiant damage when using Blood Rite equal to your Wisdom modifier. A neat way to boost the damage, and effective (I personally saw this one in action when I ran Night of Samhain for my group). Ghostslayers hit really, really hard.
Stubborn Vitality is up next. I don’t know how effective the ability damage thing is, since I don’t think I’ve actually seen a monster with ability damage yet (feel free to prove me wrong in the comments). However, halving the reduced Max HP thing is pretty cool. In a campaign where Witch Hunters would be prominent, you’re probably also going to encounter a lot of undead nasties who have life draining powers. This feels like a little victory in those instances, where you as a player get to say “ACTUALLY, it only reduces my Max HP by X, not Y.” I would personally like to see this feature improve at a higher level, making you immune to life drain effects.
Hallowed Rune is a nice boost to a nice power. Ignoring immunity can be a really big deal, but I think this feature does it right. Thinking back to my complaints re: Dark Velocity, I would not have a problem with this feature coming in at level 11, and Dark Velocity taking a back seat at level 10.
Gravesight is pretty crazy powerful. Seeing through magical darkness is a big deal, and seeing into the ethereal plane…is interesting. I don’t know how that would affect a game, really. Unless you’re fighting phasing enemies or high-level monks, I don’t see a lot of mechanical benefits to this feature. Thematically, though, it intrigues me. The ethereal plane is something that doesn’t get a lot of definition in D&D, and I wonder how constantly seeing into that ghostly realm would affect a character. Are you constantly seeing ghosts and spirits too weak to manifest? I’m sure that eventually you’d get used to the idea, but I imagine that it would be almost crippling at first. I’d like to see that role-played out.
Supernal Riposte is effectively the payoff to Dark Velocity, and it’s…okay, I guess. However, I think that combining it with Gravesight makes level 15 a little too powerful. The idea is that you goad your enemies into attacking, and you get a free attack in return. This probably equates to one extra attack per round, and a lot of weird positioning. And I’m pretty sure you don’t need that last sentence about it interrupting your movement. I get that it’s trying to take into account that you’re technically attacking while an enemy is out of your reach, but I don’t think it needs to be clarified. I’m also not a fan of the fact that Dark Velocity doesn’t get a real payoff unless you choose this particular order.
Voracious Strike is the final ghostslayer power, and it’s a little under-powered for 18th level. Declaring that you want to vampire an enemy with your attack BEFORE you hit makes the feature weaker than basically every other comparable attack power. Besides that, this is the first self-heal that the Witch Hunter has received, and it’s 18 levels in. And it only works on one of your attacks each round. Give it the buff it deserves, is all I’m saying.
Order of the Profane Soul
As I said, this is the Hexblade option, and it’s pretty basic. It has a slowed Warlock spell progression, gaining 11 spells and 3 cantrips, with up to 3 spells per rest at 17th level. Effectively the Warlock version of the Eldritch Knight/Arcane Trickster progression.
Lethal Focus is nicely paired with spellcasting at 3rd level, making your weapon your arcane focus so that you don’t have to carry around a crystal or wand in your off-hand. Though if you wanted to, it’s not really a problem, as the Witch Hunter doesn’t get shield proficiency.
Mystic Frenzy is just War Magic under another name. This means that a witch hunter can sacrifice his second attack each round to gain advantage by casting True Strike every round. Neat.
Diabolic Channel is the class feature that shows up in almost every version of the spellsword archetype. Duskblades in 3.5 had Arcane Channeling. The Magus in Pathfinder has Spellstrike. It’s the “I put my spell INTO my sword” attack. I’m not a fan of the Wisdom Modifier limit, as you’re still only getting one attack per round with this feature, and most compatible spells would have the advantage of being at range anyway, so you’re probably putting yourself in harm’s way.
Arcane Impulse is effectively an Arcane Riposte, which I like. Cast a spell at a foe if they miss you with an attack. I also like that it doesn’t specify weapon attack, meaning that you can cast a spell at a foe if they miss you with their own spell. Harry potter wizard duels, man.
Insidious Boon is a neat little damage boost. It feels underwhelming for 18th level, but not necessarily underpowered. I think it’s just me wanting a little more pizazz than “Wisdom modifier on spell damage.”
Order of the Mutant
WOO! Deep secret? The Alchemist in Pathfinder was my favorite class. Still is, in fact. And seeing mutagens in this class puts a HUGE smile on my face. And no, I don’t care that it was probably inspired by the Witcher. It’s all alchemist in my mind.
First up, your formula selection is sufficiently wide, and the ability to replace old ones as you increase in level is really helpful. In terms of the actual formulas, I love them. I like that the idea of sacrifice carries over into this archetype, as well. Every formula gives you a super cool benefit, but also has a detrimental side effect, so you have to ask yourself if it’s worth it to use them at the time. I think making them fatal to anyone but you is a bit much, and can lead to some unintended consequences (Witch Hunters dumping mutagens into a dragon’s mouth in order to instantly kill it). Maybe just give a creature the Poisoned condition.
Giving up to three active mutagens at once by 15th level is pretty awesome, and makes this a really customizable option, since you effectively get to choose your own class features.
Robust Physiology fits in perfectly. I think it should be clarified, however, as to what it gives you immunity toward. As it stands, I don’t know if it means “poisons,” like those crafted by assassins, “poison damage” like the damage you take from a Radscorpion’s stinger, or the “poisoned” condition, which gives you disadvantage on lots of things. If it’s immunity to all three, then awesome. Just want to be clear.
Strange Metabolism is really awesome, allowing you to ignore one of your mutagen’s side effects. I see myself using it on the Wariness mutagen a LOT.
Exalted Fortitude caps it off, giving you +2 Constitution, up to 22. Love it. Perfect for this order.
I have basically nothing bad to say about this subclass. It’s all wonderful.
Conclusion
Dammit. I keep telling myself to keep these things under 3,000 words. Oh well.
I really like the Witch Hunter. As I said before, it’s a glass cannon, which is something we haven’t seen much of in 5e, and puts it close to the rogue in a way I wouldn’t expect. The document states that it’s in version 4.2. I would assume that this means that it’s gone through at least 4 MAJOR revisions as Mr. Mercer developed it, and I can see it. The class has a lot of polish, and I’m not just talking about the production value of the document. Anyone can get production value if they have the money for it. Not anyone can design a unique and interesting class, however.
One of the things I wanted to know, going into this class, was whether it justified its own existence. Could you get the flavor and mechanical diversity of this class by making it a subclass for something else? All in all, I would say No. This class is interesting enough, with enough unique mechanics and a clear enough vision that it totally justifies itself.
However, I do think that it needs another pass with the editor’s pen. I would switch Dark Velocity with the level 10 Order Feature, and give the class features themselves another go-over. Hunter’s Bane needs a small boost (as I said, the short-range telepathy thing would be a good place to start), and Rune of Binding needs to be re-tooled for flavor. A few other touch-ups, and I think the class is ready for prime-time.
Well done, Matthew Mercer. The more I learn about your capabilities, the more of an inspiration you become.Through Irene, Old Guard Stood Watch At Tomb Of The Unknowns
As they did during Hurricane Isabel in 2003, the Washington-area blizzards in 2009-10 and other extreme weather events, soldiers of The Old Guard continued to march at Arlington National Cemetery's Tomb of the Unknowns as Hurricane Irene blew through the area on Saturday and into Sunday.
There is a shelter the soldiers could use, but they have consistently declined to do so.
The Old Guard has photos on its Facebook page, where many commenters are praising the soldiers' dedication.
(Click here for another recent story about the Old Guard and the work its solders are doing "to photograph more than 219,000 grave markers and the front of more than 43,000 sets of cremated remains... [as] part of the Army's effort to account for every grave and to update and fully digitize the cemetery's maps.)
While Washington largely got spared the worst of the storm, the strong winds and driving rain did do some damage — as this photo of the flag that was flying in front of the Capitol Building on Sunday shows:The Pentagon’s account of its Thursday-night air strike on pro-Assad militia forces in Syria concealed the real story of a race to the Syrian-Iraqi border by armed groups working for both the Americans and the Syrian regime. Even the targets listed by the US appear to have been wrong. Indeed, what was described by the Americans as a minor action was part of a far more important struggle between the US and the Syrian regime for control of the south-eastern frontier of Syria – a vital supply line for Iran to maintain its forces in Syria.
According to the Syrians, the US destroyed not one but four T-62 tanks and a Shilka ZSU-23-4 Soviet-made radar-guided anti-aircraft vehicle manned by both Shia Iraqi militiamen loyal to Damascus and a unit of armed Iranians who were travelling in pick-up trucks to establish positions – on the instructions of the Syrian army – in the desert west of al-Tanf. Their intention – to set up strongpoints in the vast and largely empty land in advance of the American-trained forces – was an attempt by the Syrian government to keep open the route between Iraq and Syria now that the ISIS-held Syrian city of Raqqa far to the north has been almost surrounded by largely Kurdish fighters loyal to Washington.
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Six of the pro-Syrian militiamen were killed in the American air strike and 25 wounded – it is unclear whether the casualties were Iraqi or Iranian – but forces under the command of the Syrian army intend to continue their reconnaissance missions towards al-Tanf. Anti-aircraft gunners aboard one of the pick-up trucks accompanying the pro-Syrian units that were attacked, opened fire on the US jets and, according to the Syrians, forced the American aircraft to fly higher.
At this point, Syrian air defence units north-east of Damascus prepared to fire Soviet-made S-200 Angara ground-to-air missiles (an older version of the S-300 which the Russians have since delivered to the Syrian military) at the Americans – but the US jets had by then left Syrian airspace. One of the five T-62 tanks attacked by the Americans was undamaged.
Nonetheless, the brief action in the Syrian desert was of great importance. The Syrians were obviously trying to test America’s resolve to move its anti-Assad militia forces deeper into the south-east of the country – and the US was prepared, albeit on a small scale, to show that it was prepared to press on. But the Syrian-Iraqi frontier town of al-Tanf may turn out to be a key strategic point in the struggle of the Assad government to regain its national territory and keep open its border to Iraq and, by extension, to Iran. It lies only 30 miles from Iraq – but because the Jordanian-Syrian-Iraqi borders join immediately to the south – al-Tanf also lies the same distance from Jordan – where the American-trained militia are based.
Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: US missile strike against Syria Show all 7 left Created with Sketch. right Created with Sketch. Shape Created with Sketch. In pictures: US missile strike against Syria 1/7 The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) launches a tomahawk land attack missile in the Mediterranean Sea AP 2/7 The United States military launched at least 50 tomahawk cruise missiles at al-Shayrat military airfield near Homs, Syria, in response to the Syrian military's alleged use of chemical weapons in an airstrike in a rebel held area in Idlib province EPA 3/7 Shayrat airfield in Syria Getty Images 4/7 US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) fires a tomahawk land attack missile in Mediterranean Sea Reuters 5/7 US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) fires a tomahawk land attack missile in Mediterranean Sea Reuters 6/7 President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., after the US fired a barrage of cruise missiles into Syria in retaliation for this week's gruesome chemical weapons attack against civilians AP 7/7 Syria's President Bashar al-Assad Reuters 1/7 The guided-missile destroyer USS Porter (DDG 78) launches a tomahawk land attack missile in the Mediterranean Sea AP 2/7 The United States military launched at least 50 tomahawk cruise missiles at al-Shayrat military airfield near Homs, Syria, in response to the Syrian military's alleged use of chemical weapons in an airstrike in a rebel held area in Idlib province EPA 3/7 Shayrat airfield in Syria Getty Images 4/7 US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) fires a tomahawk land attack missile in Mediterranean Sea Reuters 5/7 US Navy guided-missile destroyer USS Ross (DDG 71) fires a tomahawk land attack missile in Mediterranean Sea Reuters 6/7 President Donald Trump speaks at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., after the US fired a barrage of cruise missiles into Syria in retaliation for this week's gruesome chemical weapons attack against civilians AP 7/7 Syria's President Bashar al-Assad Reuters
Although US jets were involved in Thursday’s air strikes, the forces on the ground comprised largely proxy fighters – belonging to both the American-trained ‘rebel’ opposition and to the Syrian military. If US personnel were accompanying the ‘rebel’ forces, then they were lucky that neither the Russians nor Syrian Army personnel were present on the other side. For the Pentagon to suggest that this was a sideshow to Washington’s battle against Isis was to stretch the truth beyond credibility in the Middle East. Cutting Syria off from Iraq – and thus from Iran – appears to be a far more immediate operational aim of US forces in Syria than the elimination of the Sunni “Caliphate” cult that Washington claims to be its principal enemy in the Middle East.
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Subscribe nowFrench pioneer balloonist
Jean-François Pilâtre de Rozier ( French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ fʁɑ̃swa pilɑtʁ də ʁozje]) (30 March 1754 – 15 June 1785) was a French chemistry and physics teacher, and one of the first pioneers of aviation. He and François Laurent d'Arlandes made the first manned free balloon flight on 21 November 1783, in a Montgolfier balloon. He later died when his balloon crashed near Wimereux in the Pas-de-Calais during an attempt to fly across the English Channel. He and his companion, Pierre Romain, thus became the first known fatalities in an air crash. He also risked himself while researching the flammability of hydrogen: in "A Short History of Nearly Everything", Bill Bryson writes "In France, a chemist named Pilatre de Rozier tested the flammability of hydrogen by gulping a mouthful and blowing across an open flame, proving at a stroke that hydrogen is indeed explosively combustible and that eyebrows are not necessarily a permanent feature of one’s face."
Early life [ edit ]
He was born in Metz, the third son of Magdeleine Wilmard and Mathurin Pilastre, known as "de Rozier", a former soldier who became an innkeeper. His interests in the chemistry of drugs had been awakened in the military hospital of Metz, an important garrison town on the border of France. He made his way to Paris at the age of 18, then taught physics and chemistry at the Academy in Reims, which brought him to the attention of the Comte de Provence, brother of King Louis XVI.
He returned to Paris, where he was put in charge of Monsieur's cabinet of natural history and made a valet de chambre to Monsieur's wife, Madame, which brought him his ennobled name, Pilâtre de Rozier. He opened his own museum in the Marais quarter of Paris on 11 December 1781, where he undertook experiments in physics, and provided demonstrations to nobles. He researched the new field of gases, and invented a respirator.
Flight pioneer [ edit ]
The first tethered balloon ascent on 15 October 1783 by Rozier.
In June 1783, he witnessed the first public demonstration of a balloon by the Montgolfier brothers. On 19 September, he assisted with the untethered flight of a sheep, a cockerel and a duck from the front courtyard of the Palace of Versailles. The French King Louis XVI decided that the first manned flight would contain two condemned criminals, but de Rozier enlisted the help of the Duchess de Polignac to support his view that the honour of becoming first balloonists should belong to someone of higher status, and the Marquis d'Arlandes agreed to accompany him. The King was persuaded to permit d'Arlandes and de Rozier to become the first pilots.
After several tethered tests to gain some experience of controlling the balloon, de Rozier and d'Arlandes made their first untethered flight in a Montgolfier hot air balloon on 21 November 1783, taking off at around 2 p.m. from the garden of the Château de la Muette in the Bois de Boulogne, in the presence of the King. Their 25-minute flight travelled slowly about 5½ miles (some 9 km) to the southeast, attaining an altitude of 3,000 feet, before returning to the ground at the Butte-aux-Cailles, then on the outskirts of Paris.
The first untethered balloon flight, by Rozier and the Marquis d'Arlandes on 21 November 1783.
Along with Joseph Montgolfier, he was one of six passengers on a second flight on 19 January 1784, with a huge Montgolfier balloon Le Flesselles launched from Lyon. Four French nobles paid for the trip, including a prince. Several difficulties had to be overcome. The wallpaper used to cover the balloon's envelope became wet because of extreme weather conditions. The top of the balloon was made of sheep- or buckskin. The air was heated by wood in an iron stove: to start, the straw was set on fire with brandy. (In other tests charcoal or potatoes were used). The balloon had a volume of approximately 23,000 m³, over 10 times that of the first flight, but it only flew a short distance. The spectators kneeled down when the balloon came down too quickly. That evening the aeronauts were celebrated after listening to Gluck's opera, Iphigénie en Tauride.
Rozier took part in a further flight on 23 June 1784, in a modified version of the Montgolfiers' first balloon christened La Marie-Antoinette after the Queen, which took off in front of the King of France and King Gustav III of Sweden. Together with Joseph Proust, the balloon flew north at an altitude of approximately 3,000 metres, above the clouds. They travelled 52 km in 45 minutes before cold and turbulence forced them to descend past Luzarches, between Coye et Orry-la-Ville, near the Chantilly forest. They set records for speed, altitude and distance travelled.
Fatal accident at Wimereux, 15 June 1785.
Final flight [ edit ]
De Rozier's next plan was an attempt to cross the English Channel from France to England. A Montgolfier balloon would not be up to the task, requiring large stocks of fuel for the hot air, so his balloon the Rozière balloon was a combination hydrogen and hot air balloon. It was prepared in the autumn of 1784, but the attempt was not launched until after another Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Blanchard, and American companion, Dr John Jeffries, flew across the English Channel in a hydrogen gas balloon on 7 January 1785, from England to France.
Deaths of Rozier and Romain.
Despite several attempts, De Rozier and his companion, Pierre Romain, were not able to set off from Boulogne-sur-Mer until 15 June 1785. After making some progress, a change of wind direction pushed them back to land some 5 km from their starting point. The balloon suddenly deflated (without the envelope catching fire) and crashed near Wimereux in the Pas-de-Calais, from an estimated height of 450 m (1,500 feet). Both occupants were killed. Eight days later his former fiancée died, possibly having committed suicide. A commemorative obelisk was later erected at the site of the crash. The King had a medal struck, and gave his family a pension.
The modern hybrid gas and hot air balloon is named the Rozière balloon after his pioneering design.
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]Share. Duty calls. Duty calls.
Bulkhead Interactive’s Battalion 1944 isn’t the only competitive shooter that wants to resurrect the spirit of classic World War II action games; it's now going to be sharing a foxhole with the newly-announced Days of War from Driven Arts. Days of War, like Battalion 1944, is multiplayer shooter aiming to “revive the style of classic WWII shooters from the 2000-2010 era.”
Driven Arts founder George Rivara explains Days of War began development two years ago and it is slated for a 2016 release on PC, Xbox One, and PS4. The team has launched a Kickstarter campaign “to accelerate the final stages of development.”
“ “[T]he only way to gain an advantage over your opponent is a more accurate shot... not drone strikes ordered from iPads.”
With Unreal Engine 4 under the hood, Days of War will focus on class-based combat where “the only way to gain an advantage over your opponent is a more accurate shot, or a better strategic position... not kill-streaks, not wall jumps, and certainly not drone strikes ordered from iPads.”
It will also feature modding support, including “custom map creation, editable rulesets and dedicated server hosting tools.”
Driven Arts is planning to have Days of War hit PC via Steam Early Access in August this year and follow-up with the full release (including Xbox One and PS4) just few months later, in December.
If you’re keen for more shooters to take a step back in time again, check out Days of War’s Kickstarter here. That said, if WWII isn’t quite far enough back for you, you still may be in luck.
Luke is Games Editor at IGN's Sydney office. You can find him on Twitter @MrLukeReilly.This statement was originally published on freemedia.at on 21 July 2015.
The Slovenian Parliament earlier this month voted 86-1 to introduce a public-interest defence for persons accused of publishing classified information.
The move followed the highly publicised trial of Delo investigative journalist Anuška Delić on charges of publishing classified state intelligence after she revealed links between the Slovenian neo-Nazi group Blood and Honour and members of the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) in a 2011 exposé.
Prosecutors dropped charges against Delić in April 2015 in the wake of widespread criticism from international press freedom groups, including the International Press Institute (IPI) and its affiliate for South East Europe, SEEMO. During a Nov. 2014 visit to Ljubljana, IPI and SEEMO had urged Slovenian officials, including Justice Minister Goran Klemenčič as well as key MPs, to reform the country's official secrets legislation by providing a public interest defence and later joined a campaign on the issue launched by the Slovene Association of Journalists.
According to DNS, the July 9 vote modifies Art. 260 of the Slovenian Criminal Code to exempt from prosecution the collection, possession and publication of classified information if, according to the circumstances of the case, the public interest in revealing the information overrides the interest in keeping it secret. The exemption will not apply in cases in which such publication endangers the life of one or more persons. To the disappointment of some observers, the amendment also increases the maximum jail term for those found to have broken the law, from three to eight years.
“The introduction of a public interest defence in Art. 260 is a welcome step, particularly given the way that this law was abused in the prosecution of Anuška Delić,” IPI Director of Press Freedom Programmes Scott Griffen said. “We are pleased that the Slovenian Parliament appears to have resoundingly accepted the principle that journalists should not be punished for revealing matters of clear public interest.”
A previous public-interest exemption for disclosures of classified information was removed in 2008 under the government of former SDS Prime Minister Janez Janša, who is currently serving a two-year prison term for corruption.
Friday's changes to the Penal Code also included a significant amendment to Slovenian defamation legislation that had been sought by IPI, SEEMO and DNS. Art. 168 will be amended to specify that cases of criminal defamation or insult committed against public officials are to be brought by private action rather than by a public prosecutor, as had been the case until now.
In an April 2015 letter addressed to Justice Minister Klemenčič, the three organisations had argued that the change would help deter abuse of Slovenia's criminal defamation law by ensuring that public officials would “need to become personally engaged in the proceedings and shoulder all of the costs if their private action failed”.
Griffen characterised the amendment to Art. 168 as a first step toward the full repeal of criminal defamation and insult in Slovenia.
“This is another welcome change, but it is at best an intermediate step,” he said. “In order to bring the country's defamation law fully in line with international human rights standards and treaties, the Slovenian government needs to remove all prison sentences for defamation and insult and, ultimately, repeal criminal defamation.”
SEEMO Secretary General Oliver Vujovic added: "SEEMO welcomes the adoption of the amended Penal Code, in the areas of both classified information and defamation. I regret, however, that Parliament did not take the opportunity for additional changes toward the decriminalisation of defamation and the abolition of prison sentences. I hope that this will be done in the near future."
Slovenia is only one of two former Yugoslav countries to retain criminal defamation – Croatia is the other – and is the only one in which defamation and insult are punishable by imprisonment, according to IPI's extensive research on the situation of criminal defamation law in Europe.Casting workshops that charge actors a fee to be seen by casting directors are a “scam,” SAG-AFTRA says, and might violate California’s pay-to-play law that prohibits employers or their representatives from taking money from job seekers. The |
, giving them unlimited access to hundreds of colourful cartoon strips.The No. 12 cornerback in the country, four-star Chevin Calloway (5’10, 180 pounds, Dallas, Texas), is competing in the upcoming Under Armour All-American game, which kicks off on Jan. 1. One of the schools recruiting him is Ole Miss.
The Rebels have been investigated by the NCAA for years for potential recruiting violations, going back to the coaching staff prior to Hugh Freeze. The whole thing found new life after first-rounder Laremy Tunsil appeared to admit to taking money from coaches. We learned in August that the NCAA asked players of the Rebels’ SEC West rivals to snitch on Ole Miss recruiting.
Calloway told reporters during the Under Armour Combine Media Day earlier this week about how Freeze is describing the investigation with recruits.
Q: We’ve heard a lot about negative recruiting at Ole Miss with the NCAA thing going on, what has Ole Miss said to you about that?
“Well, Coach Freeze told me when you’re that big and out there with faith in Christ, he’s like, ‘What do you expect? Jesus got nailed to the cross.’ So, he was just telling me sometimes things like that happen, but that’s never going to change how he’s going to treat his players and take care of them. Even if — I don’t know if he really did make the mistake, doing what he did or not — but I can just tell he’s a good person, great person. I know they’re looking at maybe a bowl suspension [for 2017]. I don’t know what they’re gonna do. But I don’t think that’ll affect anything as far as how he treats his players and stuff like that.”
Calloway was asked about how the investigation affects his decision.
“That’s one thing I thought about because I’m like, maybe NFL coaches may look at that and be like, ‘I don’t really wanna mess with them right now.’ That’s something I have thought about, but at the end of the day, that’s life. People are gonna be faced with adversity at times. It’s just [about] how you respond to it.”
Per 247Sports’ Crystal Ball predictions, analysts believe Calloway has an 89 percent chance to end up with Arkansas. He has family in the Natural State, and is from there. Texas is also pursuing him hard, following the coaching transition from Charlie Strong to Tom Herman. He maintains that there is no order to his top three of the Razorbacks, Longhorns, and Rebels.
Although there has yet to be a final punishment from the NCAA, the investigation has been a topic of discussion surrounding Ole Miss’ recruiting, especially Freeze’s top-10 class in 2013. The Rebels’ 2017 class currently ranks 48th in the nation, 13th in the SEC, and has just 13 verbal commits.
Back in May, Ole Miss self-imposed sanctions.
The program will dock itself 10 football scholarships over the next three seasons (two in 2016, and four each in 2017 and 2018), plus one it's counting from the 2015 season. It also self-imposes a $159,352 fine, and "involved staff" will undergo "additional rules education" on NCAA policy.
In response to the reaction to the above quote, Calloway tweeted the following:A typical for-profit conference costs $400 a day and takes you to a getaway vacation city like Las Vegas, Orlando or San Francisco. The staff creates the program months in advance; attendees can expect good food, snack breaks twice a day and plenty of PowerPoint presentations.
While that type of conference serves a purpose, those characteristics were not the things that drew me to BarCampGR (Grand Rapids, Mich.), Test Coach Camp (San Jose, Calif.) or Open Agile-Testing Pacific Northwest (Portland, Ore.). Instead, what drew me was the opposite—all three events are open-space conferences.
The History of the Open Conference Model
When Harrison Owen was organizing the third annual symposium on Organization Transformation in 1985, he reviewed the comments from previous events and noticed something odd. No matter how much effort the planners put into the program, people still found the most value in hallway conversations.
Owen wondered if would be possible to build a conference entirely out of hallway conversations. The result was something known today as Open Space Technologies.
Think of Open Space Technologies as a framework that lets a group of people create the event schedule in real time, focusing entirely on what the actual attendees want to hear, share and talk about—the problems they want to solve and the ideas they have to solve them. (In practice, there may be a board with schedules, a unifying thread and some managers on hand to decide who does what when.)
To really understand the open space format, you need to experience it, or at least have it described in practice. I went to the three different open space conferences listed above to capture the story.
BarCampGR: Session Suggestions on a (Virtual) Wall
BarCampGR was the broadest of the three events. Mobile application development was popular, with a double-length session called "Objective-C Eye For the.NET Guy" and a talk on developing native Android UI applications. There were also presentations on distributed version control, hacking GIS systems, decoupling team active record and about how "Real-Time Systems Keep You ALIVE!" In addition to hardcore technical topics, there were sessions on using a slow cooker to smoke ribs, publishing an ebook, learning macroeconomic theory and removing malware.
The Saturday morning status board for BarCampGR 2012.
The great story of the conference wasn't the talks, though, but how it was organized. When I attended BarCampGR for the first time, in 2008, the schedule (Friday night to Saturday night) was built on a big board where people who wanted to present showed up and wrote in what they wanted to speak about. Organizers put up a new board every few hours, with three in all.
By 2012, the organizers had something better in mind. Prior to the event, they create a Reddit page for attendees to submit ideas. Anyone could browse the selection, vote ideas up or down or leave comments. This way, by the time the conference started, submitters know if a particular event will be popular enough to propose and will have feedback to make the talk better.
One highlight of the conference came from Calvin College Professor Patrick Bailey. He speaks about the science, technology, engineering and math professions, collectively called the STEM degrees. Bailey shows the difference between the new types of jobs that require STEM degrees and the number of students in the pipeline.
News: Microsoft Calls for $5 Billion Investment in U.S. Education Analysis: Real Programmers as an Endangered Species
For computing through 2020, Bailey's research shows three-and-a-half times more computer science jobs created than CS graduates. While that might be good news for programmers, it suggests that employers need to develop hiring and retention strategies now or face pain later, he says.
Patrick Bailey suggests that there is a mismatch between computing students and the jobs that will be created in the next eight years.
Like many free conferences, BarCamp is hosted at a local college and sponsored by local employers. When Bailey speaks, I can't help but notice the large Atomic Object banner in the background. Then again, the conference has no entrance fee. I offer a toast to AO with my free soda while eating my free hot dog.
BarCampGR is literally a camp. Some people toast marshmallows late into the night and bring sleeping bags to crash on the floor. Since I have a warm bed 40 miles away, I head home.
Test Coach Camp: Learning to be a Good Example
My next open space event, while also called a camp, is held at a Holiday Inn on the Friday and Saturday before the annual conference for the Association for Software Testing.
Like BarCampGR, the program begins with an exercise to create a schedule. Here, though, we announce our sessions verbally, write them down and post them on the wall. We discuss which sessions have overlap, combine some and eliminate those with a lack of interest. After that, we build the schedule for the day by moving the sticky notes into a grid taped on the wall with duct tape by Matt Barcomb, who is the lead facilitator.
Where BarCampGR was local and eclectic, Test Coach Camp is international in attendees, but focused in vision. There are sessions on how to coach in difficult situations—dealing with people who don't want to be coached, people who don't want to test and so on—how to be a good role model, how to create games, puzzles and simulations that challenge the mind and, of course, how to play some games and learn from each other.
I sit in a session by Christin Wiedemann on being a good role model. Wiedemann offers to facilitate and takes notes on easel pad pages. The attendees throw out ideas: expressing appreciation for others creates a culture of appreciation, while keeping the work fun will tend to influence others to seek out fun and play. We write down that leaders must be careful about how they offer feedback, because other people will mirror that behavior.
Christin Wiedemann runs a session on being a good example at Test Coach Camp.
The tester games session is a side-splitter. I show my old business card, which has a defect, and ask attendees to "find the bug." I let them ask reasonable questions. Like good testers, they jump into possible errors: "Is the phone number wrong? Do you really want it to say P: before phone, not H:?" and so on. Eventually, Wade Wachs points out that the color, which is different on both sides, could be perceived as a quality problem. The testing lesson is in the way testers engage—asking for requirements is a reasonable question.
Analysis: Software Testing Lessons Learned From Knight Capital Fiasco
At the end of the event, Barcomb runs a debrief in which people talk about their experiences and what they learned. Several people mention Paul Carvalho's Coaching game, which leads a small group through exercises to understand the perspective of people with different roles in the organization.
After Test Coach Camp, the 30-odd attendees go to the conference for the Association for Software Testing, where we create a one-hour presentation called "What I learned at Test Coach Camp." That talk is recorded and available on YouTube:
Agile Testing Open: Bridging the Communication Gap
The final event is Agile (Testing) Open Northwest (ATONW), organized by Diana Larsen, president of the Agile Alliance. Like Test Coach Camp, ATONW has a specific theme: Truly integrating the test process into agile software delivery.
The format of the sessions is similar to Test Coach Camp, too, with an easel and notes. Individuals propose sessions and, by proposing, also offer to host. At ATONW, hosting an event often means asking the audience questions, directing the flow and taking notes on an easel page.
Several sessions at ATONW dealt with the same issue: Regression testing for the current set of code to be deployed is a slow, painful process that can make a goal like "ship every week" seem impossible. Several sessions focus on test automation. Where most teams have programmers automating unit tests, nearly everyone present has human beings executing customer acceptance tests. A few people present have done successful test automation at the GUI level.
Michael Norton, a consultant at LeanDog, proposes a session titled "Help! My Automated Tests Are Out Of Control" Norton talks about the classic problems with large GUI automation test suites—how they are slow and brittle—and the group discusses how to break a complex test suite down into a reasonable selection of specific tests that do one thing at a time and do it well. I write down this idea—refactoring an aging test suite—to add to my list of tools.
Michelle Hochstetler, a QA engineer in Portland, proposes a session on bridging the communication gap between developers and QA. After a few minutes of reasonable, and expected, "us vs. them" comments, we talk about getting the groups together, including pairing roles in and out. That seems unrealistic, though, as many testers lack production code skills. Instead of insisting on production code, someone suggests pairing a developer with a tester to do a day's work, and vice versa.
How-To: Using Pair Programming Practices in Code Inspections
Michelle Hochstetler facilitates bridging the communication gap.
At the closing session, Ben Simo, a tester from Phoenix, mentions that the best way to break down the barriers between development and QA is to literally break them down: Eliminate cubicles and physical space differences and even reorganize the groups if you have to.
Next Steps: Improve Regression Testing, Collaborate With New Friends
After attending three open space events (and taking notes), I am struck at just how emergent they are. In every conference, I found sessions that lined up directly with my interest. By the end of the events, I had a toolbox of ideas to help companies streamline the regression-test process, along with a half-dozen new friends to collaborate with.
Unconferences tend to be on a weekend, local and free (or at lease) very cheap. BarCampGR was entirely sponsor-supported, Test Coach Camp was grant-funded, and ATONW had a $75 entrance fee. This kind of price means that technical staff can attend local conferences without taking any time off, and use that time to pursue the exact idea they are struggling to solve.
Finding an open space conference can be as simple as searching Google for "barcamp (major city name)," "peer conference (topic)" or "open space (topic)." Once you find the right conference, getting your issues on the table is simply a matter of presenting the idea. Hosts do not need to present; they can take notes. This means there are no "bad" conference sessions; if the choices are poor, well, create a good one.
The best part is the quality of staff drawn to these events. It's people who care passionately about the topic. Beyond ideas for regression testing, doing this research I twice saw Michael Larsen, senior tester for Rovi and Association for Software Testing board member; ran a session with Jane Hein, director of product engineering at EthicsPoint, and met Ward Cunningham, the co-creator of extreme programming.
Thank you, Harrison Owen. Thank you very much.
Matthew Heusser is a consultant and writer based in West Michigan. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mheusser, contact him by email or visit the website of his company, Excelon Development. Follow everything from CIO.com on Twitter @CIOonline, on Facebook, and on Google +.Black’s pawns have made 14 captures altogether, which accounts for every one of the missing white pieces. So the missing piece cannot be white. Both kings are in check, which is illegal, so the missing black piece must be on a2, blocking the rook’s check. The missing piece cannot be a queen or rook, as this would put the white king in an illegal double check. So it’s a black knight or a black bishop. And it can’t be a bishop — Black’s light-squared bishop never left its home square (the pawns on b7 and d7 have not moved), and all his pawns are still on the board, so Black has made no promotions. So the missing piece is a black knight on a2. From Schachmatnaja komposizija, 2007.As the 10pm newscast drew near one night last month, the chief meteorologist of Birmingham's ABC-affiliate began to get worked up. Balding and characteristically attired in suspenders, James Spann is one of the most recognizable and respected local TV meteorologists in the country. But he had a familiar problem. The day had been pleasant in Alabama, and more of the same temperate spring weather lay ahead—so what the heck was he going to talk about?
“I’ve got 2 minutes and 30 seconds to fill,” Spann explained. “Everyone in my audience is going to know what the weather is going to do. Except maybe my mom. She’s 85 years old. But most everybody has looked on their phone or some other device already. So what am I going to do? Am I just going to rehash everything they already know?”
Many forecasters have been asking themselves this question lately. Two technologies have converged to rapidly displace the primary function of meteorologists. First are computers that are generally better forecasters than humans. For most types of weather, numerical weather prediction has superseded human forecast methods. And secondly, thanks to the Internet and increasingly ubiquitous weather apps on mobile devices, people have continuous, immediate access to 5-day, 7-day or 10-day forecasts. As technology drives automation and machines take job after job once performed by humans, are meteorologists next in line?
The early days
Meteorology, as a science, only became possible about a century ago after a succession of physicists worked out the basics of thermodynamics in the 1700s and 1800s. American meteorologist Cleveland Abbe is credited with making the observation around 1890 that “meteorology is essentially the application of hydrodynamics and thermodynamics to the atmosphere.”
Early in the 20th century, Norwegian physicist Vilhelm Bjerknes devised a two-step process for forecasting. First he would make observations of existing weather conditions, and then he used the laws of motion to calculate how those conditions might change over time. According to Peter Lynch, who wrote about this early history for the Journal of Computational Physics, Bjerknes considered seven basic variables when understanding weather: pressure, temperature, density, humidity, and three components of atmospheric motion. He then identified seven independent equations, including the three hydrodynamic equations of motion, to solve for future conditions.
Bjerknes's brilliant ideas form the cornerstone of modern meteorology. Unfortunately, they're completely impractical. In his day there were few surface-level observations, fewer observations above the surface, and almost no information about the atmosphere over the oceans or unpopulated areas. Moreover, there existed no efficient means of collecting or sharing what few observations did exist. Even if Bjerknes had some data, there were no calculators or computers to help solve the complicated equations he found to govern atmospheric motion.
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All that began to change in the 1940s and 1950s when computer scientists like John von Neumann and meteorologists like Jule Charney worked together to apply computer science to forecasting. They ran simplified calculations on the first electronic, general-purpose computer, the ENIAC machine in Maryland. Eventually, they succeeded in making 24-hour forecasts that showed some accuracy. Alas, it also took about 24 hours to churn through those calculations, so computer models at the time were only able to keep pace with the weather.
As computer processing power has increased in the decades since, so too has the ability of physicists and meteorologists to accurately model the atmosphere. Primitive equations have given way to the ability to solve the full set of equations Bjerknes proposed, all around the world, at all levels of the atmosphere. There has been a similar revolution in data gathering for initial conditions. Whereas Bjerknes could only rely on local observations, today twice-daily balloon soundings, sensors attached to aircraft, and satellites all feed near real-time data about the entire atmosphere into the global models.
Numerical weather prediction improved dramatically, especially since the 1970s. An analysis in Nature, published in 2015, found that forecast skill in the 3- to 10- day range has increased by about one day per decade. That is, a 6-day forecast today is as accurate as a 5-day forecast a decade ago. And this improvement shows no sign of slowing down.
IBM bets on digital
In October 2015, IBM announced that as part of a $2 billion deal it would acquire most of The Weather Company. IBM planned to pair its artificial intelligence business, Watson, with the vast weather data repository of The Weather Company. The deal excluded The Weather Channel television network. For now, IBM is betting on an almost purely digital future for forecasting—not good news for someone like James Spann.
Mary Glackin, a former senior official at the US Commerce department who joined IBM in 2015 as a senior vice president, described the acquisition of The Weather Company as a “bellwether” in the field of meteorology. The deal, she said in an interview with Ars, reflects the increased skill in computer model forecasting. It also speaks to how applicable weather and climate forecasts are to corporate interests.
IBM intends to build its business around enhancing decision making, serving as a bridge between the forecast and the decision maker. “Everybody is walking around with a forecast in their pocket, on their cell phone,” Glackin said. “The Weather Company will continue to distinguish itself by having the best forecast, but really our push is ensuring effective decision making, and we’re going to get there through data analytics.”
Traditionally forecasts have been made by a meteorologist who collects the output from one or more forecast models and then distills that information into a forecast for grid points across a certain area. The traditional example would account for temperature, winds, and chance of precipitation at each of the airports in a major metro area. This process was limited by how often a forecaster could update the grids, but this job of making 5- and 7-day forecasts is now going away.
The automation of this process has been driven both by increased computing power and mobile devices. Better computer hardware has allowed forecast models to run at higher resolutions, which means that the model has more grid point outputs. So instead of a handful of points in a large city, a model may have dozens of grid points across a metro area. Weather apps have taken advantage of these higher resolution models to offer more localized forecasts for “your backyard.” Increasingly, then, a human forecaster might have some top-level input into such forecasts today, perhaps weighing the European model more heavily than the US Global Forecasting system. But this new role largely removes the human element from the forecast loop.
IBM envisions even this limited role going away. Peter Neilley, a former US government scientist who now operates The Weather Company’s global forecasting operations, told Ars this “marginal revolution” toward machines would continue in meteorology.
“The computers fundamentally are the best forecasters we have, and as a result meteorologists are becoming more interpreters of the information, helping people make more effective decisions at the consumer level, such as go to the basement now or go buy a snow shovel now,” Neilley said.
From IBM’s perspective, humans will continue to be pushed out at both the consumer and business level. Computers will learn to interpret information, too, and provide guidance on activities. The role of humans will evolve into ever more complex decisions that require multiple sources or types of information, such as when it is prudent to order the evacuation of New Orleans in the face of a Gulf of Mexico hurricane. Complex decisions will incorporate both weather forecasts (made by the National Hurricane Center, but based almost entirely on computer model guidance) and human factors, such as how many buses are available and how long historical evacuations have taken.
“There’s no doubt that the trend in the big picture is less of a pedigree on solely meteorology, and more of a pedigree on meteorology plus analytics or data sciences or other related areas,” Neilley said. “That trend is pretty steep.” That trend is also reflected in The Weather Company’s employment. In the part of the business that makes forecasts and produces them for customers, the employment ratio is about 4-to-1 non-meteorologists to meteorologists. The company prizes data analytics over forecasting skill.
In the near future, Neilley said, the company will focus less on producing the standard 5- or 7-day forecast accessible on an iPhone and more on helping consumers make decisions such as whether they should, for example, cancel the family picnic this weekend or park the car in the garage tonight. The company is moving toward allowing customers to interact directly with the data, such as signing up for an alert when the winds are going to exceed 15mph.Mubashra Uddin, 20, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter on July 6. View Full Caption DNAinfo; Cook County Sheriff's Office
UPTOWN — An Uptown mom who dropped her newborn from an eighth-story window after hiding her pregnancy from her parents has been sentenced to four years of probation.
Mubashra Uddin, 20, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in front of Cook County Judge Carol M. Howard on July 6, after prosecutors dropped the original murder charges.
Around 11:20 p.m. on Nov. 11, 2015, Uddin gave birth to a 7-pound, 11-ounce baby girl while her younger sister slept in the family's apartment in the 800 block of West Eastwood Avenue, according to authorities.
When Uddin heard her mother approach the room, she opened a window and dropped the child eight stories.
Uddin had hidden the pregnancy from her parents, who didn't approve of Uddin's boyfriend, prosecutors said.
The child initially survived the fall, but suffered complex skull fractures, a fractured spine, a broken shoulder and forearm, fractured ribs, a lacerated liver, a lacerated aorta, blood in her abdomen and multiple bruises.
A passerby who spotted the baby wrapped her in his shirt, retrieved two baby blankets from his nearby home and waited for an ambulance, said Assistant State's Attorney Pat Turnock at the bond hearing.
"Baby Jane Uddin," as she's referred to in court documents, died just before 1 a.m. Nov. 12 at a nearby hospital.
Police found blood on Uddin's sheets and window, as well as the pair of scissors she allegedly used to cut the umbilical cord.
As part of the probation, Uddin will undergo a mental health evaluation and treatment and is subject to drug testing 7 days a week. She will also have a curfew from 11:30 p.m. to 7 a.m. for the first year and can't leave the state without permission.The illumination will be held on January 25, a day prior to India's Republic Day, as well as on January 26.
Global developer Emaar Properties joined the UAE in celebrating India's 68th Republic Day celebrations with a spectacular illumination of the iconic Burj Khalifa with the colours of the Indian national flag.
The visual expression of the tri-colours underlined the solidarity of the UAE and its people with India, with which the nation shares strong cultural and trade ties. The illumination will be held on January 25, a day prior to India's Republic Day, as well as on January 26.
The LED show will be at 6:15pm, 7:15pm and 8:15pm on both days with The Dubai Fountain performance complementing the grand illumination.
This year's celebration is even more special with His Highness Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi Crown Prince and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, attending the Republic Day celebrations in New Delhi as chief guest. His Highness is leading a high-level delegation of ministers, senior officials and entrepreneurs to the country.
Emaar Properties has significant presence in India, one of its key international markets. The company had recently restructured its operations in the country to drive its ongoing developments and explore new growth opportunities.
At 828 metres (2,716.5 ft), the 200 plus storey Burj Khalifa has 160 habitable levels, the most of any building in the world.
For more information, please visit: www.burjkhalifa.ae
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ERROR: Macro /ads/dfp-ad-article-new is missing!Now that GABF is out of the way, and we all have (hopefully) recovered, there’s a number of great events coming up! A number of beer releases, tappings, beer dinners and another beer festival are heading your way! As always, when we hear about new things, we’ll keep you all updated!
Thursday Oct. 24
Imperial IPA Release / 5pm
Bristol Brewing / 1604 S. Cascade
Join us for the release party of the ultra hoppy but smooth tasting Imperial IPA and live music by Small Axe. We’re not big fans of the palate-crushing hops and alcohol levels found in many Imperial IPAs, so we set out to brew a tasty treat for the hop loyal that embodies just a bit more finesse. Checking in at a relatively friendly 7.9 ABV, our Imperial is citrusy, pungent and robust, with a malt bill that provides the backbone your trusty palate craves.
Join us for the release of Winter Warlock!! With the cold weather brewing it’s time to release our Winter Warlock Oatmeal Stout. Join us for a tasty pint and enjoy live music by Moonhoney! Come dressed up for the occasion in your favorite Bristol character! Costume contest at 7 pm with Bristol prizes!! Chock full of highly roasted barley malt and 100 lbs. of flaked oatmeal, the Warlock is a dark and satisfying winter elixir. Smooth, rich and exceptionally comforting. An annually-awaited winter seasonal, and one of our award winners. Winner of the Silver Medal in the Foreign-style Stout category at the 1998 Great American Beer Festival®.
Saturday Oct. 26
Costume Party at PPBC / 7pm
Pikes Peak Brewing / 1756 Lake Woodmoor Drive, Monument
It’s finally costume season! If you find yourself up north this weekend, you should make an effort to stop by Pikes Peak Brewing’s decade related costume party this Saturday! Come dressed in the style of the decade you were born Saturday, October 26! Live music from Mark’s Midnight Carnival Show starts at 7pm.
Brewer’s Republic Halloween Party / 9pm Brewer’s Republic / 112 N. Nevada
With Halloween falling on a Thursday this year, parties are either a bit early or a bit late. Never fear! The folks at Brewer’s Republic have decided to ring this years frightful holiday in early, but with a bang! Along with a costume contest that could net you $100 in beer, they’ve invited Dry Dock down to celebrate with awesome beer and lots of door prizes! Every pint gets a raffle ticket! Check their facebook event for more info!
Thursday Oct. 31
Winter Warlock Release / 5pm
Bristol Brewing / 1604 S. Cascade
Join us for the release of Winter Warlock!! With the cold weather brewing it’s time to release our Winter Warlock Oatmeal Stout. Join us for a tasty pint and enjoy live music by Moonhoney! Come dressed up for the occasion in your favorite Bristol character! Costume contest at 7 pm with Bristol prizes!! Chock full of highly roasted barley malt and 100 lbs. of flaked oatmeal, the Warlock is a dark and satisfying winter elixir. Smooth, rich and exceptionally comforting. An annually-awaited winter seasonal, and one of our award winners.
Winner of the Silver Medal in the Foreign-style Stout category at the 1998 Great American Beer Festival®.
Saturday Nov. 2
All Colorado Beer Festival / 1pm, 6:30pm
Freedom Financial Services Center / 3650 N. Nevada Ave.
If you decided against attending GABF, or need another beer festival, the All Colorado Beer Festival is the one to attend. With over 60 Colorado Breweries attending, if you like Colorado beer, you need to be here. There’s multiple ticket levels, with deep discounts for Designated Drivers as well! Get your tickets here
Saturday Nov. 9 Prost Beer Dinner / 5:30pm
Brewer’s Republic / 112 N. Nevada Brewer’s Republic is bringing the German-inspired brewers from Denver down for their next Beer Dinner. Tickets available at Coaltrain or Brewer’s Republic. We will updated this as soon as more info is announced.
– – –
Stay updated with our email updates and like us on Facebook. We’re also on Twitter and Instagram at @focusonthebeer.In 1989, a group of unknown Utah actors starred in what would be crowned the worst movie of all time: TROLL 2. After two decades of running from this cinematic disaster, the cast can no longer hide from the legion of followers that celebrate them for their ineptitude.
BEST WORST MOVIE, directed by TROLL 2’s once-disgraced child star, Michael Paul Stephenson, unravels the stories of these unforgettable real-life characters and the colorful army of devotees who continue to revel in the film’s perfectly flawed brilliance.
At the center of this celebrated documentary is the improbable story of a small-town Alabama dentist-turned-cult-movie-icon, and an Italian filmmaker who come to terms (or doesn’t) with his internationally revered cinematic failure.
BEST WORST MOVIE is an affectionate and intoxicatingly fun tribute to the single greatest bad movie ever made and the people responsible for unleashing it on the world. The result is a hilarious and tender offbeat journey that pays homage to lovers of bad movies and the people who make them, while investigating a deeper story about the strange nature of celebrity, the catharsis of redemption and the humanity that exists in making even the worst movie ever made.
Read more…Today I am going to share with you etudes by Frederic Chopin. But I cannot talk about Chopin and not mention Schubert and Liszt.
This discussion is a follow-up to previous articles I wrote about two Franzes – Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt.
Schubert lived a very short life: When he was 25 he contracted syphilis, and at the time syphilis was a treacherous, painful death sentence. He died at the tender age of 32.
Just imagine a young man aged 25, his life supposedly lying ahead of him, but instead he is staring death in the face. If that were not enough, imagine living in Vienna in the early 1800s and trying to compose your own music when you have heard the ingenious 7th symphony composed by a fellow (Beethoven) who lives a few blocks down the road. Any sound that comes to your head will seem to pale in comparison, and anything you put on paper will somehow seem insignificant. That is exactly what Schubert felt. Understandably, Schubert was depressed. You can hear this depression in his music; it is full of melancholy.
He was an introvert and not a good pianist – the piano was just another instrument to him, a means to his music. His “Fantasia in F minor” is written for four hands (two pianists). If Liszt had composed the piece, he undoubtably would have arranged it for one pianist. (Read more about Schubert here.)
Liszt is the complete opposite of Schubert. He is the Michael Jackson of his time. He tours all over Europe, giving several performances a day. Women go crazy over him. He is the Paganini of piano, a virtuoso. For Liszt, the piano as instrument is as important as the music he composes. (Read more about Liszt here.)
This brings us to Chopin, who is a year younger than Liszt. He leaves Poland at 20 and settles in Paris. He’s a skinny, sickly-looking man. He’s very shy – he will give only 30 public performances in his lifetime (Liszt gave more performances in a month). He is in poor health; in fact he will die young, just like Schubert, at 39. And where Schubert lives in the shadow of Beethoven in Vienna, Chopin is in Paris, a city completely smitten by Liszt.
It seems there are two Chopins: the one who reminds us of Schubert – first, the one in poor health, the depressed one, the one who wrote deeply emotional, melancholic music. Remember, this is the composer who wrote the “funeral march” – happy people who look toward life don’t do that.
And then there is another Chopin, the one who lives in the shadow of Franz Liszt, who is in the same city and travels in same circles as Liszt. Yes, Chopin the virtuoso, trying to push the limits of the piano.
Chopin’s etudes are the Liszt side of Chopin. An etude is a short piece of music that is composed to improve a player’s specific technique. Before Chopin etudes were mainly composed for musicians, not for listeners. Chopin’s etudes changed that. Chopin’s etudes are very Lisztonian, as they push the then newly evolved piano to new, unheard levels. I want to share this small excerpt from the Polish movie Desire for Love. This scene features both sides of Chopin: the “Revolutionary Etude” (the Liszt side) and his “Nocturne No. 20” (the Schubert side).Alice Chess
Invented by V.R. Parton in 1953
Alice Chess was invented by V. R. Parton in 1953. It is one of the top 20 played chess variants in NOST, and David Pritchard in his Encyclopedia of Chess Variants recommends it as one of the best variants. Personally, I think it is one of the few variants that has that 'neato' quality to it; one of the most fun to play variants.
The standard game of Alice Chess is played using two boards, A and B. All pieces move as in standard chess. The normal array is on board A; board B starts empty.
The rules are very simple. In turn, each player makes a single move on either board following these three rules:
A move must be legal on the board where it is played.
A piece can only move or capture if the corresponding destination square on the other board is vacant.
After moving, the piece is transfered to the corresponding square on the other board.
Since a square and it's corresponding square on the other board are never both occupied, Alice Chess can actually be played on a single board. Checkers are placed under pieces that are on board B. I don't know if this makes moves easier or harder to visualise.
The starting setup:
There are less played variations of Alice Chess. One variation is to simply have all Black's pieces start on board B. Another, Ms. Alice Chess, allows 'zero' moves. To make a zero move, simply transfer a piece to the same square on the other board. Kings may not zero while in check.
Parton also suggested a smaller version, played on two 4x8 halves of a single board:
Clarifying the Rules
Written by Fergus Duniho
Parton describes Alice Chess in Curiouser And Curiouser and in Chessery For Duffer And Master. Both descriptions |
of the suspects in an arson attack on a Palestinian home that killed a baby and his father.
Some 54 Israeli websites, including those of the prime minister’s office, the Israeli military, and foreign and finance ministries, were offline or experiencing technical problems for up to 12 hours after the attack, the Middle East Eye online news portal reported on Tuesday.
Following the attack, Anonymous announced in a statement that their attack was in response to a decision by the “criminal state” to release the arson suspects.
A file picture taken on July 31, 2015, shows Palestinians looking at the damage as they stand in a house set on fire by Israeli settlers and where 18-month-old Palestinian toddler Ali Dawabsha died, in the West Bank village of Duma. (AFP)
On Monday, Tel Aviv released all those who had been held in connection to the Israeli settler firebomb attack on a Palestinian house in the village of Duma in the West Bank on July 31.
An 18-month old baby, Ali Dawabsheh, was burnt to death in the attack and his father, Sa’ad Dawabsheh, succumbed to his injuries last week.
Palestinian men pray over the body of Sa’ad Dawabsha, the father of a Palestinian toddler killed when their home was firebombed by Israeli settlers, during his funeral in the West Bank village of Duma on August 8, 2015. (AFP)
Settlers, mostly armed, almost regularly attack Palestinian villages and farms and set fire to their mosques, olive groves, and other properties in the West Bank.
Israeli settlements are considered illegal by much of the international community because the territories were captured by the regime in a war in 1967 and are hence subject to the Geneva Conventions, which forbid construction on occupied lands.Morning Spoilers If there’s news about upcoming movies and television you’re not supposed to know, you’ll find it in here.
The Dark Knight Rises adds a new actor. J.J. Abrams talks about Brad Bird's live-action directorial debut, the latest Mission: Impossible movie. Plus new videos for Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Torchwood: Miracle Day, and Game of Thrones!
Spoilers from here on out!
Top image from The Walking Dead.
The Dark Knight Rises
The movie has added another actor in an unspecified role. The latest addition is reportedly Josh Stewart, who I will always know as Joshua from No Ordinary Family, for better or worse...yeah, that'd be for worse. [Variety]
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The Avengers
When asked about the filming process, Robert Downey Jr. gave the most Robert Downey Jr. answer imaginable:
"Well, I hate everybody. [Audience laughs] I'm not talking about the cast, I'm not talking about Joss. What I mean is I tend to look at a scene and say, 'This is absolutely impossible, we can't shoot this, it's horrible. I can tell you 10 other movies it's been in, I refuse.' I usually start off the morning by refusing to do what I've signed on to do. So I brought that attitude, happily. I just thought, 'How are you gonna put all of us clowns together? He's wearing a suit, he's all jacked up, he's so and so and poor Mark Ruffalo, he's gonna outdo us.' And we're about six weeks in and I have to say Joss Whedon is nailing it. He's so smart and so good. And it's gonna be great. I can't believe I just said it, I never could've believed this but it's gonna be great."
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[/Film]
Here's a promo poster spotted at the Licensing International Expo in Las Vegas. [ComingSoon.net]
Iron Man 3
From the same interview, Jon Favreau explains he has already been asked by director Shane Black to help out with the new movie, and that he wants to remain involved:
And I love the franchise and I'm a big fan of Shane's as well so hopefully I can be helpful because I want to see this thing grow and transform. And actually, when it finally landed on Shane, it was like, ‘All right, that's gonna be something interesting.' Especially because it's gonna be so difficult for whoever does that one because although it's Iron Man 3, the whole Avengers thing…I guess in comics you can say that it's an individual storyline and you can break it off into a group. But in movies, it's hard not to take into consideration what just happened. What are you gonna say? ‘They all just lost their cell phones and you can't get help?' So it's going to take a lot of ingenuity to make it make sense to a mainstream film audience as well as a comic book audience.
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There are some more details at the link. [/Film]
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
Here are some more TV spots.
And here are some more photos.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II
Here's one more poster. [ComingSoon.net]
Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol
Mission: Impossible 3 director J.J. Abrams talks about the latest entry and the work of his successor, longtime Pixar director Brad Bird:
It's going great. Brad Bird directed an incredibly fun movie. To watch him do his first live-action movie is kind of surreal, because you see these moments that are really funny, and specific and about character - and you think, "WOW, that's so Brad Bird"… but then you think, "God, I've never seen a Brad Bird live action movie, ever." So its a weird thing to see stuff that feels… He's a great filmmaker who just happens to have been using the tools of animation. It's going great. And the IMAX footage in particular is looking INSANE.
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[/Film]
Torchwood: Miracle Day
Here's a new teaser trailer:
And here are some more photos. [SpoilerTV]
Game of Thrones
Here's a preview for next week's season finale:
True Blood
Here are some set photos from yesterday's filming, featuring Stephen Moyer and Deborah Ann Woll. [SpoilerTV]
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Now for some various spoiler-y tidbits. A statue of Michelle Forbes's maenad Maryann will be seen in the backroom of the Witch Goddesses magic shop, and play an important role. Stephen Moyer's Bill will do "a vigilante thing that's pretty hard-core." Joseph Manganiello offers this update on Alcide and a new pack of werewolves:
"Wherever werewolves go, they never get along, so you're going to see a lot of fighting. My character has moved since last season. He was living in Jackson, but all that bad stuff went down in Jackson, so all I can say is he moves very close to Sookie now."
[E! Online]
The Walking Dead
AMC has released the second official image from season two. [ShockTillYouDrop]
And here are some set photos from yesterday's filming. [SpoilerTV]
Chuck
Zachary Levi explains what this final season will mean for Chuck and Sarah:
"It'll be our swan song and we all kind of ride off into the sunset together. It's great; we get closure."
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[E! Online]
Falling Skies
Star Noah Wyle discusses executive producer Steven Spielberg's involvement with the show:
"[Spielberg] was instrumentally involved throughout the whole process, from shaping the original pilot script to casting. He came to the set...helped craft the overreaching arc of the season [and] made editorial suggestions on all the episodes."
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[E! Online]
The Nine Lives of Chloe King
Here's another trailer for ABC Family's upcoming series.
The show is reportedly looking for a recurring guest star to play the boyfriend of one of the main characters, and this boyfriend will - surprise! - have some nefarious, mysterious ulterior motive. [E! Online]
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And for a roundup of what's in store on the show, check out the link. [TV Line]
Additional reporting by Gordon Jackson and Charlie Jane Anders.The national anthem isn't always perfect. Here's an example of one bad, one awkward and one great moment in NZ's national anthem history.
NZ First leader Winston Peters supports a call to dump the national anthem.
Labour leader Andrew Little has described God Defend New Zealand as "a dirge" and claims many Kiwis prefer to sing along to the Australian anthem. A dirge can mean a mournful song or a lament for the dead.
Peters, who has been vocal in his opposition to a flag referendum, agrees.
GETTY IMAGES Richie McCaw, Kieran Read and Daniel Carter sing the national anthem before the match between the All Blacks and Argentina.
"He is on to some sound ground there," Peters told reporters on Wednesday.
"It is a funereal dirge... I've heard people sing Flower of Scotland, I've heard the Irish in full flight, I've heard the French in full flight but I have never heard anyone sing our anthem when they are happy," he said.
A Bill on the flag referendum passed its second reading in Parliament on Tuesday night, 63 votes to 58, with Labour, the Green Party, and NZ First opposing it.
Peters said he would prefer "something that is memorable, stirring, that has got to do with where we are on the globe in the 21st century".
But he rejected Little's claim that Kiwis would plump to belt out Advance Australia Fair.
"It's a pretty poor comparison because the Aussies' is pretty bad as well," he said.
Meanwhile, Peters refused to say if NZ First will back a move by Labour to scrap a second flag referendum if the first attracts fewer than half of eligible voters.
Labour added two Supplementary Order Papers to the flag referendum bill. One seeks to defer the vote for five years. The second would can the final referendum "if voter apathy continues at its current level."
Peters obfuscated when asked if his party would lend support. "One party in this party is opposed to the flag change, it's called NZ First. You all know that... we will not join this expensive $26m circus," he said.
"Every other party joined. We are not going to have a situation where people are allowed to run with the hares and hunt with the hounds on such an important issue...we are adamantly for the flag.
Labour leader Andrew Little told the House that while many New Zealanders would like something different, they "don't want this change right now".
He also said many New Zealanders preferred to sing along to the Australian national anthem rather than God Defend New Zealand.
New Zealanders were "sick of singing a dirge every time you turn up to a festive occasion", Little said.
The estimated cost of the flag referendum was $26 million, with the majority of that to be spent on two postal votes.
The first referendum would determine which new flag design is preferred by the public, and the second will pit that design against the current flag.
Little said that was money the country could ill afford, and people were not comfortable with the expensive process at a time the economy was struggling.
Deputy Prime Minister Bill English said the referendum questions were being asked in a "logical process", despite protests that a Yes/No question should be asked in the first instance on whether people wanted a change of flag.
Opposition parties were "whinging" and making "backward-looking complaints", because they did not like Prime Minister John Key, English said.
Green Party MP Russel Norman said it was a failure of leadership in steering clear of wider constitutional issues.
The flag was "just changing a piece of cloth", and would not celebrate New Zealand's independence, as the head of state would remain the British monarch, Norman said.
The Flag Consideration Panel would release a list of alternative designs in August, and a final four would be selected and voted on by the public in November.
We're sharing your opinions about the national anthem on Snapchat: nzstuff. Add us to tell us what you think.NCSL's The Canvass
can•vass (n.) Compilation of election returns and validation of the outcome that forms the basis of the official results by a political subdivision.
The watchers watching elections
You go to the polls and who do you see? Your neighbors, maybe. Poll workers, of course (who may also be your neighbors). Who else?
Party designees known as “poll watchers” are likely. Members of the media too. Interested citizens and academics might be there. And, in a smattering of polling places spread throughout the nation, international observers may be there on Election Day, as well. As it turns out, who—besides voters—is allowed at the polls depends on which state you are in.
Regardless of which category these people fit in, they have at least three things in common:
All are governed in some way by state law—which means legislators set the policy.
None are permitted to interfere with the voting process, although some have authority to formally challenge a voter’s eligibility.
All aim to ensure that the election is well-run, often by providing feedback to election officials.
Partisan Observers
Let’s start with partisan observers because they are at work in virtually every state. Often called “poll watchers” or “poll challengers,” these partisan volunteers have been deployed since well before 1934, when Joseph P. Harris wrote the seminal book on election administration titled, not surprisingly, Election Administration in the United States. A salient quote: “It is generally believed that the honesty of elections is safeguarded by having at the polls representatives of the several political parties as official watchers and challengers.”
In short, if both parties watch, stealing an election is harder. Partisan watchers still serve much the same function today.
But—of course—how each state regulates poll watchers varies. They may have laws regarding how they are appointed, where they can stand, what they can observe and how many can serve. It is common to permit two watchers per party and two per candidate in each polling place. In battleground states during general elections, indoor traffic jams may be a concern.
Forty-one states have a formal accreditation or appointment process for poll watchers and challengers. This appointment generally begins with the local party chairs submitting a list of potential poll watchers to the local election officials for approval. Once appointed, parties are likely to provide party-specific training and local election officials may require training as well. Poll watcher manuals are common, such as this one from Arizona (see pages 120-122).
Nonpartisan Observers
As for nonpartisan observers, such as nonprofit advocacy groups like the Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota, state law is often less specific.
Many states, including Washington (RCW 29A.04.086), permit citizen observers at all stages. In fact, “anyone has the right to observe any part of the election process” in Washington, according to An Observer’s Guide to Washington State Elections. Washingtonians, whether they represent a formal group or not, can observe pre-election procedures such as logic and accuracy testing of voting equipment, processing of voted ballots and post-election procedures including ballot tabulation and recounts.
These observers sometimes come with concerns or even suspicions about election procedures and leave providing testimonials to the good work they saw. Additionally, these observers may have noted processes that worked well, or possibly procedures that could use streamlining. These reports include (or at least may include) recommendations that aim not to discredit election administrators, but to assist them in improving efficiency and accountability for future election cycles.
Academics
Academics may fit under the heading of “nonpartisan citizen observers,” but they deserve a special mention. Even when things are squeaky clean, the use of observation (and the data that it may produce) can help with planning for the next election. In Bernalillo County, N.M., every general election, is observed by a team of graduate students from the University of New Mexico. Under the direction of Professor Lonna Rae Atkeson, the group produces a report for each general election, such as this one from 2014. It’s part of a “continuous improvement” process in the Land of Enchantment.
Plenty of political scientists may be doing exit polling or other kinds of research during a big election in support of one research project or another, but academic election observers are looking at administration—not at outcomes.
International Observers
Whenever there is an election in Bosnia, Brazil, Botswana, or other countries, election coverage always includes a mention of the international observers who were on hand. Mostly these teams quietly keep tabs on election procedures and citizen access to the ballot, as just two measures of election quality. The most important product of these observations is an after-report that may include ideas for improvement for future elections.
Sometimes, the same organizations that send election observation teams to Eastern Europe, Africa, Latin America or Asia also send teams to the United States. The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has observed the last several presidential elections, and expects to spread 400 observers across the nation this year. The Organization of American States (OAS) plans to send a delegation of observers as well. See NCSL’s International Election Observers At Home and Abroad webpage.
The U.S. is a signatory of the 1990 Copenhagen Agreement, an agreement that gives member countries the right to observe each other’s elections. Even so, these observers are still subject to the laws of each state.
Three states—California, Missouri and New Mexico—and the District of Columbia use the term “international observers” in statute. California’s AB 2021 is the most recent, signed into law on Sept. 29.
The role of these observers is much like that of nonpartisan observers: to observe, take notes and provide feedback. Many more states may permit international observers in practice, even if state law isn’t explicit on this topic.
On the flip side, 12 states have statutes that detail who can be in a polling place, and because observers are not mentioned, these laws effectively prohibit international observation. Legislatively, Tennessee enacted HB 2410 in 2014 that prohibits U.N. election monitors, unless they are expressly permitted by treaty signed by the U.S. Senate.
“Transparency is always important in elections,” says Christy McCormick, commissioner for the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and occasional international observer. “Therefore when we have observers able to go into polling places, we are supporting transparency and free and fair elections. I don’t think we should be fearful of observers if we’re doing our jobs.”
Logistics
From a logistical point of view, local election officials’ top priority is to meet the needs of the voters first. That means the needs of observers come second, or even further down the line.
However, many think that being open to observers also serves other purposes. “Election observation helps to strengthen election processes by providing information and recommendations to hard-working and over-stretched election administrators as the election unfolds,” says Avery Davis-Roberts from The Carter Center. She points out that observation regulations vary greatly across jurisdictions and that having clearer rules would help “institutionalize trust and good communication between observers and election administrators.”
In fact, some election officials invite the public in a few weeks ahead of time to see their operation, ask questions about the mechanics of elections and to see a “test deck” of sample ballots run. Such transparency can allay anxiety about election fraud and restore confidence in the nation’s democracy.
Recent Legislative Enactments
Then and now: 2012 to 2016 Comparisons
From now until the November general election, we will be taking a look at one major election administration topic showing how it has changed at the legislative level from one presidential year to another. This month: Electronic Ballot Transmission.
Amount of change: Moderate
In 2012: 29 states and D.C. allowed some form of electronic transmission of voted ballots for subsets of their voters—primarily those covered under the Uniformed & Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA).
In 2016: 31 states and D.C. allow some form of electronic ballot return (the same states since 2012 plus Alabama and Iowa).
Alabama is now testing email and web portal ballot return for UOCAVA voters.
Iowa began allowing some UOCAVA voters to fax and email their voted ballots for the first time in 2014.
Most states allow all UOCAVA voters to email and fax their voted ballots and some states also offer a web portal. Since 2012, five states have broadened their provisions by either adding a new form of approved technology such as email or a web portal or allowing more voters to participate (Hawaii, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Texas).
Electronic ballot transmission is typically available for UOCAVA voters or subsets of that population. However, in four states, electronic ballot transmission is available for voters in addition to those covered by UOCAVA:
In Alaska, all qualified voters can become no-excuse absentee voters and return voted ballots by mail, fax, or web portal.
In Hawaii, legislation passed last session that allows all permanent absentee voters to email their voted ballots.
Utah allows all UOCAVA voters and voters with disabilities to email and fax their ballots; and
Since 2013, Oklahomans registered as absentee voters (in addition to all UOCAVA voters) can fax their ballot if the mail ballot is going to arrive late.
To learn more about electronic transmission of ballots including a 50-state analysis, visit our webpage and read up on internet voting.
will presidential coattails affect state legislatures?
For the more than 10,000 candidates seeking state legislative seats this year, the wild race for the White House might feel like watching their investments rise and fall with the stock market. Investors have relatively little control over their stocks’ success, yet how they perform will have a dramatic impact on their portfolios. Likewise, state lawmakers have very little influence over their party’s presidential campaign, yet how their top candidate performs can affect their political future immensely.
On Nov. 8, officials will tally the ballots to determine the winners of 5,915 regularly scheduled elections for legislative seats in 86 chambers in 44 states. That’s more than 80 percent of all the 7,383 state legislators nationwide. Not on the ballot: legislators in Alabama and Maryland who serve four-year terms and were elected in 2014, all Michigan senators, and lawmakers from Louisiana, Mississippi New Jersey and Virginia, as these states hold legislative elections in odd-numbered years.
How High Can the GOP Go?
Currently, Republicans control 68 percent (67 of 98) of the partisan legislative chambers in the country (the Nebraska Legislature is unicameral and nonpartisan, so is not counted in this total). That’s more than at any other time in the history of the Republican Party. They also hold more total seats, well over 4,100 of the 7,383, than they have since 1920. And in 30 states, Republicans have the majority in both chambers of the legislature.
Democrats control 31 chambers. They lead both chambers in 12 states and split control in seven states.
While NCSL counts New York State among the states where Democrats control both chambers, others do not. The New York Senate is run by a coalition that consists of only a small number of Democrats who are allied with all of the Republicans. The chamber consists of 32 Democrats and 31 Republicans and is led by Republican John Flanagan, who serves as president pro tempore and majority leader.
Familiar Battlegrounds
Because of large majority margins and redistricting, some states are beyond the reach of the minority party for a takeover in 2016. Still, many of the chambers on the 2016 battleground list, like the Kentucky House, continue to be competitive. The Republicans’ success in the past three legislative election cycles, however, requires them to play far more defense this year just to hold on to previous gains.
At least 18 legislative chambers—11 Senates and seven Houses—are definitely in play this November and can easily be identified as true battlegrounds.
On the Senate Side:
Five chambers could shift party control with just one seat change. The Senates and their current numbers are: Colorado 18 R–17 D, Iowa 26 D–24 R, Nevada 11 R–10 D, Washington 25 R–24 D and West Virginia 18 R–16 D. Only half the Senate seats are up this year in these states.
In five other state Senates, GOP majorities are bigger but still vulnerable: Arizona 18 R–12 D, Maine 20 R–15 D, New Hampshire 14 R–10 D, New Mexico 24 D–18 R and Wisconsin 19 R–14 D. All Senate seats are up in Arizona, Maine, New Hampshire and New Mexico. In Wisconsin, each party has eight seats up this year. In Arizona, Republicans are trying to hold on to a three-seat lead while in New Mexico the Democrats are trying to do the same thing.
As noted above, the unique situation in the New York Senate is worth watching.
On the House Side:
In three states, Democrats have slim leads to defend: Colorado 34 D–31 R, Kentucky 53 D–47 R and Washington 50 D–48 R.
In another four House chambers, Republicans must defend against Democrats in states where polls show Hillary Clinton in the lead for the White House. Minnesota 73 R–61 D, Nevada 25 R–17 D, New Hampshire 239 R–160 D and New Mexico 37 R–33 D. The Minnesota and New Hampshire Houses have been the two most competitive chambers in the country over the past 10 years. They have both changed party control in four of the past five election cycles.
This year’s election may be a challenge for Republicans, as they seek to defend their control of a record-high number of state legislatures. That means 2016 is shaping up as an opportunity year for Democrats. With the unusual race for president at full steam and garnering the vast majority of voters’ attention, coattails will matter, as is usually the case. In 21 of the past 29 presidential elections, the party of the winning presidential candidate has also won state legislative seats and legislative chambers.
What is clear is that states are where the action will be after November, leading the way when it comes to tackling problems and innovating new policies.
For more election coverage visit NCSL’s StateVote 2016 webpage and check back on Election Night for updates from across the country.
from the chair
Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie is the chair of the Committee on the Judiciary in the Council of the District of Columbia. He represents Ward 5 and was first elected to the D.C. Council in 2012. Councilmember McDuffie spoke to The Canvass on Sept. 8.
“We’ve focused on using our oversight of the board of elections to improve the overall administration of our elections given some of the challenges we’ve had in the past. Also we’ve encouraged the board to explore secure technological innovations for the District and it is a priority we’ve had in the committee.”
“Voter registration is a really significant issue, particularly in regards to low income populations and young people. One of the things we’ve done is to support the board in their funding and their budget to hire outreach staff for these specific populations, and to encourage the board to envision the agency’s mission as expansion of the franchise and not just simply administration of an election but expanding opportunities for voter participation.”
“One of the things that makes the District unique is that we are particularly transient. Many of the eligible voters move back and forth between the District, Maryland, Virginia and other jurisdictions. As a result it can be a challenge to maintain accurate voter rolls.”
“One of the areas where we still have some challenges—and we are working on it—is accessibility at the polls. Some of the polling places in the District are old government buildings or old churches and private facilities that present challenges for individuals with disabilities. Being a former DOJ civil rights attorney and caring about running elections efficiently and properly, we want to remove those types of barriers.”
Read the full interview with Councilmember McDuffie.
from the election administrator's perspective
Bryant Rains is the secretary of the election board in Cleveland County, Okla. The city of Norman serves as its county seat and it was named after President Grover Cleveland. Rains spoke to The Canvass on Sept. 5.
“I think Oklahoma is unique in that we have the state election board and we are under that umbrella. There are 77 county secretaries and we report to the state election board. Paul Ziriax is the state election board secretary and also secretary of the senate.”
“Cleveland County is the third largest county in Oklahoma. I don’t think our issues are unique to us. Our biggest challenge is finding and maintaining workers to work the polls on Election Day. People used to do it as their civic duty. Now I think people are having to work longer and put off retirement, so it’s getting harder to find workers to work that day. Their pay, here, is set by the state legislature.”
“As far as technology issues, we have a great system. It’s all uniform, every county does the same thing and it all ties into the state election board. We get written instructions, policies, procedures and communication from them all the time. It keeps us up to date—there are really no problems there.”
“If I’m speaking specifically to Oklahoma state legislators, I want them to know how much I and the other secretaries appreciate their leadership and how they work with us. We have great communication. I think it also helps that the secretary of the board of elections is also the secretary of the senate. They listen to us and do a lot of things to help us out.”
Read the full interview with Rains.
worth noting
from ncsl's elections team
Do you think more states should offer more ranked-choice voting opportunities? Or that primaries should be nonpartisan or open to all voters? Do the Electoral College and redistricting need reform? Well then if you’re a legislator or legislative staff sign up to be on NCSL’s Mechanics of Democracy listserve where you can converse with other interested legislators from across the country on these and other topics. Just email Dan Diorio to be added to the list.
NCSL’s Capitol Forum is just around the corner and will take place Dec. 6-9 in Washington, D.C. Find out how the 2016 elections will affect states. Be sure to join the elections team on Tuesday, Dec. 6 for a free preconference looking at the big election issues of the year and what legislatures may take action on in 2017. More information coming soon!
Browse the most recent entries from the election team on the NCSL Blog.
Look for #NCSLelections on Twitter for all NCSL election resources and news.
Thanks for reading, let us know your news and please stay in touch.
—Wendy Underhill, Dan Diorio and Amanda Buchanan
The Canvass, an Elections Newsletter for Legislatures © 2016 | Published by the National Conference of State Legislatures | William T. Pound, Executive Director
In conjunction with NCSL, funding support for The Canvass is provided by The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Election Initiatives project. Any opinions, findings or conclusions in this publication are those of NCSL and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Links provided do not indicate NCSL or The Pew Charitable Trusts endorsement of these sites.
TO SUBSCRIBE, contact TheCanvass@ncsl.orgBy: Christopher Burt
Stepping into a new school can be a terrifying and stressful experience, particularly in high school. Growing up, my dad worked construction, so every few years we would move to another new state. I went to a handful of different elementary schools, and I had the great misfortune of experiencing a new high school twice, because once just wasn’t miserable enough. I originally attended high school in South Carolina. From there, my family and I moved to Denton, Texas. I attended Guyer High School, and I’m guessing there was about three thousand kids that attended that school. This made it easy for me to stay camouflaged and quiet the majority of the time I was there.
The story can’t just end there, though, because as soon as I got comfortable there, Frazee Minnesota was the next stop (because the only logical option is to move from the pleasant climate of Texas to the arctic tundra of Minnesota). For some reason, I always thought that the closed-minded, confederate flag waving people only lived in the South; this wasn’t the case. I was intrigued to see that Midwestern Minnesota was full of dip-spitting, loud truck driving “rednecks” just like the towns I’ve lived in down south, except there’s never any sun, so their necks are pasty white.
All jokes aside, stepping into a new high school is a great way to ramp up your anxiety levels. I have always been a person who could be considered on edge. Novel situations, for as long as I can remember, have always made me very anxious. When entering a new school, this anxiety was increased. Multiple thoughts raced in my head. From, “Wow, those guys seem pretty cool, hopefully I can get to know them” to “Why did I wear this stupid polo, everyone here is wearing plaid button-ups.” Every time I stepped into a new high school, the same thoughts raced through my head and the stress built back up. High school is already an unfortunate time for the students, mostly because of the legendary “hormones”. Take a student, make his hormones go haywire, then add a new school, and what you are left with is a cocktail for stress.
There is some science behind being a new student in a new school. It mostly shows that it increases stress levels, which has negative effects for the student. Tiffany Field, at the University of Miami Medical School (Study Here) observed preschool children and found that those who transferred schools had increases in negative affect, fussiness, illness, along with a few other maladies. Although this study only looked at preschool children, I think it seems logical that it translates across adolescence. To help manage my stress when I changed schools, I tried many different strategies. What I found were five ways that helped ease my stress and assimilate into a new school:
When I moved to Minnesota from Texas, the transition was particularly tough. The culture shock and the close-knit community I moved to made me feel like an outsider. This did not get much better until I got involved in extra-curricular activities, like football and basketball. I think this is the biggest way for someone at a new school to make the transition easier. Not only did this open new opportunities to meet fellow students, it also helped me stay busy, which helped with the homesickness of being in a new place. Sports, in particular, can bring a great amount of camaraderie among students, which helps especially when a student is new. Those long bus rides to different schools are some of my favorite memories in high school. It is also well known that exercise enhances mood, and playing sports is a great way to do that, while also making friends. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, physical exercise has the ability to reduce levels of tension, elevate mood, and even improve sleep. Not only was I building friendships in sports, I was also bettering my mental health. Another way I helped manage the stress of switching to a new school was finding a job. Part of this was motivation from myself, but I would be lying if I did not say that the majority of the reason I got a job was because of my parents. When I moved here from Texas, I was fifteen years old. Although that isn’t old enough to work in Texas, it is in Minnesota. So I got a job at a restaurant, which helped me stay busy and meet more of my peers. Because of this job, I became a more talkative and friendly individual, which led me to meeting one of my best friends there. Working in a restaurant is great, too, because you are forced to communicate with people you don’t know, which is good practice for going outside of one’s comfort zone. The Youth Development Study conducted by Jeylan Mortimer found that working can enhance healthy mental development in teenagers. Not only that, but working in a restaurant also pays great. I was able to afford to go to the movies and sports camps, among other things, which helped me build more friendships. This all tied into lowering my stress levels, because I stayed busy and got to know my fellow peers outside of the school environment. Plus, what high school student doesn’t love extra cash? Although this may seem obvious, getting enough sleep is crucial to overall stress reduction, especially in high school students. I am still bad at this. Though I get enough sleep, I never get to bed at an early enough time to give me ample opportunity in the morning to get ready. As a student in high school, I was faced with the same problem. Teenagers live very busy lives (work, homework, and after school activities), sleeping seems to be on the back of their priorities. According to the National Sleep Foundation, lack of sleep can limit ability to learn, concentrate and listen. Not getting enough sleep also contributes to being more prone to illness. A student trying to get used to a new school will only cause themselves more stress if they are out of school sick. Also, going to bed at a decent time is important. Going to bed at 1 AM doesn’t give a student much time to sleep when the school bell rings at 8:15 in the morning. Instead, having a set bedtime that allows for enough sleep and adequate time to get ready in the morning is vital to maintaining good sleep hygiene (and body hygiene, too). Attending class is vital when being new at school. Different schools have different curriculum, so transferring can be difficult because of where the classes are in terms of learning. Every time I transferred to a new school, I fell far behind with my grades because I hated going to school and getting there on time. I was probably avoidant of the situation, since the whole concept of being new stressed me out, but being absent only made my stress worse. Because of this, attending every class and being on time will help a new student become acclimated to the new academic guidelines. A study hosted by Attendance Works found that missing three or more days a month leads to lower test scores. This was probably my biggest mistake when I transferred high schools; I never wanted to go to class and often skipped. This caused me to fall greatly behind in class, always playing catch up on missed assignments and tests and it exacerbated my mental stress. If I could redo the whole process of transitioning into a new school, I would have been on time to every class and paid more attention. The last way I was able to get used a new school and manage the stress of the situation was by going out of my comfort zone. Going to new places with friends, talking to new people, and trying new sports all brought me out of my comfort zone. When I went to school in Texas, I was a quiet and shy teenager that did whatever was comfortable for me. This usually meant going to school, not talking with anyone, then going home. |
nor to the moon; and make obeisance to Allah Who created them, if Him it is that you serve.[47]
In 2009, anthropologist Gregory Starrett wrote, "a recent survey by the Council for American Islamic Relations reports that as many as 10% of Americans believe Muslims are pagans who worship a moon god or goddess, a belief energetically disseminated by some Christian activists."[48] Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) calls the Moon-God theories of Allah evangelical "fantasies" that are "perpetuated in their comic books".[49] Muslim reactions to the allegation are also widespread online.[50][51][52][53]
Farzana Hassan sees these views as an extension of long-standing Christian evangelical claims that Muhammad was an impostor and deceiver:
Literature circulated by the Christian Coalition perpetuates the popular Christian belief about Islam being a pagan religion, borrowing aspects of Judeo-Christian monotheism by elevating the moon god Hubal to the rank of Supreme God, or Allah. Muhammad, for fundamentalist Christians, remains an impostor who commissioned his companions to copy words of the Bible as they sat in dark inaccessible places, far removed from public gaze.[54]
Linguistic relationship to words for "God" in other languages [ edit ]
Theologian Catherine Keller has written that Allah is the word for "God" in Arabic, which ultimately derives from the same root as the Hebrew words El and Elohim, both used in the Old Testament, particularly in the books of Psalms and Job, to refer to the God of Judaism and Christianity.[55] Many other sources also attest to this.[56][57] Keller writes further that like Allah, the Hebrew word Elohim was a generic title that was also applied to other gods besides Yahweh.[55]
The English word "God" evolved from Germanic terms for invocation.[58] The Latin word Deus, from which "Dieu" derives, can be traced to the same root as Dyeus, which gives the names of the ancient Greek and Roman divinities Zeus, Jove and Hindu Dyaus Pitar.[59]
See also [ edit ]Story highlights Caged animals were placed by authorities in the center of the blast zone for chemical testing
Local residents are fearful of chemical contamination
Death toll has risen to 129 people
Hong Kong (CNN) Caged rabbits, chickens and pigeons placed in the heart of the Tianjin blast zone by Chinese authorities to test for chemical exposure have drawn a mix of ire and ridicule on Chinese social media, as pressure builds for authorities to answer for the deadly blast that devastated the northeastern port city earlier this month.
According to a weekend tweet by the state-run People's Daily, the animals were placed in a "core" area of Tianjin to test for possible "chemical remains."
The move comes after images emerged last week of a large number of dead, rotting fish washed up in a local river, fueling local residents' fears over possible chemical contamination.
"Why not put those 'un-corrupt' experts and officials to do some testing?" one Weibo user asked.
"Should drag the people responsible over to it," posted another.
Caged animals were put at the core area of #Tianjin blast site to test possible chemical remains from Wed. pic.twitter.com/8BmMs3SVHR — People's Daily,China (@PDChina) August 22, 2015
Read MoreNicola Sturgeon has been urged to break her silence over accusations her government used public money to try and win votes as more allegations emerged.
The Scottish Conservatives said there was a “cash for votes” scandal swirling round the First Minister following a series of Scottish Government funding announcements that have coincided with campaigning for the local government and general elections.
They said the sums were awarded in “apparent contravention” of civil service guidance warning that “particular care” must be taken over such announcements in the three weeks before polling day.
Ross Thomson, a Tory MSP, wrote on Wednesday to Ms Sturgeon’s most senior mandarin demanding an investigation into a possible breach of purdah rules but the First Minister is yet to say anything about the accusations.
Among the latest examples to emerge was almost £1 million for crofters in Scotland’s most rural communities handed over on April 25. This was welcomed by Gail Ross, the SNP MSP for Caithness, as a “fantastic resource for crofters”.
The following day a further £1 million of EU money was passed onto industry group Seafood Scotland. Mike Russell, the SNP’s Brexit Minister, said it was an example of “why EU funding is so important.”
However, it emerged amid a controversy over two SNP MPs whose seats are being targeted by the Tories in the general election signing a pledge welcoming the opportunities that Brexit provides the fishing industry and promising to oppose re-entering the Common Fisheries Policy.
The following day, only eight days before the council elections, Keith Brown, the Economy Minister, published a “progress report” on the Scottish Government’s infrastructure blueprint that included £1.3 billion of spending for North East.The mother had pleaded guilty over the incident which occurred in 2014
A woman who left her newborn baby boy for dead in a drain is expected to walk free from jail as early as next week.
The 30-year-old factory worker, now 32, has spent two years behind bars in a maximum security women’s jail for dumping her child down a 2.4m drain in Quakers Hill, western Sydney.
The baby, which lay undiscovered for five days in hot dry condition, was discovered on the morning of Sunday, November 23, 2014, reported Geelong Advertiser.
Scroll down for video
The baby (pictured at the moment he was saved) was retrieved from a stormwater drain in November 2014 five days after the newborn was allegedly abandoned by his mother
The five day old baby boy (left) miraculously survived after being dumped down this drain (right) by his mother on the day of his birth in western Sydney
The mother went back twice to check if he was still alive but 'did not hear anything and concluded her baby had died.
The woman, who cannot be named to protect the baby, had pleaded guilty to abandoning or exposing a child under seven years of age to danger of death and recklessly inflicting grievous bodily harm.
After giving birth to a healthy baby boy at Blacktown hospital at 1am on November 18, she discharged herself early that afternoon and took her baby and placed him in a stormwater drain near her home at about 3pm.
She told police: 'I sat with him at the park for a while... we continued walking up towards Quakers Rd. Then I just saw the drain... and I just put the baby in there.'
She then returned to the drain on Friday evening but didn't hear anything and concluded he was dead.
Sydney man David Otte and his daughter Hayley, heard cries coming from a drain on Sunday at 8am as they were cycling near the M7 motorway.
They stopped, thinking it was a trapped small animal, and then called emergency services when they saw it was a baby.
Police from Quakers Hill Local Area Command retrieved the baby, which was wrapped in a pink striped blanket, from the drain.
The auntie of the woman accused of attempting to kill her own child was comforted on Facebook (above) by relatives and friends after the incident
The court documents reveal that the father of the baby was a Fijian man who the woman began dating in January, but left her after finding out three months later that she was pregnant.
The woman began to appear 'withdrawn' and eventually told colleagues that she had a miscarriage in order to hide her pregnancy from her relatives, friends and boyfriend, who was not the child's father.
The woman had been living with her aunt and uncle in Quakers Hill when she became pregnant.
The woman soon entered into another relationship, and while pregnant boasted about her new boyfriend and posted a photograph of the two of them on her Facebook page.
The one day old baby boy was pushed through the tiny opening of this stormwater drain (pictured) in western Sydney. If not for dry Spring weather, the newborn might have drowned
The five-day-old infant was taken to hospital, where it was found he was severely dehydrated and had bleeding on the brain.
Doctors said the baby was able to survive in the drain because of a lack of rain causing storm water which might have drowned him, along with newborns' natural ability to survive without food or water.
While she dumped her day-old baby down a drain and leaving him to die, the woman is also thought to be a loving aunt who adores children and appears entirely devoted to her family in Australia and Samoa, Daily Mail Australia revealed.
One of her social media accounts is filled with pictures of babies and young relatives.
A family friend told Daily Mail Australia that the young woman - who goes by an anglicised nickname and works in western Sydney - 'loves children and is very good with children'.
The son of a Seventh Day Adventist pastor told Daily Mail Australia that his father had spoken to the woman in prison late last year.
Relatives of the accused woman (pictured leaving Blacktown Court last November) have been left distraught and confused about the 30-year-old's alleged dumping of her newborn son
The accused woman's aunt (pictured, left) said she did not know who the father of her niece's baby could be, but police have since located the man
He said she 'was trying to keep on top of things' while incarcerated in a Sydney jail, believed to be the Silverwater Women's Correctional Centre.
He described her as a'very happy person' who was'very good around children and young people at the church'.
He said that she is 'a quiet girl' but that'she's an island girl, so she's got a bit of bite in her' and that might help her cope while in prison awaiting trial for attempted murder.
The accused's social media account also reveals that in the months leading up to the day the woman secretly gave birth, the woman posted photo after photo of newborn relatives with loving messages.
'Happy Eleven Weeks Princess', she posted with double pictures of an infant dressed in pink.
In another post from earlier this year, below a photograph of her with a relative's baby, she says, 'Awww, it's mine'.
Another post with photos of the same baby dressed in a singlet and nappy has 'I love you' written with the accused's name next to it.
In earlier posts, the young woman's life appears to revolve around her work friends, family and the church.
Last year, she posted a birthday message to her aunt, with whom she was living in Quakers Hill until her arrest, saying 'Happy Birthday to the lady of our house an amazing, aunty, mom, chef... hero!! Thank God for you [and] may our Good Lord continue to Bless you with many more years to come. Love you loads xox'The Story Edit
Apple computer's earliest court action dates to 1978 when Apple Records, The Beatles-founded record label, filed a suit against Apple Computer for trademark infringement.
The suit settled in 1981, with an amount of US$80,000 being paid by Apple computer to The Beatles´ Apple Corps. As a condition of the settlement, Apple Computer agreed to stay out of the music business. The case arose in 1989, again when Apple Corps sued many other over the Apple IIGS, which included a professional synthesizer chip, claiming violation of the 1981 settlement agreement.
In 1991, another settlement of around US$26.5 million was reached. In September 2003, Apple Computer was sued by Apple Corps again, this time for introducing the iTunes Music Store and the iPod, which Apple Corps believed was a violation of the previous agreement by Apple Computer not to distribute music.
The trial began on March 27, 2006 in the UK and ended on May 8, 2006 with victory for Apple Computer. The judge ruled the company's iTunes Music Store did not infringe on the trademark of Apple Corps.
As of November 16th, 2010, The Beatles music has been available for download on iTunes. Paul McCartney was quoted saying "We're really excited to bring the Beatles' music to iTunes. It's fantastic to see the songs we originally released on vinyl receive as much love in the digital world as they did the first time around.".Matches:
Team Hell No defeated Drew McIntyre and Heath Slater of 3MB
Ryback defeated Damien Sandow
Alberto Del Rio defeated Dolph Ziggler
Mark Henry defeated Yoshi Tatsu (I am shocked by this)
Tamina Snuka defeated Kaitlyn
Sheamus and Big Show ends in a no contest
Tonight Smackdown taping from Albany started off with Jack Swagger and Zeb Colter. It’s the usual schtick about illegal immigrants and how people from other countries are taking jobs from what they call “real Americans”. They get interrupted by the World Heavyweight Champion Alberto Del Rio and his friend Ricardo Rodriguez. They show Zeb Colter and Jack a video of their own. It’s a parody of the “We The People” YouTube videos where Ricardo is dressed like Zeb and Alberto is dressed like Swagger. They mock the two by saying the real reason they don’t like immigrants is because American stomachs cannot handle food like tacos, nachos, and burritos. Really funny segment, made me hungry though.
After Team Hell No picks up the win we were backstage with Matt Striker and his special guests Dolph Ziggler with Big E. Langston and AJ Lee. Dolph says he was chosen to face ADR tonight because it’ll be a show stealing match but most importantly it’s about the MITB briefcase. He say’s tonight history will be made.
Before the commercial break Ryback and Mark Henry get into an intense stare down. As we know they are building up a program for the two giants to do battle at Wrestlemania.
Before the recap of Triple H calling out Brock Lesnar we are joined on commentary by Brad Maddox, I’m sorry but outside the ring I think the guy is hilarious. Remeber that this Monday on Raw Brock Lesnar will answer Triple H’s challenge. We get to see The Shield triple power-bombing the Big Show. He says he blames Sheamus and Randy Orton for the attack he suffered after Old School Raw went off the air. The Del Rio/Ziggler match was really good so make sure you catch that online if you missed the show. Even though Ziggler lost again his ring is consistently good and it seems like him and ADR have a good chemistry together. Sheamus is backstage with Matt Striker and he says he understands Big Show since nothing is his fault. So when he Brogue Kicks Show’s head off his body it won’t be his fault either, it’ll be Sheamus’. Fandango was supposed to debut but he didn’t because Lillian Garcia could not pronounce his name correctly. Irony is he calls Lillian, Jillian. Can’t say I am mad about him not wrestling yet.. We get another video package from Zeb Colter and Jack Swagger. The topic tonight is about people in America not speaking English. The show ended with a brawl between Sheamus, Randy Orton, Big Show and The Shield. Show helped Orton and Sheamus clean house but then knocked Sheamus out with a WMD. He turns around and gets an RKO to close the show out. What did you think of tonight’s Smackdown? Comment below, Facebook, or Tweet me your thoughts!On Friday night, the panel on HBO’s Real Time discussed gun control in the wake of the Las Vegas massacre.
MSNBC political analyst Steve Schmidt told Bill Maher that the Founding Fathers “could no more conceive the idea of an AK-47” when writing the Second Amendment than they “could’ve conceived a spaceship.”
“These weapons were not conceived of, were not understood, were not imagined in the context of the time when the amendment was authored,” Schmidt elaborated, “and we ought to have a real debate in this country about whether we want military weapons… weapons of war in the hand of every Joe who wants to go in and buy 30 of them.”
He then declared that it is “harder to buy cough medicine than it is to buy an AK-47 or 50 of them.”
Watch the clip above, via HBO.
Have a tip we should know? tips@mediaite.comHere's the Big Finish roundup of the last week, we hope you didn’t miss anything! Plus, one more chance to catch the worlds of Big Finish...
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There are also offers to go with this week's Cybermen filled Doctor Who episode. Until midday Monday you can get The Silver Turk, Legend of the Cybermen, Last of the Cybermen and The Isos Network at £6 on CD or £5 a download. Also available are series 1 and 2 of Cybermen (exclusively available at Big Finish) for £18 on CD and £15 on download and Spare Parts on download for just 99p!
On Monday we saw Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra joins the ranks of the Big Finish elite, with the release of Marilyn and Sinatra, adapted from the hit stage play of the same name. This is available to download from the Big Finish site for just £3.99.
We announced the wrap of Series 7 of the Fourth Doctor Adventures, with Tom Baker and Louise Jameson starring as the Doctor and Leela, with the first of these adventures scheduled for release in January 2018. You can preorder on the Big Finish site, or save over 50% with a subscription, at £45 on CD or £40 on download.
Survivors Series 6 was released this week, carrying on the adventures of the original Terry Nation series, and exploring the lives of those left after ‘The Death’ wipes out the majority of the population.
Also we looked behind the scenes of the upcoming Terrahawks Volume 3, out next month!
And that was the Big Finish week! We have more exciting announcements coming next week, make sure you keep up with all the news (and occasional free gifts) on the Big Finish newsletter, which you can sign up to on the left of this page, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram!The Hierarchy of Vipassana Practice
Answer 11/26/11 6:11 PM After a number of conversations recently with various people, I realized that my conception of the hierarchy and essence of vipassana practice wasn't written down anywhere I could remember, so I thought I would write it down here. This is more geared to the type of concentration one develops on retreat, but may apply just as well in daily life for those who are diligent and skilled or aspire to be.
It would be nice to start at the top, even though people don't generally seem wired to do that, but just to keep it in mind:
At one's best, one attains to Conformity Knowledge, Insight Stage #12, in which one comprehends simultaneously two of the Three Characteristics of one's entire sense field completely including space, consciousness, and everything else in that volume as an integrated whole. That's what you are shooting for if you are going for stream entry at least, and it even works well for the sort of continuous complete mindfulness that works well for higher paths.
However, I will go back to the bottom, which is where most start and often return, and work back up from there:
1) Not trying to practice, lost in one's stuff, spacing out, mindfulness weak.
2) Mindfulness weak, lost in one's stuff, but at least attempting some technique at times, even if one can't actually do it. People spend whole retreats at this level, unfortunately.
3) Able to actually practice and follow basic instructions somewhat, such as noting, body scanning, or whatever you are trying to do. I'll go non-technique specific here, as this is a guide to the essence of the thing. Basically any technique or object or posture that moves you up this hierarchy and keeps you there is what matters, and nothing about the specifics of what you are paying attention to or how you are trying to pay attention to it is important so long as it serves that fundamental goal.
4) Able to actually do a specific vipassana technique or set of techniques well with few interruptions.
5) Able to actually do that with no interruptions.
6) To be able to directly perceive the Three Characteristics of objects in the center of attention consistently and directly whether or not one is using a more specific technique or not. In short, if you can do this, at that time and for however long that lasts, whether or not you use a more formal technique is irrelevant.
7) To be able to directly and continuously perceive the sensations that make up the coarse background components also in that same light of strong, direct vipassana awareness, meaning direct comprehension of the Three Characteristics of not only the foreground objects, but things like rapture, equanimity, fear, doubt, frustration, analysis, expectation and other sensations in the periphery, as well as other objects as they arise, such as thoughts and the component sensations of feelings as well as the primary object or objects, assuming one is even using primary objects at this point, which is not necessary.
8) To be able to do #7 very well and then add core processes such as the sensations that seem to make up attention itself, intention itself, memory itself, questioning, effort, surrender, subtle fear, space, consciousness, and everything that seems to be Subject or Observer or Self all the way through the skull, neck, chest, abdomen and all of space such that nothing is excluded from this comprehensive, cutting, piercing, instantly comprehending clarity that is synchronized with all phenomena or just about to be.
9) Able to do #8 naturally, effortlessly and clearly due to one's diligent efforts to write that wiring on the mind as one's new baseline default mode of perception.
10) We are back where we started: one comprehends simultaneously two of the Three Characteristics of one's entire sense field completely including, space, consciousness, and everything else in that volume as an integrated whole and so attain to Change of Lineage, Path and Fruition. That's what you are shooting for if you are going for stream entry at least, and it even works well for the sort of continuous complete mindfulness that brings on higher paths.
Keeping this hierarchy in mind, many questions are answered either directly or with small amounts of additional information.
Q: Does it matter what object I use?
A: Only if that object at that moment in time helps you at least stay above the lower few levels of the hierarchy and hopefully progress up them.
Q: Does it matter if my concentration is really focused or broad?
A: As all you have to do is comprehend the Three Characteristics of one's sum total reality for 3 moments, you only need really limited objects if you haven't gotten automatically fluent enough with other objects to attain to Conformity Knowledge on them. By way of example: if you can get your attention focused exclusively on the breath and comprehend the sensations that make it and the attention focussing apparatus, as that is all there is, that's all you need to understand. If you can't get it that focussed but have attained through diligent work a natural fluency in a wider array of other sensations, then broader attention will do you just fine.
Q: Does it matter what technique I use?
A: I would say scramble up the hierarchy however you can using any object you can and whatever dose it takes to get there, changing objects, focuses, techniques, postures, or whatever other factors need to be changed if those help you rise higher and stay there. This is the pragmatists approach to vipassana rather than the dogmatic traditionalists approach to vipassana. If a dogmatic and traditional approach gets you up the hierarchy, there is no conflict between these at all. If your dogmatic and traditional approach is not working at that moment, sit, walking period, hour, month, or year, try switching things around, preferably with the help of good guidance if available, to see what does get you up a notch.
Q: When should I stop noting and just pay attention?
A: You can definitely stop when at that particular time you are at stage #6 or higher, but you could also continue so long as it didn't slow you down or restrict your ability to comprehend whatever arises in its rich and comprehensive entirety.
Q: Which technique is better: Noting, Body Scanning, Zen Koan Training, or what?
A: Whatever at that time helps you progress or at least stabilize above the bottom levels of that hierarchy. Note: techniques take time to learn, so continuous abandoning of one poorly-learned technique for another poorly-learned technique is unlikely to do much of anything good, but if you have learned a few techniques well, they anything that works goes. One should realize that this is for most people a very dynamic and non-linear progression, with many risings and fallings up the ranks of the hierarchy, and learning how to shift focus or approach at the right time is a learned skill that requires constant vigilance and practice, but having the basic goals in mind should help guide you.
For instance, say one had decided to use noting practice, and had gotten to stage 2, Cause and Effect, with steady, slow noting, but then bad back pain began to derail one's attempts at noting in stage three, Three Characterisics, during which time one fell back to poor practice. One might reflect: "Ah, I am no longer able to do slow noting, at least I should try to do slow noting, and perhaps choose a different posture that wasn't so painful for a time in a mindful way."
Or, one might have been doing noting up through the Three Characteristics stage, but then began to notice energetic phenomena, heat and kundalini stuff show up that was too fast to note, at which point one might think, "Ah, I was really good at blasting through the A&P using more Goenka-style body scanning on a previous retreat and know how to do that, maybe I will give that a try, as it worked well before."
Or, one might have been rockin' it in the A&P by rapidly and directly perceiving fast vibrations and tingling interference patterns, but when one got to Dissolution notice that one's practice was completely derailed and one was just spacing out. One might reflect, "Ah, whereas before I was rockin' it in the A&P, now my practice has fallen to the bottom of the barrel, and perhaps attempting to do slow noting and build back up to more direct methods when I can would be better than floundering." Good plan.
Or, one might be high up in Equanimity and yet not be able to land a Fruition. One might ask oneself, "What core process, subtle background or foreground sensations, or other patterns of experience are not yet brought into the clear light in the way I have done for so many objects?" In this way, one sees what one is missing and, having learned to see those objects naturally also, lands it.
Working thus, one gets a sense of how one may adjust one's practice to accommodate what is happening and keep one riding the waves of changes that vipassana in all its forms can throw at one.
I hope this is helpful,
DanielPlay Facebook
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For months, Republican elders cautioned Donald Trump that his wild-eyed approach was dragging down his general election campaign. In reshuffling his top staff, Trump offered an emphatic response: Don’t tell me what to do.
By installing Breitbart executive Steve Bannon as campaign CEO and veteran pollster Kellyanne Conway as campaign manager, the GOP nominee is recommitting to the dark anti-establishment message that worked in the primaries but has so far turned off the general electorate.
In doing so, he’s placing a campaign-defining bet on his raw political instincts to dig him out of a polling slump that’s seen Clinton seize a significant lead nationally and in key swing states.
“The move is clearly to let Trump be Trump,” a campaign source told NBC News. “You're not going to change him, you can't moderate him, but you can sharpen his messaging.”
A second source within the campaign said the expansion of staff stems from Trump's displeasure at how his campaign has been run and with internal efforts to rein in his freewheeling message.
"He has been deeply unhappy for weeks," a source who agreed to speak anonymously to discuss internal discussions told NBC.
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Trump’s campaign has long been characterized by a struggle between voices pushing Trump to adopt more traditional campaign tactics and those pushing a “let Trump be Trump” mantra. The former path was personified by Paul Manafort, who was brought in to professionalize the campaign in March, and the latter by former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who clashed with Manafort and eventually was forced out.
Despite Lewandowski’s ouster, though, Trump never became comfortable with the concept of a general election “pivot” to tighter scripts and outreach to voters outside his loyal circle of fans. He dismissed the idea of major changes in interviews and regularly ad-libbed his way into controversy, most notably his feud with the family of the late soldier Capt. Humayun Khan and his brief refusal to endorse Speaker Paul Ryan and Senator John McCain in their respective primaries.
Related: What Trump's Latest Campaign Shake-Up Means
Over the last two weeks, concerned members of Trump’s inner circle plotted an intervention to try and convince Trump that he needed to mount a more traditional campaign with a more disciplined approach to attacking Hillary Clinton and appealing to swing voters.
Trump heard them out and then staged a campaign intervention of his own in the opposite direction after concluding, as the campaign source recalled him saying, "the guys in New York don’t know what they are doing.”
"This is him finally embracing the fact that he knows better than they do," the source concluded.
In some ways Lewandowski and his more permissive advice never left: Trump still talks to him daily, according to four sources.
From his perch as a CNN commentator, Lewandowski has cheered on the campaign and occasionally undermined Manafort, even suggesting at one point he step down over plagiarism in Melania Trump’s convention speech.
Stephen K. Bannon talks about immigration issues with a caller while hosting Brietbart News Daily on SiriusXM Patriot at Quicken Loans Arena on July 20 in Cleveland. Kirk Irwin / Getty Images
Like Lewandowski, Bannon seems unlikely to push for retreat when Trump inevitably walks into another media firestorm. Under his watch, Breitbart has cheered the nominee on at every step of his run while pushing no-holds-barred attacks on his opponents in line with the candidate's own approach.
When Breitbart staffer Michelle Fields complained Lewandowski had manhandled her at an event, Breitbart itself published a story accusing her of mistaking Lewandowski for someone else before security footage disproved the theory. When Trump fought with the Khan family, Breitbart published articles accusing Khizr Khan of vague associations with Islamic radicalism.
And when Republican leaders hounded Trump over his initial failure to endorse Ryan, Breitbart published articles with headlines like “Paul Ryan Bows Down To Nationalist Populism As His Career Flashes Before His Eyes.” Now, as Trump jabs at Clinton’s “stamina” this week, Breitbart is churning out articles pushing paper-thin conspiracy theories about the Democratic nominee’s health.
Related: Meet Team Trump's New Bosses
“Hiring Bannon is a sharp pivot to the dark side for Trump,” conservative radio host Charlie Sykes said. “We can expect more gratuitous insults, conspiracy theories, and attacks on the media, critics, other Republicans, and the kinds of viciously personal attacks on Hillary that could end up backfiring by making her an object of sympathy."
Bannon’s arrival comes as Trump is increasingly obsessed with unsubstantiated plots by corrupt forces to derail his campaign. In recent weeks, the nominee has -- without evidence -- warned of a “rigged” election, speculated the Obama administration will delay an upcoming enrollment period for health insurance to swing the race, accused the president of bribing New York’s attorney general to launch a lawsuit against the now-defunct Trump University, and accused Clinton of bribing the United States Attorney General to avoid criminal prosecution despite the FBI’s recommendations not to pursue charges.
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Outside the campaign, many Republicans critical of Trump interpreted Bannon’s entry as an obvious concession to the nominee’s worst political behavior.
“Hiring Bannon to run the campaign in the midst of its crisis is insane,” Republican consultant Rory Cooper said. “Trump needs a 75 day plan. He needs a political ground strategy. He needs an organization. Instead he's bringing in someone who will encourage him to speak to the same ten people who have supported him from day one.”
“Trump's entire goal is to win the votes of his 13 million primary votes a second time,” Matt Mackowkiak, a GOP strategist, tweeted bitterly in response to the news.
Others saw it as a necessary reboot. Citizens United president David Bossie, who said he introduced Bannon and Trump in 2011 when the nominee was exploring a presidential run, described the changes as a positive move.
"There’s a group of people who want to see a very scripted Donald Trump because they feel that’s a better way to go, but that’s not who Donald Trump is and didn’t win him the nomination," Bossie said.
He added that Trump was "clearly" unhappy with Manafort's management, which Bossie said produced more missteps than happened on Lewandowski's watch.
Publicly, the Trump campaign pushed back against the notion that the Bannon and Conway moves represented a major shift away from Manafort. Instead, they framed it as an expansion that would split responsibilities into more manageable chunks. Manafort himself called it an “exciting day” in a campaign memo.
“It's the busy home stretch to Election Day, and we just need to sort of beef up the senior level roles in a way that we are, you know, dividing and conquering,” Conway told Fox News on Wednesday.
Republicans outside the campaign are hoping in particular that Conway, a respected and experienced pollster, will serve as a soothing good cop to complement Bannon’s more pugilistic bad cop.
“The Kellyanne promotion was essential,” GOP strategist John Feehery said. “The Bannon thing was shocking. Obviously Trump wants to run as an outsider and this confirms that he has no interest in trying to please the establishment in any way, shape or form.”
Under the new roles, Conway will travel with Trump day-to-day, giving her a chance to try and keep him on message between events. Two campaign sources predicted she would be a “calming presence” who could say “no” to Trump when he needs it.
Kellyanne Conway, new campaign manager for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, speaks to reporters in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York, Aug. 17. Gerald Herbert / AP
Bannon, by contrast, will be tasked with finding the “big ideas” that Trump will use to frame the race, according to sources within the campaign.
As for Manafort, who never officially served as Trump’s campaign manager, he is still expected to operate as a liaison between the campaign and Republican supporters in Washington. Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump who is close to Manafort, indicated in an interview with Miami radio station WIOD that both he and Manafort favored the changes.
Looking to smooth the transition, Bannon also phoned the RNC, according to a source with knowledge of the call, to reassure them he would cooperate despite his site’s penchant for bashing GOP leaders. There’s little the RNC can do either way: They depend on Trump to raise funds for their down-ballot operations as well.
But not everyone was so sanguine. “All I can say is wow,” one Manafort ally told NBC News, attributing the change to Trump’s failure to appreciate his campaign chair’s “sophistication.”
“The only positive spin I can put on [the changes] in my mind is that somehow Trump realizes that New York has to have its own culture and that Washington needs Paul, because that’s really where he’s more comfortable,” the source reasoned. “Then he gets the best of both.”
A senior Trump adviser described the candidate as “apathetic” towards Monday morning quarterbacking from Washington Republicans, and more determined than ever to cement his outsider brand.
Trump’s public statements point to a more combative approach. He told a Wisconsin crowd on Tuesday night that "I’m fighting, all of us across the country are fighting, for peaceful regime change in our own country," adding, "the media-donor political complex that’s bled this country dry has to be replaced with a new government of, by, and for the people."
"I don’t want to change,” he said in an interview with WKBTV the same day. "Everyone talks about ‘Oh well, you’re going to pivot, you’re going to' — I don’t want to pivot. I mean, you have to be you. If you start pivoting, you’re not being honest with people."
NBC News' Leigh Ann Caldwell contributed to this report.|
For a book built on a narrative of, among other things, the history of our understanding of electricity, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn, has had a remarkable run. It appeared in 1962, and people have been arguing about it ever since. Structure didn’t make the list of 88 “Books that Shaped America” that the Library of Congress put on display last summer, even though Benjamin Franklin, Experiments and Observations on Electricity [1751] is first on the list (that title will return below). For Structure is the book that made the word paradigm, meaning a way of seeing, part of the everyday discourse of nearly everyone who deals with ideas for a living.
In his introduction to a fiftieth anniversary |
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definitive verdict on anything "Alligator" and after until at least 20 listens. And so it goes here. It wasn’t until a week or two after I purchased it that I started really getting into it. I’ve said it before, but the band’s like looking at the night ocean under bright moonlight; there are weird little details that emerge out of nowhere, and an overall energy that’s calmly compelling. While I wasn’t initially nuts about the odd abbreviated guitar noodlings on the lead single, they do fit, a series of warmups for a crackly energetic Dessner guitar solo that really lights up the song. The propulsive Devendorf drumming and high descending Dessner arpeggios of “Day I Die” are as strong as anything they’ve written. “Born to Beg” is a beautiful sleeper that easily passes notice on first listen. And the delicate tinkling piano of “Guilty Party”—evocative of Radiohead for me, at least—is perhaps my favorite sound in music, at least for the moment. Indeed, the songs I liked on first listen are now songs I love, and the songs I hated are now calling me back. One wonders again how long it can last—“It all catches up with me all the time,” Berninger declares on “Guilty Party,” and it isn’t hard to imagine all the fun-but-destructive behavior eventually destroying the band, too. But by the time he croons "I’m gonna keep you in love with me for a while,” on “Dark Side of the Gym,” you realize he HAS kept you in love, and you hope against hope that “a while” lasts forever. As has been the case with everything except their debut, there will come a time when you will need to listen to precisely THIS album multiple times in a row--and no other National album, let alone any other album by anyone else, will quite do. So I’m settling in for the night with "Sleep Well Beast," and praying for more to come. As it was since "Alligator," is now and ever shall be, career without end. Amen.British police have warned the public that merely watching the James Foley beheading video may be a criminal offense under terrorism legislation, a draconian escalation that threatens to create an ominous pretext for the free flow of information on the Internet.
After the video emerged, which purports to show an ISIS militant with a British accent beheading American journalist James Foley, the Guardian reported that Scotland Yard had launched a full investigation.
“Scotland Yard warned the public that viewing, downloading or disseminating the video within the UK might constitute a criminal offence under terrorism legislation,” states the report.
“In other words….if you watch terrorism, you’re also a terrorist,” remarked Zero Hedge.
So not only could it be treated as a terrorist offense to post a link to the video on your Facebook page, but merely watching the clip could also get you in hot water, despite the fact that tens of thousands of Brits have probably seen the video since it emerged earlier this week.
In terms of brutality, the video pales in comparison to previous examples since it doesn’t actually show the full beheading during the clip.
If watching a YouTube or Live Leak video can be classified as a terrorist act, what’s next? Given that authorities in the U.S. consider libertarian beliefs to be “extremist” and have placed them in the same category as militant Islam, are seemingly mundane political videos going to receive the same treatment in future?
Of course, British authorities are not going to pursue everyone who watches or disseminates the video, but threats combined with selective enforcement create a pretext that governments can exploit to set the benchmark for declaring any content whatsoever on the Internet to be extremist in nature and therefore off limits to the general public.
As we previously reported, UK authorities have acted to censor YouTube clips in the past, most notably in 2011 when the British government ordered YouTube to remove footage of the British Constitution Group’s Lawful Rebellion protest, during which they attempted to civilly arrest Judge Michael Peake at Birkenhead county court.
Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.
Facebook @ https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71
FOLLOW Paul Joseph Watson @ https://twitter.com/PrisonPlanetImage copyright Kevin McAuley Image caption The tree fell onto the Bregagh Road near Armoy on Tuesday night
One of the renowned trees which features in Game of Thrones has fallen on to the road near Armoy, County Antrim.
It fell onto the Bregagh Road on Tuesday night.
The tunnel of trees, known as the Dark Hedges, became famous throughout the world after it featured as the Kingsroad in the HBO series.
In January, a number of the 200-year-old beeches fell victim to Storm Gertrude.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Steve McCartney from Causeway Coast and Glens Council explains why the tree fell down
The trees were planted by the Stuart family along the entrance to their Gracehill House mansion.
Over the decades, the branches grew over the road and became entangled and intertwined, creating a covered passageway with something of an ethereal feel.
Originally, there were about 150 trees, but time has taken its toll and now only about 90 remain.
Image caption Tourists pass the fallen tree at the Dark Hedges on Wednesday
Steve McCartney, from Causeway Coast and Glens Council, said that weather conditions and the age of the tree had caused it to fall.
"What's happened here has been very simple, there's been a bit of wind overnight and this tree has had a fork and inside that fork a bit of water has gathered - something we couldn't have seen was that that gave rot inside the tree," he said.
"A point of weakness and unfortunately that big branch came down."
Image caption The Dark Hedges have been made famous in the HBO series Game of Thrones
He said the volume of tourism at the site was unlikely to have contributed to it.
"Most of the nutrients that this tree and the other trees will get are from the trees on either side of the road, so the traffic on the road probably isn't as major a factor as we might expect," he said.
"Really when they get to this age, they are starting to wind down."
Image caption Experts say the tree's age and recent weather conditions were to blame for it falling
North Antrim assembly member Mervyn Storey, who is chairman of the Dark Hedges Preservation Trust, said a number of trees had been lost in recent years due to their age and weather conditions.
"There's been ongoing discussions between the Causeway Coast and Glens Council, Transport NI, the Tourist Board, the [National] Trust and other interested parties to ensure that we have a comprehensive plan for this area," he said.Virtually all uniformed officers with the Baltimore County police will be equipped with body cameras by September 2017 under a new plan. (Damian Dovarganes/AP)
Baltimore County will equip all uniformed officers with body cameras within a year and review how officers respond to individuals with mental-health and drug-abuse issues, officials said Wednesday.
The reforms were announced 11 weeks after the death of Korryn Gaines, a 23-year-old woman who was shot by police in her apartment as she wielded a shotgun during a standoff that she live-streamed on social media.
Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson, County Executive Kevin B. Kamenetz (D) and county Health Officer Gregory Wm. Branch also said the department is implementing stricter requirements for investigating sexual assaults and is creating a task force to consider options for training police to de-escalate situations.
Kamenetz declined to discuss specifics of the Gaines case, citing a wrongful-death lawsuit filed by her family. But he said the review of police policies and procedures for dealing with individuals who have behavioral-health issues “will lead to recommendations that will help us avoid these kinds of tragic incidents in the future.”
[The standoff that led to the death of Korryn Gaines]
Korryn Gaines (From video)
The nonprofit Council of State Governments Justice Center will lead the review, working with police and county health officials.
The body-camera order means virtually all of Baltimore County’s more than 1,400 uniformed police will wear the devices by September 2017, accelerating an earlier deadline of December 2018.
Since beginning its body-camera program in July, the department has outfitted 128 officers with cameras.
The officers involved in the Gaines incident, which drew national attention through social media, were not wearing body cameras. Police were attempting to serve warrants on both Gaines and her boyfriend, Kareem Kiean Courtney, 39. Gaines had been charged with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest in a March traffic stop; Courtney was charged with second-degree assault in a domestic incident involving Gaines.
Prosecutors declined to press criminal charges against the officer who fatally shot Gaines, saying that police fired only after Gaines raised the shotgun and that she returned fire. Her 5-year-old son, who was nearby, was wounded in the exchange.
Jim Bell, an attorney for the Gaines family, said the family is encouraged by the department’s reform efforts but feels the proposals don’t go far enough.
“These changes don’t address treating individuals like human beings,” he said. “They had a low level of respect for the lives of African Americans and African American children.”
[Charlotte, officer did not activate camera until after Keith Scott was shot]
The police union in Baltimore County said officers there have largely embraced body cameras and were consulted about the program before it was implemented.
“They’re okay with it at this point,” said Cole Weston, president of the Baltimore County Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 4.
The District, which began equipping all of its officers with body cameras last year, now requires officers to confirm with dispatchers that the cameras are switched on before they respond to a call or interact with civilians.
Weston said rank-and-file county officers also welcome additional training on de-escalating confrontations and working with mentally unstable individuals.
“We don’t push back on that,” he said. “If it’s well thought out and presented in an academic setting that can be helpful to officers in the field, we have no issues with that.”
Maryland’s legislature made broad changes this year in how law-enforcement agencies hire, train and discipline police. The bill was based on recommendations from a work group that the General Assembly created after the death of Freddie Gray from injuries suffered while in Baltimore police custody, an incident that led to protests and riots in the city.
Del. Shelly L. Hettleman (D-Baltimore County), who attended the announcement Wednesday, praised local officials for taking the additional measures.
“I’m happy to see the county executive stepping up here... bringing some outside folks in and shedding some transparency on the police-accountability side as well as the sexual-assault and rape cases,” Hettleman said.
Law-enforcement officials nationwide have been grappling with tension and mistrust between police and minority groups in the wake of numerous high-profile civilian deaths, protests and ambush killings in the summer of officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.
This week, the president of the nation’s largest police management organization formally apologized on behalf of the group for “historical mistreatment of communities of color.”
Terrence M. Cunningham, the police chief in Wellesley, Mass., issued the statement at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in San Diego. About 23,000 law-enforcement officials in the United States are members of the organization.
Baltimore County’s Johnson, who attended the conference, said Wednesday that “there is ample evidence to indicate that there were past injustices,” adding that reforms have been “taking place in public safety nationwide for years.”
Lynh Bui contributed to this report.Second presidential debate moderator Martha Raddatz is just like any other mainstream media reporter, she’s a Hillary Clinton flacky.
So when Donald Trump supporter Tracy Connors confronted Raddatz on the street, she asked her about her bias against the New York business mogul.
But in true liberal fashion, Martha just ran away. Check it out:
Randomly ran into @MarthaRaddatz, tried to nicely point out her blatant bias at the last debate. Her version of reality differs from mine. pic.twitter.com/6EX32F8ZwC — TLC (@TracyLConnors) October 13, 2016
Trending: CNN Told By South Korean Official: “Clearly Credit Goes To President Trump” (VIDEO)
“Have you been getting a lot of flack for the stuff at the debate last night,” Connors asked Raddatz.
“No, no, sure online,” Raddatz responded.
“For your own behavior or anything like that for pushing back on Trump,” Connors pressed.
“And Hillary,” Raddatz added.
“No, I watched it, you gave Trump a really hard time,” Connors told Raddatz.
That’s when Raddatz started fleeing the scene, saying “Alright, gotcha.”
How pathetic are these reporters?A school system in Texas confirmed this morning that all schools in the district were on lockdown after an active shooter situation, CBS 7 reported.
All schools in the Alpine Independent School District were on lockdown and classes and athletics were canceled for the rest of the day.
The Brewster County Sheriff's Office and local police said the active shooter was at Alpine High School, located in the western part of the state.
According to KWES, the shooter died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She was a student at the school, and has only been identified as being female.
Police found a semi-automatic pistol next to her body with a large amount of ammunition.
The station said she shot a student in the "lower extremities." That student was taken to a local hospital and authorities have not said whether that student is male or female. That person was the only victim.
Witnesses said about five shots were fired at the high school.
Brewster County Sheriff Ronnie Dodson said to KWES that the shooter had only lived in Alpine for six months. He said that he knows the girl's grandparents, and they said today that their granddaughter was a straight-A student and didn't show signs of having any problems at school.Nike Sportswear will be upgrading the classic Nike Air Force 1 Low with the use of their Flyknit material.
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Going with the brands classic White-on-White colors scheme, the shoe features an all-White Nike Flyknit based upper, with a leather Nike Swoosh logo on each side and heel tab. Completing the look is an icy translucent outsole for a nice added touch.
Check out the first look below at the Nike Flyknit Air Force 1 Low “White” that is set to debut in 2016. Let us know what you guys think in the comments section and stay tuned to Sneaker Bar for further updates.
UPDATE: Here is another look at the “White” Nike Flyknit Air Force 1 Low that will be releasing in the coming months. Stay tuned for more updates.
Source: lequan306It’s time! This week, news that Hamburg banned coffee pods from government buildings set off a larger conversation about why we’re still giving our money to companies like Keurig and Nespresso. Let’s be honest: It’s time for the whole world to stop buying coffee pods.
The news from Hamburg comes a year after Keurig announced that nobody was buying its DRM-enabled coffee machine that only accepted “Keurig 2.0” branded coffee pods. The company said it would finally allow people to fill their own coffee pods (again). But again, you shouldn’t be buying these wasteful little pods to begin with.
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By some bizarre twist of fate, I attended a Nespresso event a couple years ago and received its newest machine for free. I’d used a Keurig machine at my old office and was thrilled by the convenience. The new Nespresso Virtuoline, however, is like a Cadillac version of the Keurig 2.0 in a way. At $350, the system is expensive, and it’s also equipped with a barcode scanner that ensures your coffee is brewed perfectly you only use Nespresso brand pods. The Keurig 2.0 is equipped with similar technology that Keurig says exists for safety reasons. Everybody knows that it’s really because companies like Keurig and Nespresso really just want to sell you bad, wasteful coffee for over $50 a pound.
Like a chump, I started buying Nespresso pods for my otherwise free machine. It was so shiny and those little pods saved me a trip to the coffee shop! When news of Keurig’s inevitable downturn hit, however, I did a little bit of math in my head. Over the past few months, I’ve spent more on those pods than the machine’s original cost. At $1.50 per pod, they’re actually more expensive than a small coffee at the trendy spot across the street from my apartment. The pods are also clogging up a landfill somewhere, since I can’t really recycle them when they’re full of coffee grounds. That’s a handful of my spent pods in the photo above. I certainly can’t re-use them. Meanwhile, the coffee kind of tastes like mud.
This is all my fault. It would be easy to blame Nespresso—or Keuring, since that’s what got me started on coffee pods. But this shiny new machine was free, and I would’ve been a fool not to use it. Therein lies the fault.
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Even if you buy the machine, you can convince yourself that convenient, pod-hungry coffee machines pay for themselves in time and convenience. You convince yourself that the pod coffee tastes not too bad and ignore how many pounds of garbage you’re creating along the way. You tell yourself that America promised you innovation. You even think that refillable coffee pods make the whole system more sensible, less wasteful, and even acceptable.
I did all of these things, save the last part about refillable pods. (Nespresso doesn’t offer this option.) And at this point, I’m ashamed for being such a terrible consumer. I’m going to start making coffee that tastes good. I’m going to get a Chemex or, better yet, a cheap pour-over coffee dripper. I’m going to start using my brain. I’m not buying coffee pods any more, and you shouldn’t either.
This post was originally published on May 8, 2015. It’s been updated with news of Hamburg’s ban on coffee pods.Marca, based in Madrid, this afternoon say that Tottenham Hotspur are set to pay the buy-out clause for Atletico striker Adrian. The payment set in his contract is €18m and Marca say that Spurs would treble his wages, making it an opportunity he's not likely to turn down.
The 24 year old scored 7 La Liga goals last season but netted an impressive 10 times as the club completed a victorious Europa League campaign, added to a cup goal that made his goal tally 18 for his first season with the club.
Atletico want to try everything to keep the player and upon hearing of interest from the London club they contacted Adrian's representatives with a view to offering an improved contract and increasing his buy-out clause.
Marca say that Adrian would be happy to continue at Atletico Madrid having joined them on a free transfer last summer, but that he will not do that at any cost to himself and is tempted by the offer Tottenham are preparing.
Barcelona have also been linked with the player in the past and Adrian, who made his debut for the Spanish national side this year, is thought to prefer to stay in La Liga. Atletico believe his market value is far higher than the €18m buy-out clause but are aware that without a new contract they are powerless if Adrian agrees to terms offered by Tottenham and the London club meet the amount stated.
Marca say Andre Villas Boas has approved the Tottenham move for Adrian and wants the player at White Hart Lane. It's certainly a new name to be so heavily linked with Spurs and Marca are running this as their main story this afternoon.
For Twitter round-ups of transfer window news worldwide Follow @Sport_WitnessIntroduction
In this article I am going to discuss the eventual merging of the two political and economic systems that were dominant in the past century. I am talking about Capitalism and Communism. These two systems were given to us by the ruling elite themselves, so that the people of the world can be conditioned to accept the final merging of the two systems into a new hybrid with all Capital in the hands of a few elite and the rest of us living in communism.
Hegelian dialect and the cold war
The two cold war sides.
After the second world war the world was divided into two spheres of influence, led by the two super powers of the time. The USA and the USSR, both representing their political and economic ideologies of Capitalism and Communism, both trying to outwit the other side, leading to a huge arms race and various subversive movements which ultimately led to the demise of the Soviet Union in the late 1980’s. In reality the Cold War was just a show for the masses, the Rothschilds and their interconnected bloodlines had the two sides under their complete control. The communist regime was brought into power and financed by the International bankers and the rich Capitalists out of western countries in the first place. A good book to read of this subject is The Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution : The remarkable true story of the American Capitalist who Financed the Russian Communists. read here The West also provided the technology to the USSR. Read Antony C. Sutton’s trilogy Western Technology and the Soviet Economic development. read here. This two way conflict development is the classic example of the Hegelian dialect. The thesis vs the anti thesis resulting into a new synthesis. Capitalism was the thesis vs Communism which was the anti thesis resulting into a synthesis in which all Capital will be in the hands of a ruling elite and the rest of humanity is going to live in Communism.
G.W.F Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher born in 1770, he was a major figure in German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.
Hegel developed a comprehensive philosophical framework, or “system”, of Absolute idealism to account in an integrated and developmental way for the relation of mind and nature, the subject and object of knowledge, psychology, the state, history, art, religion, and philosophy. In particular, he developed the concept that mind or spirit manifested itself in a set of contradictions and oppositions that it ultimately integrated and united, without eliminating either pole or reducing one to the other. Examples of such contradictions include those between nature and freedom, and between immanence and transcendence.
The Hegelian dialect proceeds in this way. Thesis : an idea or a concept vs Anti thesis : the opposing idea or a concept resulting into a Synthesis. Synthesis : the blending of the two ie thesis + antithesis. The word synthesis in its general meaning refers to a combining or putting together of parts. In the context of dialects the synthesis combines the thesis and the antithesis. read here
The cold war was a classic example of the Hegelian dialect. Even the political paradigm is based on the Hegelian dialect, the right vs the left, the conservative vs the liberals, the republicans vs the democrats. Now i hope you have understand why are there only two major political parties in most countries.
Capitalism for the elite
The rich capitalist Rothschild with his gold.
In the future all production will be carried out and all services will be provided by huge private transnational corporations. Just like a communist government have monopolies over all production and the service sector, everything will be in the hands of private corporations. There will be no public sector and no small-scale industries, small businesses or service providers in the future. Only huge transnational corporations running everything. Slowly and steadily with the help of economic reforms like Globalization, Liberalization etc. and along with the economic imperialism of IFI’s like WTO, IMF, World Bank and mean government policies like Deregulation and Free trade systematically everything is being sold off to private corporations.
Just have a look around you, all Infrastructure, natural resources, services, schools, roads, gas, electricity, water, food supply, health services etc are being sold off to private corporations. Water being privatized read here and read here Roads, bridges sold off read here and read here Social services sold off read here Even prisons are being sold off read here.
The elite wants all Financial Capital, Fixed Capital, Circulating Capital and Social Capital in their hands.
The Official historian of Council of Foreign Relations Carroll Quigley had something very similar to say in his book Tragedy and Hope.
“The powers of financial capitalism had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves private corporations.”
– Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966)
Communism for the rest of the population
Communism is what is planned for the general masses. We are going to live in a communist society under the pretense of saving the planet from global warming.
The method to do it is the United Nations Agenda 21 which is being implemented throughout the globe.
UN Agenda 21
UN Agenda 21 is the renamed and recycled version of Karl Marx’s communist manifesto. The difference between the two is that Marx wanted to implement communism under the guise to end class struggle and UN want to implement communist style system through Agenda 21 under the guise to end global warming.
Karl Marx
The Rothschilds funded the two masons Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels to write the Communist manifesto and the Das Capital.
Karl Marx and Engels wrote in their book communist manifesto about creating an ideal communist society which will be run on the 10 planks of communism.
Below are the 10 planks of communism. (In the brackets what they mean in the modern context and UN Agenda 21 role in it if any.)
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
(You can read straight out of UN Agenda 21 that there will be no private property for the public. More info on this read here).
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
(This is done to keep everyone at similar levels of wealth. Its also the redistribution of wealth. Read more about UN Agenda 21 and redistribution of wealth watch here).
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
(So that the state can take over all wealth and property).
4. Confiscation of the property of immigrants and rebels.
(It basically means that you should remain absolutely silent and never raise your voice against the totalitarian system or else you have to suffer pretty badly. Bertnard Russell who was an elite front man wrote in his book “The Impact of Science of Society” that weekly credits will be give to the public and those who oppose the system will get their credits confiscated until they comply).
5. Centralization of all credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
(Lenin once said that installing a central bank is 90% communising a nation. Nearly all countries have a private central bank that issues the currency of that nation. The elite may create a World Central Bank for tighter control. The pope is a prime caller to it. read here).
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
(This is done to monitor and control everyone. All totalitarian governments take in charge of communication and transportation in their hands. There will be no private or personal transportation under UN Agenda 21. There will be only public transportation like buses. You wont own a car or bike but they may allow cycles. I don’t think that anyone can create mass rebellion by travelling through cycles. Tourism would be banned, travelling would be highly restricted just like it was in the USSR. You would be locked up in your habitat area and would require special permits to leave. More on UN Agenda 21 and reduced private vehicle ownership. watch here).
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
(In the modern context it means private corporations like Cargill and Monsanto taking over all farms. Farms around the globe are being sold off to private corporations. A good documentary to watch on corporate farming is Food Inc. Watch here).
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
(Meaning everyone got to work and serve the elite’s World State. You will be born only if you have a function. As the elite front man and one of the founder of the Fabian society G.B Shaw once said “One day you have to come to us and justify why we should allow you to live”. The general masses would live in a completely planned society from cradle to grave, just like it is in any other collectivist society like Communism. UN agenda 21 and planned society watch here).
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
(This means as the corporations take over land from family farmers then move people to urban areas from rural areas. People will be forced to leave the country side and move into highly controlled cities. That’s what United nations Habitat areas are all about. read here also read about the US government plans to move people out of suburban areas into cities read here).
10. Free education for all children in public schools.
(This means compulsory indoctrination of children to accept the collectivist society and worship mother Earth. More on UN Agenda 21 and education watch here).
The ruling elite created, promotes, sponsor all global warming, climate change, environmentalism, sustainable development movements. They want to implement the UN agenda 21 to rule over us in a communist style fashion.
Mikhail Gorbachev
There is no better person to speak on the this subject of global warming than Mikhail Gorbachev himself. The last dictator of the USSR. The founder of two big environmentalism foundations the Green Cross International and Gorbachev Foundation. The man who authored the Earth Charter in 1997 alongside Maurice Strong who is another big player in the environmentalism movement.
Maurice Strong
Gorbachev during the late 1980’s openly talked about the coming together of capitalism and communism. Here are his few comments/quotes. “Communism did not crumble with the Berlin Wall. That was the show to end the signal the end of the Cold War.” He also said “We are moving towards a New World Order the world of communism and we shall never turn off that road”.
Earth Charter Logo.
Gorbachev ain’t alone in pushing this global warming/environmentalism agenda. He has a long list of globalists with him like Robert Muller, Ted Turner, Al Gore, Crispin Tickle, Maurice Strong, Javier Salvona.
Mother Earth Gaia
Gorbachev even said in his book “The Search for a New Beginning” that they (elite) would make this environmentalism into a religion to make it more successful.
Many researchers think that they would make the public worship mother Earth Gaia.
Conclusion : Green is the new Red
Just like Eastern Europe was swept by the Red terror in the 20 century, the world will be swept by the Green terror in the 21 century. There is a lot of information available on the internet and elsewhere that exposes the lies and deception of these climate change, global warming, environmentalist groups. Expose the elites plans to create the Worldwide GULAG, using the fake environmentalism crisis. (Gulags were Soviet slave labor camps).Photo: Third Man Records/Angelina Castillo
In the ever-changing world that is Nashville, many things define our evolving culture: Maybe it's the old soul of Lower Broadway, split between the ghosts of honky-tonk heroes and the exposed navels of Honky Tonk Central, or maybe it's winning the battle to preserve RCA Studio A. Perhaps it's just a well-kept Victorian in East Nashville, or a modern spin on meat-and-three, where a haute ingredient trumps a simple fish fry. Surely, Wednesday night's lineup at Bridgestone Arena — where Jack White, Loretta Lynn and William Tyler will take the stage — is about as indicative of our past, present and future as they come. Combined, the trio of White, Lynn and Tyler — who spins guitar-centric instrumental records that have more in common with Sex Mob and Smog than Johnny Cash or George Jones — takes defining Nashville's signature sounds one step further. Which is about meshing genres all the way from the stage of $2 Tuesdays at The 5 Spot to our 18,000-plus-capacity hockey arena.
In a town gripped by growing-pain panic, here's a reminder of the good side of all this evolution.
"It's great that the city is growing so, so much," White's Third Man Records co-founder Ben Swank tells the Scene. "But it's also great that you can still have what people could describe as a 'Nashville moment.' That's what it feels like to me, despite none of us at Third Man being Nashville natives. The city has really taken us to heart and looked after us and treated us as such."
It's difficult to imagine Nashville's current culture without White, who moved to town in 2006, or Third Man's downtown record store, live venue and label headquarters, which opened its doors in 2009. Third Man's two-toned black-and-yellow motif is now nearly as iconic as the Predators blue and gold painted throughout Bridgestone. Jack White and Third Man changed Nashville, setting off a chain of dominoes that let the world in on a dirty little secret: that Country Music City, USA, is also a rock 'n' roll hub.
"I think Jack moving to Nashville had a lot to do with changing the attitude that this city is a nexus of rock 'n' roll," Tyler tells the Scene. "I grew up here, and no one took our rock 'n' roll seriously until Jack came here. That, coinciding with [local punk label Infinity Cat Records], is when it all changed. And suddenly people realized it's actually a really rad place to live if you're a band that doesn't play [country music]."
And White and his label have played an active role in making Nashville a rad place for local rockers to live.
"William is the perfect person to open [the Bridgestone show] because, to me, he's a lot of what the good side of Nashville is," Swank says of Tyler, who, in addition to his acclaimed solo albums, did time as a sideman in Tennessee bands from Superdrag to Lambchop and currently co-owns and operates Nations neighborhood haunt The Stone Fox. "He has his own business, he's a local musician who has a lot to say and approaches his craft from a well-thought-out place, but is also very instinctual. He's very Nashville, as much as Loretta is."
White's relationship with Nashville began two years before he moved here. April will mark a decade since the release of Lynn's White-produced comeback album Van Lear Rose, and the Bridgestone show is a tribute of sorts to a partnership that not only spurred a Grammy-winning record, but also set a new blueprint for what a country-rock partnership can look and feel like. It also served as a precursor to the rest of the now former White Stripe's career.
White morphed from a Detroit poster boy to a musical ambassador when he moved to Music City, establishing himself in the spirit of what Nashville desperately needs from their new inhabitants: people who are reverential of the past without being retro, who are innovative without ringing as throwback. On Wednesday, flanked by a living legend and an arbiter of youthful indie avant-garde, White will show exactly how well that balance can be executed.
"It's all about finding a way of growing and developing that's still retaining character and honesty," says Swank. Third Man does this by preserving lost ghosts, like the release of The Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, while tapping into our progressive cultural core: showcasing vital artists like Shabazz Palaces and PUJOL on vinyl and onstage. Of course, Lynn was also doing her part in 1975, slipping the world a "Pill" with a glass of Tennessee whiskey.
"I think any growth is good," Swank adds. "But I also think any growth is going to have growing pains, and I think that's what everyone is experiencing. Rather than trying to be overly negative about things or having knee-jerk reactions, I think the best way to combat that is going out and putting your own positivity into things and creating your own kind of world. That's when beautiful things happen. If you don't like the 40-story building that's going up, go out and create your own art collective."
It certainly worked for White — and for Tyler, who's seen the city change in front of his eyes, from the slow-chugged place of his birth to the rash of two-in-one condos. But he'll take the bad with the good. "Nashville used to be a little more relaxed," he says. "But it also used to be a lot less interesting."MXP on the Cerro Kishtwar in India
Manu Pellissier and three of his friends realised in India the first ascent on the Cerro Kishtwar East Face. Story
There are some propositions you can’t refuse…
When my old friend Marko Prezelj invited me to an expedition in India together with Urban Novak and Hayden Kennedy, I first asked him to give me a week to think about it. It only took me 1 hour to call him to confirm and ask for some more details about this East face of Cerro something…
The Cerro Kishtwar is located in the Jammu Kashmir area, in the Kishtwar province. Cerro Kishtwar is around 6173m, it has been climbed twice, first by Mick fowler and Steve Sustad in 1993, and by a Swiss team in 2011 made up of Stephan Siegrist, David lama, and Denis Burdet.
There was also a remarkable attempt in 1991 by Brendan Murphy and Andy Perkins on the stunning North Face. They spent 17 days on the wall and stopped 100m from the summit. On the most direct line on the North Face, a 1000m climb and about 28 pitches in capsule style…
credit photo: "Marko Prezelj"
On September 10th we all meet in Delhi. Urban and Hayden knew each other from climbing on K7 in 2012 together, and with Mark |
aps every Sunday game from an upset-heavy Week 2 in the NFL, and considers what RGIII's injury could mean for the Redskins.EXCLUSIVE
AUSTRALIA’S worst killer is a grossly overweight loner who pays other prisoners with chocolate bars for attention and has violently attacked several jail workers.
At 48, Martin Bryant is unrecognisable from the tall, slim blond man who 19 years ago killed 35 innocents and injured 23 others in the Port Arthur massacre.
Through a series of interviews with former prison staff, medical staff and fellow prisoners at the maximum security jail where he will die, News Corp is able to reveal Bryant’s until now highly secret day to day existence.
Some jailers refer to him as “Porky Pig” and he has ballooned to 160kg at times. His weight fluctuates up to 30kg, from obese to morbidly obese. Some who have encountered him say Bryant rarely leaves his cell and is drugged to point of being “almost a vegetable”. Others talk of a violent and unpredictable predator who targets the most vulnerable of his fellow inmates.
From a vantage point on public land some 600m from Bryant’s exercise yard, News Corp witnessed him attempt a few kicks of a football, watch fellow prisoners exercise and try to join their conversations. Mainly, he walked alone, pacing back and forth, rarely glancing towards the yard’s front wall of bars, the only way to see the outside world.
Tactical response group team leader Tony Burley, who left Tasmania’s corrective service in 2012 after two decades, said Bryant is treated with contempt by other prisoners.
“They think he is nothing special and they take advantage of him. He’s known for giving other prisoners what they want,” said Mr Burley.
Former prisoner Tony Bull said Bryant had been the target of several assaults and that he “wouldn’t stand a chance” in the general prison population, who would be all too keen to abide by the prison code which targets men who hurt children and women.
“Mainly he would be the target because he killed those poor little kids,” Mr Bull said.
“The fact is he’s Martin Bryant, and in some circles, to kill Martin Bryant, well you could hold your head up.”
Insiders says Bryant has attempted suicide numerous times since beginning his life sentence, and he has several health issues which have seen him transferred under armed guard to Royal Hobart Hospital for treatment.
“When he is in the public hospital it’s very difficult for all of us,” said one former nurse, who did not want to be identified because of a media ban for public servants imposed by the Tasmanian government.
“A lot of us were here on the day of the massacre and we lost people we loved. Having to look after him is awful.”
Another former nurse described the terror her colleagues felt when their roles required them to care for him in a prison facility.
“This particular part of the jail where it happened is a little more comfortable, they try to make it a little more homely to help keep the inmates calm,” she said.
“That means there is carpet, a bit more space for them. But the problem is with carpet, you can’t hear people coming at you.
“That’s how he managed to get one of us, just by running at them from behind.”
Bryant has been involved in several assaults and was part of an attack in February that left a male nurse with a fractured jaw. That worker may not be able to return to duties.
His only visitor is his mother Carleen Bryant, although it is unclear the last time Mrs Bryant made the journey to Risdon. She did not wish to be interviewed for this story.
The Tasmanian prison service was approached for comment but said in a statement: “The Tasmania Prison Service does not comment on matters relating to individual prisoners”.
TO READ SARAH BLAKE’S FULL INVESTIGATION, CLICK HERE.Hillary Clinton Hillary Diane Rodham ClintonSanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' Former Sanders campaign spokesman: Clinton staff are 'biggest a--holes in American politics' MORE has won South Carolina's primary by a landslide, giving her a decisive victory in a key state days before Super Tuesday.
The New York Times reported that Clinton lead 74 percent to 26 percent, higher than the final margins in all but six contests during the 2008 Democratic primary.
The Associated Press reports that Clinton walks away from South Carolina with 39 delegates, leaving Sanders with 14.
South Carolina was seen as a test of Clinton's strength with African-American voters, who were expected to side with her over rival candidate Bernie Sanders Bernard (Bernie) SandersPush to end U.S. support for Saudi war hits Senate setback Sanders: 'I fully expect' fair treatment by DNC in 2020 after 'not quite even handed' 2016 primary Sanders: 'Damn right' I'll make the large corporations pay 'fair share of taxes' MORE.
Clinton has won three of four contests against Sanders, but South Carolina is her biggest win, and support from black voters could carry over to Alabama, Texas, Georgia and a few other states voting on Tuesday. The win is also a significant reversal from 2008, when Clinton lost the state by 28 points to Barack Obama Barack Hussein ObamaWith low birth rate, America needs future migrants 4 ways Hillary looms over the 2020 race Obama goes viral after sporting black bomber jacket with '44' on sleeve at basketball game MORE.
The result gives the former secretary of State a boost ahead of those 11 contests on Tuesday, and Clinton looked toward next week in her victory speech.
"Tomorrow, this campaign goes national," she said. "We are going to compete for every vote in every state, we are not taking anything and not taking anyone for granted.”
"Despite what you hear, we don’t need to make America great again — America hasn’t stopped being great. But we do need to make America whole again," she said Saturday.
"Instead of building walls, we need to be tearing down barriers. We need to show, by everything we do, that we really are in this together.”
Sanders was quick to congratulate Clinton, releasing a statement just after 7 p.m. He noted the results meant both had a single decisive win.
"Let me be clear on one thing tonight. This campaign is just beginning. We won a decisive victory in New Hampshire. She won a decisive victory in South Carolina," Sanders said. "Now it’s on to Super Tuesday. In just three days, Democrats in 11 states will pick 10 times more pledged delegates on one day than were selected in the four early states so far in this campaign. Our grassroots political revolution is growing state by state, and we won't stop now."
Sanders also took a shot at GOP front-runner Donald Trump, stating that "when we come together, and don't let people like Donald Trump try to divide us, we can create an economy that works for all of us and not just the top 1 percent."
Clinton came into the race holding an overwhelming polling lead over Sanders in South Carolina.
She worked assiduously to ensure she retained the support of black voters in the face of a major push by Sanders.
MSNBC reported that Clinton won 87 percent of the black vote based on exit polls, beating Obama's margin with black voters in the state in 2008.
Clinton surrogates repeatedly bashed Sanders’s racial justice record by casting him as a political opportunist whose interest in the issue came after he launched his bid. Clinton also worked to align herself with President Obama, while castigating Sanders for not always standing by the president’s side.
Sanders’s surrogates responded by noting civil rights work throughout his career — former NAACP head Ben Jealous, academic Cornel West, producer Spike Lee and rapper Killer Mike all lent a hand to help boost the Vermont senator’s credibility with black voters.
Clinton also beat Sanders by about 6 percentage points among white voters.
The loss makes it more difficult for Sanders to regain momentum in the near future, as Clinton holds double-digit leads in six of the 11 Super Tuesday states. Those states alone make up a majority of the day’s delegate haul, so Sanders would have to sweep the contested states and pull off at least one major upset to come out of the day ahead.BANGKOK — Three suspected members of a pickpocket gang which targeted foreigners were arrested Thursday night in the Lat Phrao district.
Kissada “Oat” Sawasdee, 33, Panthagarn “O” Watsola, 20, and Chakrapan “Yin” Ngamwong, 20, were wanted for mugging a Japanese tourist earlier this year. Chakrapan was apprehended in Soi Lat Phrao 71, while the other two turned themselves in.
The trio allegedly injured Shinichi Kowaguchi on Feb. 22 in Soi Sukhumvit 24 when they snatched his bag.
Lat Phrao police investigators said there were six people in the gang, who worked the streets on motorcycles and frequently switched roles.
Thursday’s arrest came after police raided a phone shop in the Huai Khwang district and arrested Pornthep Kitchaisophon and Uranee Chayaniwanit, who they accuse of fencing the gang’s loot.
Officers seized 23 mobile phones.
The other three gang members are still on the run. Lt. Col. Jirakit Jarunapat said police have applied for arrest warrants but would not disclose their names.
“They had a whole operation running. We want to clean up the whole system!” Jirakit said.
Kissada, Panthagarn, and Chakrapan said that they had been running the pickpocketing operation and committed hundreds of thefts, sometimes injuring victims, in the Thonglor, Thung Maha Mek, Wat Prayakrai, and Lat Phrao areas.
Panthagarn and Chakrapan and the members on the lam carried out the pickpocketing, police said. They would snatch bags and dispose of travel documents and the bag itself while fleeing the scene. Police said they would then bring mobile phones to Kissada, who would sell them to Pornthep and Uranee and split the earnings with the gang.
The mobile phone shop owners have been charged with buying stolen goods, and the three gang members will be charged with running a criminal enterprise.EAST LANSING, MI - NOVEMBER 08: The Spartan statue is seen prior to the game between the Michigan State Spartans and the Purdue Boilermakers at Spartan Stadium on November 8, 2008 in East Lansing, Michigan. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images) EAST LANSING, MI - NOVEMBER 08: The Spartan statue is seen prior to the game between the Michigan State Spartans and the Purdue Boilermakers at Spartan Stadium on November 8, 2008 in East Lansing, Michigan. (Photo by Jim McIsaac/Getty Images)
Vandals have struck at Michigan State University ahead of the school’s big football season opener against Oregon on Saturday.
The statue, located near Spartan Stadium, was targeted sometime Thursday night or early Friday morning.
Vandals painted a blue “M” on the statue’s chest, with the Greek symbols for alpha and omega below in yellow paint. A blue stripe is painted on its face with a yellow stripe painted down its arm. There’s also a large yellow splotch on its crotch region.
Who would do this to the Spartan statue? What do you think @MSU_FB fans? http://t.co/tNGeef98gA pic.twitter.com/EgJZe9aeaJ — WLNS Newsroom (@WLNS) September 11, 2015
It’s unclear who is responsible for the vandalism, which took place before a nationally televised game.A MAN tried to hack down a wall and tree outside a house, before it burst into flames at West Ryde this morning.
Police and firefighters were called to the corner of Adelaide St and Victoria Rd just before 10am after neighbours reported the fire and man’s erratic behaviour.
A vet at the neighbouring West Ryde Veterinary Clinic, Dr Kara Altman, saw most of the drama.
“A man with a sledgehammer was trying to hack down the front wall (outside the house),” she said.
“I was keeping an eye on him. I wasn’t sure if he was demolishing it. He looked a bit erratic.
“Then he went out the back, grabbed a saw and tried to cut the tree down at the front.
“It didn’t seem to work, so he went and got pruners and tried that.”
media_camera Emergency services outside the house. Picture: Steven Deare
Ms Altman said the man appeared to have full access to the house and garage. No-one else was at the house.
“The next thing we saw fire coming from the house, so we called the fire brigade and police,” she said.
The blaze prompted people living next door to rush outside.
“There were people next door trying to put out the fire, and the man yelled abuse at them,” Ms Altman said.
“Then he drove a car up on to the corner (of Adelaide St and Victoria Rd).”
Ms Altman said the man opened the petrol cap cover of the car.
However, he became distracted and ran in to the garage.
media_camera The windows of the house were smashed by the blaze. Picture: Annika Enderborg
Police from Ryde Local Area Command and the Public Order Riot Squad soon arrived, forced entry to the garage, and arrested the 41-year-old man.
Another witness to the blaze, Philip Brown, described the scene.
“There was smoke pouring out of the roof, and the windows were blown out,” he said.
“The police and fire brigade were arriving and the traffic was chaos.”
The arrested man has been taken to Royal North Shore Hospital for assessment.
Police directed traffic at the busy Victoria Rd intersection during the event, while firefighters extinguished the blaze.
Police cordoned off the site as a crime scene and the car remained at the corner of the streets this afternoon.With the World Series set to wrap up on Wednesday or Thursday, the official start to the MLB offseason is quickly drawing near.
In the previous two offseason’s the Indians wasted little time to make news. They acquired Derek Lowe from the Braves in a trade just two days after the 2011 World Series and then last offseason they acquired Yan Gomes and Mike Aviles in a trade from the Blue Jays less than a week after the completion of the 2012 World Series.
Article continues below...
The Indians are expected to be busy this offseason with many irons in the fire in free agency and the trade market. In addition to finding suitable matches on the trade and free agent front, they also have several questions they need to address with players currently on their roster.
With that in mind, as we get set to embark on what will probably be another wild offseason for the Indians, here is an overview of the decisions the Indians need to make and key areas they need to address this offseason.
1. The Kazmir and Jimenez dilemma
This is the most important decision the Indians need to make this offseason and one which will be addressed right away. Within three days of the completion of the World Series the Indians need to officially declare whether they are picking up Ubaldo Jimenez’s $8 million mutual option for next season (they will), and then within that same timeframe he needs to decide whether to decline it (he will).
From there, assuming Jimenez declines the option, the Indians have within five days of the conclusion of the World Series to extend him a qualifying offer. The same applies to Scott Kazmir. Both are free agents, but since both were with the Indians all season the Indians are eligible for compensation (first round supplemental draft pick) on each player if they extend a $14.1 million qualifying offer to them. If the player accepts the offer, he is paid $14.1 million in 2014, but if he declines he is free to sign with any team although comes at a steep price as the signing team forfeits their first unprotected pick in the 2014 Draft.
The Indians would be wise to resign one or both of Jimenez and Kazmir since starting pitching is the most valuable commodity in the game; however, both look to be on their way to some pretty expensive deals this offseason. What the Indians do in this situation should shape the rest of their offseason.
2. The rest of the internal free agents
In addition to Jimenez and Kazmir, the Indians also have other players up for free agency such as Joe Smith, Matt Albers, Jason Giambi, and Rich Hill. Albers and Hill are not expected to be retained, although Hill might come back on a minor league deal. Giambi looks all but certain to return in some capacity next season, although his situation probably will be one of the last decisions made this offseason in order to see where he fits within the Indians roster.
Smith is another significant free agent decision to make since he has been so important to the bullpen over the years; however, he may ultimately be too expensive to retain since he is probably looking at a three year deal for $14-18 million.
3. Handing out the non-tenders
The Indians have several players up for salary arbitration this offseason, but they will likely part with a few of them to save moneys. Players in danger of being non-tendered by the December 2nd non-tender deadline include Chris Perez, Drew Stubbs, Blake Wood and Lou Marson.
Perez is heading toward a $9-10 million pay day if he reaches arbitration, so he is all but certain to be non-tendered. With the emergence of Yan Gomes the Indians will probably part ways with Marson and save the $1.5 million or so he’d cost to retain. Wood is part of a deep mix of middle relievers and they may opt to save his money and use it elsewhere. Stubbs appears to be on the fence with a non-tender and it may depend on who they are able to acquire in a trade or in free agency prior to the tender deadline.
4. Searching the trade market
This will be an offseason long area of focus as GM Chris Antonetti has probably already fielded hundreds of calls on potential trades and will receiver hundreds more over the next several months. The Indians had their organizational meetings a few weeks back in Arizona where the entire scouting staff was on hand to help prepare Antonetti for potential trade targets.
The first big flurry of rumors in the trade market will probably come at the GM Meetings in Orlando from November 11-13. That will serve as the launching off point for several deals which will be discussed prior to the beginning of the Winter Meetings in Orlando from December 9-12 where the offseason activity will likely hit its climax. The possibility also exists that like in past offseason’s he already has a deal in place but has not been able to announce it because of the gag order on news that MLB places on teams during the World Series.
The trade market may be the most efficient area for the Indians to operate as the cost to acquire players is not necessarily money, but players. The Indians have several attractive prospects they can package in deals, and it is not out of the realm of possibility the Indians trade a player or two from their major league roster (someone like Michael Bourn) if the right opportunity arises. Players like Chase Headley, David Freese, Steve Cishek, and others could be targets.
5. Finding fits in free agency
Assuming that the Indians are unable to retain any of their free agents, the Indians go into the offseason with a need to acquire or retain at least one starting pitcher, add a middle of the order bat, add a part-time platoon style bat, and add or retain a reliable backend bullpen option. If the Indians are able to resign one of Kazmir and Jimenez and then resign Smith, then their focus would shift almost completely to upgrading their lineup.
The Indians caught a break last offseason as they had a protected first round pick and had Nick Swisher and Michael Bourn fall into their laps because teams did not want to surrender their first round picks for slightly above average players. This offseason that will not be the case since their first round pick is not protected, and they have much more limited financial resources than last offseason.
How the Indians attack free agency will probably depend on what they do on the trade market and who they resign. They may not be too active in free agency since it is an inefficient market and players can be costly to acquire for little bang for their buck. Where the Indians may be active is finding bargains and players that bring value such as Corey Hart, James Loney, David Murphy, David DeJesus, Eric Chavez and other bats of the same ilk.
6. Other roster decisions
On November 20th the Indians will need to finalize their 40-man roster. This is always an important part of the offseason roster process as the decision with which prospects to protect is a first step toward finalizing the 40-man roster for the 2014 season and identifying young players which they feel can help them very soon.
There are also other decisions the Indians need to make with what players they sign to minor league deals. They signed several last offseason and found the likes of Scott Kazmir, Ryan Raburn and Rich Hill on such deals, and will no doubt look to find bargain bin values once again.
7. Exploring extensions
Another sub plot to the offseason is which players the Indians sign to long-term extensions. Any such extension is probably on the backburner and won’t be announced until after the New Year, and going by their recent history probably would not be announced until late March or sometime in April.
The main targets for a long-term extension are Michael Brantley and Jason Kipnis to lock them up through their arbitration years and maybe buy out a year or two of their free agent years. Also, with Justin Masterson one year away from free agency, contract talks about a multi-year extension will undoubtedly heat up this offseason.By this challenge, the organizers of the event are keen to evaluate the state of the art image compression technologies. While the challenge is independent of any standardization body, it should be noted that the ISO working group JTC 1/SC 29/WG 1, known as JPEG, has an open Call for Information (CfI) on new image coding technologies and contributors to this challenge may want consider contribution of their technology as input to the ongoing JPEG activity. Contributors of new image coding technologies may find the ICIP to be a convenient and robust mechanism for promoting new approaches, and bringing new approaches into application. The objective of this call is to have an independent evaluation of the state of the art, and how contributions position themselves compared to existing still image compression standards.
Contributions – Input Requirements
Contributors are expected to provide
Contributions should provide a description of the basis of the compression algorithm as compression performance alone is not the sole evaluation criterion.
An implementation of algorithm in a form that allows stand-alone execution on a stand-alone computer, ideally in compilable source code form. Software is expected to implement a decoder to the PNM still image format.
Contributions are expected to be accompanied with detailed instructions, potentially including options to optimize to particular evaluation criteria such as PSNR, MS-SSIM or subjective quality or more.
Contributors are asked to identify how additional features such as spatial scalability, resolution accessibility, amneability to subjective optimization or representation of images of higher bitdepths, high dynamic range, hyperspectral data etc. might be addressed.
Contributors are expected to compress the provided test material (download here with their technology to bitrates that will be communicated by the organizers; the compressed codestreams along with the encoder options have to be included in the contribution.
Contributors may also provide a maximum of four (4) additional test images at their discretion. Images should be either grey-scale or sRGB with 8 or 12 bits per component, encoded in PNM. Contributed test images must not previously have been compressed using any lossy coding scheme. Contributors are also expected to provide the evaluation committee sufficient rights to allow usage of the provided software and provided input data for the purpose of evaluation of their own, and other contributions to the challenge. The evaluation process may need to crop and/or clip the provided images to make them suitable for subjective evaluation. This requires contributors to provide a suitable derivative license e.g. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) for any content contributed.
Input data for the compression algorithm will include at least 8-bits per component grey-scale and color image data from natural scenes.
Evaluation Criteria
The formal assessment process to be undertaken in this evaluation exercise is concerned only with compression performance. It should be noted, however, that compression performance alone is not the sole feature of interest for practical deployment of an image compression technology.
Objective evaluation will at least include the quality indices PSNR and MS-SSIM; a subjective evaluation will be performed by DSIS tests assessing image fidelity, collecting MOS values.
Test imagery for the evaluation will be drawn from a sizeable repository that is maintained by JPEG and a subset of which will be made available to contributors via this link. The test set will at least include 24bpp RGB photographic content.
In addition to the provided codecs, the evaluation will also include well-known standardized image compression solutions such as JPEG, JPEG 2000, JPEG XR and JPEG XT.
Submission Deadlines
The evaluation event will take the form of a ICIP Special Session. Contributions to this Special Session will be reviewed and potentially published as part of the proceedings of the conference following the regular paper submission and review process of the ICIP. All contributors are expected to produce a paper, formatted in accordance with the paper template for ICIP 2016, to be uploaded to the site specified on registration of intent with their final submission. Paper submissions, including any software, images and/or codestreams as an electronic attachment must be uploaded to the ICIP submission page prior February 15th 2016.
Contributors will be notified on the acceptance of their contribution by April 16th.
Organizers
University of Stuttgart
EPFL
VUB
University of Patras
Participating Labs
The following parties will implement the procedures and tasks of the challenge:Today, I have ordered a number of actions in response to the Russian government’s aggressive harassment of U.S. officials and cyber operations aimed at the U.S. election. These actions follow repeated private and public warnings that we have issued to the Russian government, and are a necessary and appropriate response to efforts to harm U.S. interests in violation of established international norms of behavior.
All Americans should be alarmed by Russia’s actions. In October, my Administration publicized our assessment that Russia took actions intended to interfere with the U.S. election process. These data theft and disclosure activities could only have been directed by the highest levels of the Russian government. Moreover, our diplomats have experienced an unacceptable level of harassment in Moscow by Russian security services and police over the last year. Such activities have consequences. Today, I have ordered a number of actions in response.
I have issued an executive order that provides additional authority for responding to certain cyber activity that seeks to interfere with or undermine our election processes and institutions, or those of our allies or partners. Using this new authority, I have sanctioned nine entities and individuals: the GRU and the FSB, two Russian intelligence services; four individual officers of the GRU; and three companies that provided material support to the GRU’s cyber operations. In addition, the Secretary of the Treasury is designating two Russian individuals for using cyber-enabled means to cause misappropriation of funds and personal identifying information. The State Department is also shutting down two Russian compounds, in Maryland and New York, used by Russian personnel for intelligence-related purposes, and is declaring “persona non grata” 35 Russian intelligence operatives. Finally, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are releasing declassified technical information on Russian civilian and military intelligence service cyber activity, to help network defenders in the United States and abroad identify, detect, and disrupt Russia’s global campaign of malicious cyber activities.
These actions are not the sum total of our response to Russia’s aggressive activities. We will continue to take a variety of actions at a time and place of our choosing, some of which will not be publicized. In addition to holding Russia accountable for what it has done, the United States and friends and allies around the world must work together to oppose Russia’s efforts to undermine established international norms of behavior, and interfere with democratic governance. To that end, my Administration will be providing a report to Congress in the coming days about Russia’s efforts to interfere in our election, as well as malicious cyber activity related to our election cycle in previous elections.Cloud Infrastructure vs Distributed computing. Or, How to have your cake and eat it to.
CryptoFlint Blocked Unblock Follow Following Dec 6, 2017
I was a very lucky college grad many years ago. I landed a job that gave me entry level into the Information Technology career field. I have spent most of my career in an area called Infrastructure. Infrastructure is the domain of servers, storage, memory, raised floor data centers, UPSes, Networks, and lots and lots of nerds and geeks. We got excited about distributed computing. We fell in love with the internet. We took to cloud computing like bees to honey. What’s funny is that along the way distributed, in the end, doesn’t really mean distributed. And cloud really just ended up meaning that someone else runs the big data center somewhere so that you don’t have to. It is all made to look like what we thought it was but under the covers it isn’t.
Recently I have started following the newest developments in blockchain. As you may know, blockchain is a relatively new technology that brings high levels of trust and security to a distributed computing platform. In essence, blockchain allows for cryptographically controlled transactions while allowing for broad levels of visibility and scrutiny once the transaction has been committed. Many of the newest developments in blockchain are now appearing and having direct impact on startup businesses that are working to realize benefits by solving real world problems. I ran into one of these startup companies recently, and I found it at the intersection of Cloud Infrastructure and Distributed computing. And I don’t mean the Cloud Infrastructure and Distributed computing that we ended up with. I mean the Cloud Infrastructure and Distributed computing that we thought we were going to get when we first started out.
What if I told you that you could start a business out of your house and that for this business you could acquire all of the systems and services you need to run your business with just a few keystrokes and clicks. And what if I told you that these services would be running on computers, disk drives and memory spread all over the world. In fact your business services would be guaranteed 99.99% up-time, and they would be running in the worlds first global blockchain managed computerized system. Your employees workplace desktop could be launched from the blockchain computer system, freeing them up to work from any location in the world where an internet connection is available. In fact your entire business operation could be started and launched and have a full blown IT presence in minutes, and you wouldn’t even have left your couch. Now, that’s cloud! And that’s distributed computing. Oh, and it costs 50% less than its competitors. Who does this? Well, no one yet. But this is the vision Michael Stollaire at Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure Services (TBIS)is bringing to the Word.
Titanium Blockchain Infrastructure Services is currently raising funds for its startup operations via an ICO, or Initial Coin Offering. Its new currency, call BAR, or the Titanium BAR, will be used as the currency for buying products and services on the TBIS eco-system. (Ecosystem is just a fancy way for saying the computing environment).
What makes this ICO compelling and different than many others is that this isn’t Michael Stollaire’s first foray into Infrastructure Services. Michael is a 17 year IT Infrastructure veteran (almost as much as me). He has owned an operated his own consulting firm and performed work for a stunning list of fortune 500 companies. I won’t name them here, but you can find them in his Whitepaper, which was recently updated with even more detailed information about the project.
When you visit this project, please don’t be frightened away by terms you may not be familiar with. These terms abound in the Infrastructure world, and they often make it difficult for us gear heads to communicate with non-gear heads. The good news is Michael and his team are very good at discussing these things in terms everyone can understand, even though the technical details have to be explained somewhere. To get people like me excited, all the technical details are included. But to help everyone be able to discuss, understand and take part in understanding this vision Michael and team have setup several places they can be contacted. These include their website, Telegram Group, and bitcointalk forum.
Hey, this stuff excited me enough that I called and talked to Michael Stollaire personally, I read the Forbes article he is quoted in, and I spent some time on the sites I mentioned above. I can’t tell you if this is for you of if you’d like it at all. But I can tell you, this seems to be a first. And its worth checking out.
As always, please do your own research and consult your investment and/or tax advisers before making any investment decisions. These statements contained here are from my personal research and do not constitute advice or recommendations.
Visit tbis.io, botcointalk forum and join their Telegram Group.
Referral link: buy Titanium BAR
This article posted at http://medium.com/@CryptoFlintThe Reclusive Spanish Billionaire Behind Zara's Fast Fashion Empire
Enlarge this image toggle caption Inditex/AP Inditex/AP
He's the richest man you've never heard of: Amancio Ortega, founder of the Spanish clothing chain Zara. He's a notorious recluse who is rumored to wear the same plain shirt every day, but his Zara empire has come to define the concept of fast fashion.
And now he's taken Warren Buffett's No. 3 spot on Forbes' billionaires list.
Ortega's rags-to-riches tale mirrors the fast growth of southern Europe in the past 30 years. But the difference in this story is that Zara shows no sign of crashing.
His Beginnings
Ortega built the world's biggest fashion company in a rainy, impoverished corner of northwest Spain — Galicia — where the 76-year-old has lived since he was a kid.
The son of a railway worker, Ortega went to work in a local shirt maker's shop at age 14 to help feed his family. Jose Martinez was Ortega's first colleague. He's 77 now and still works at that same shop called Gala.
"He may be the third-richest man in the world, but for me, he's just a good guy," Martinez says. "He came to work in my father's shop in 1951, so we became friends, Amancio and me."
More than 60 years later, Gala employees still sew shirts upstairs from where they're sold. That's a model Ortega took with him when he opened his first Zara store two blocks from Gala in 1975.
As the company grew, he kept production close to home — in Spain and Portugal — at a time when other chains were moving factories to Asia for cheap labor.
A Look Inside Ortega's Empire
Enlarge this image toggle caption Evan Joseph Uhlfelder/Courtesy of Inditex Evan Joseph Uhlfelder/Courtesy of Inditex
Sooty smokestacks dot the green Galician hills around Zara's headquarters. Inside, machines sort garments to dispatch to stores.
Every single garment passes through Spain. And more than half of production is done locally. That allows Zara to be quick: 15 days from design to retail rack — compared with the old industry standard of six months.
"They look at whatever is new," fashion expert Jose Luis Nueno says. "They see what the celebrities and so on are wearing, and put it in their windows very fast."
Nueno studied the clothing company at Harvard Business School and now teaches at Spain's IESE Business School. He says the key to fast fashion — and to Zara's success — is owning the whole supply chain from factory to retail and dealing in small batches that sell quickly.
"If I change the merchandise very frequently, then I give you an excuse to come to the store more frequently," Nueno says.
He has asked his students how many times they frequent the clothing store, and he says the responses have been "absolutely pathological." Sometimes they shop there once or twice a week, he says.
And Zara entices shoppers just like that, with zero advertising. Instead it has invested in flagship stores in historic buildings — a converted convent, an art deco cinema — and a $324 million store on New York's Fifth Avenue. This year, it will open 500 new stores.
The Secret Formula
Enlarge this image toggle caption Lauren Frayer/NPR Lauren Frayer/NPR
Like Ortega, his company, Inditex, which manages Zara and seven other brands, is notoriously secretive. It took nearly two months to get clearance to visit its office, and Ortega declined our request for an interview.
"Well, our philosophy is that the customer is the one to describe if we do good or bad things," says Jesus Echevarria, Inditex's spokesman. "It is not ourselves, to explain how good or how bad we are."
At Zara's flagship store in Madrid, customers are doing just that.
"I like it because it's not so expensive," a shopper says.
Another customer says she likes the quality of the clothes, but the only problem is the lack of bigger sizes.
Yet Zara is famous for adapting. Sales clerks report back to headquarters daily on what customers are saying.
For example, if they're asking for a particular blue jacket in green, that green jacket might just land on a rack. If enough shoppers request that green color, "I'm positive that [jacket] would turn into green," Echevarria says.
Back in Ortega's hometown, the shirt maker, Jose Martinez, says he has no regrets about staying put and not joining his friend at Zara when the company took off.
"It never appealed to me, to leave and start a bigger business. This is my shop, and everything I love is right here. I've made it!" Martinez says.
He says Ortega drops by with a bottle of wine each Christmas. Ortega is now worth more than $56 billion. And Inditex has about 6,000 stores in 85 countries — and counting. Another one is likely to open today.Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant returned to practice Saturday morning for the first time since tearing his Achilles tendon nearly seven months ago.
Bryant declined to comment as he walked out of the Lakers' training facility in El Segundo, Calif., other than to say he felt like "it was time" to test himself in a practice. The former league MVP also said he would evaluate how he felt on Sunday.
Sources with knowledge of the situation told ESPNLosAngeles.com that while Saturday's return to practice was encouraging, there's still a belief that Bryant has got "a ways to go" before he starts targeting |
, were beaten 2-0 by Scotland - a result that led their manager Igor Stimac to offer his resignation.
Croatia manager Igor Stimac offered to resign after his side's defeat by Scotland
Stimac said: "Never mind that we qualified for the play-offs, I want to show some morale, certain responsibility and if there is anyone in the federation that does not believe in my work I want to give them the chance to change. They will have a meeting to discuss it."
The Scots' victory lifted them above Wales and into fourth place. Macedonia, who were thrashed 5-1 by Serbia, finished bottom.
Group B
Mario Balotelli ran on to an Andrea Pirlo pass to level for Italy
Italy, who had already won the group, were behind twice against Armenia in Naples but goals from Alessandro Florenzi and Mario Balotelli gave them a 2-2 draw that ensured they ended their qualifying campaign unbeaten.
Four teams began the day in contention to finish runners-up - Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark and Armenia.
Bulgaria's home defeat by the Czech Republic allowed Denmark to overtake them and finish second, with a 6-0 win over Malta although they will not be in the play-offs. Armenia ended up finishing fifth.
Group C
Germany, already through as group winners, fought back from 2-0 down to clinch a thrilling 5-3 win over Sweden, who were already secure in their play-off place.
Andre Schurrle celebrates a 20-minute hat-trick
Chelsea forward Andre Schurrle crowned his side's comeback with a second-half hat-trick in Stockholm as the two sides fought out their second eight-goal qualifier in the space of 12 months, following a 4-4 draw in Berlin.
The Republic of Ireland finished fourth after beating Kazakhstan 3-1.
Group D
Ciprian Marica scored twice to give Romania a 2-0 win over Estonia that saw them clinch a play-off place ahead of Turkey.
Ciprian Marica celebrates his second goal that clinched their play-off place
Marica opened the scoring from the penalty spot in the first half and sealed victory nine minutes from time with a header from Alexandru Matel's cross.
Turkey had started the day in second place, ahead of Romania on goal difference, but were beaten 2-0 in Istanbul by the Netherlands.
The Dutch finished their campaign nine points clear at the top, with nine wins and a draw from their 10 games.
Group E
Switzerland, who had already clinched their World Cup spot, helped Iceland reach the play-offs by beating Slovenia 1-0 through Granit Xhaka's 74th-minute strike.
Iceland's players celebrate after reaching the play-offs
Iceland, who have never reached the finals of a major tournament, took on Norway in Oslo knowing they only needed to match Slovenia's result to finish runners-up.
Kolbeinn Sigthorsson put Iceland in front after 12 minutes but Daniel Braaten's 30th-minute equaliser ensured a nervy finish before news of Xhaka's goal reached the Ullevaal Stadion.
Group F
Russia got the point they needed to win the group in Baku, drawing 1-1 with an Azerbaijan side who only equalised in the last minute.
That means Portugal, who beat Luxembourg 3-0 without the suspended Cristiano Ronaldo, will be in next month's play-offs.
Russia coach Fabio Capello gesticulates during his side's draw with Azerbaijan
Russia's former England coach Fabio Capello said: "I am very happy with the qualification because we faced a strong opponent like Portugal, and because we played good matches.
"It was just the one against Northern Ireland (a 1-0 defeat in August) where we didn't play a good match."
Northern Ireland, who drew 1-1 with Israel, finished fifth.
Group G
There were wild celebrations in Sarajevo's central square after Bosnia-Hercegovina beat Lithuania to book their place in Brazil.
Asmir Begovic, left, and Haris Medunjanin celebrate Bosnia-Hercegovina's qualification
Their winner came in the 68th minute when Manchester City striker Edin Dzeko found the unmarked Ibisevic to the delight of some 10,000 travelling Bosnian fans.
Thousands more back home watched the game on big screens erected in city squares around the country.
Bosnia narrowly missed out on the 2010 World Cup and Euro 2012, both times losing to Portugal in the play-offs.
The team booked a special flight from Lithuania to return straight home and join the celebrations.
Greece, who beat Liechtenstein 1-0, finished level on points but with a vastly inferior goal difference.
Group H
Marko Devic scored a hat-trick as Ukraine crushed San Marino 8-0 but they had to settle for a play-off place after England beat Poland 2-0.
Ukraine will hope it is fourth time lucky in the play-offs, having failed to reach the World Cup finals that way in three previous attempts.
Group I
Spain, who only needed to avoid defeat against Georgia to qualify, clinched a comfortable 2-0 win.
The world champions' goals came from Manchester City striker Alvaro Negredo and Chelsea playmaker Juan Mata, who scored seconds after he came off the bench.
Spain celebrate Juan Mata's goal against Georgia
Spain boss Vicente del Bosque said he was satisfied with his side's qualifying campaign, explaining: "We had a few problems against the lesser teams but we also showed our strength against a powerful France side (who they beat 1-0 in Paris in March).
"We almost, almost found ourselves losing out to them in the group but we came through with flying colours."
France, who easily saw off Finland 3-0, will not be seeded in next month's play-offs.by Sabrina Fendrick
Atlanta, GA – A newly released poll found that over half of Georgia voters support a marijuana legalization policy similar to that of Colorado and Washington (54%), however that same report found that even larger majority supports decriminalization. 62% of respondents believe that the state should remove criminal penalties for possession of less than one ounce of pot, and replace it with a $100 civil fine, without the possibility of jail time. Only 32% were opposed. Interestingly, 56% of seniors, and republicans respectively, were among that nearly two-thirds majority.
The poll, conducted by Public Policy Polling (PPP) was commissioned by state affiliates of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, Georgia NORML, and Peachtree NORML. Said Peachtree NORML’s Executive Director Sharon Ravert, “The citizens of Georgia agree, marijuana prohibition is a wasteful and destructive policy. It is time for our state to catch up with public opinion and find a more sensible solution to the status quo.” Peachtree NORML and other advocacy groups are working with lawmakers and various state coalition groups to amend Georgia’s criminal marijuana laws. In 2010, some 32,500 Georgians were arrested for violating marijuana laws, according to the FBI. That is the sixth highest total of any state in America.
Also of note, only 9% of respondents were millennials. This demographic is known to be overwhelmingly supportive of this issue, but their limited representation highlights the fact that there is significant support among other age groups. 71% of those questioned were between the ages of 30 and 65 which suggests that older generations, who are more likely to vote, are also strongly in favor of decriminalization. It’s clear that the widespread support for marijuana law reform in the traditionally conservative state of Georgia has grown to such an extent that it now reaches across all party lines, age groups and races.
“Though it may be surprising to some, these numbers are consistent with a growing trend of support for reform in the southern region of the country,” said Sabrina Fendrick NORML’s Outreach Coordinator for the southeastern region. Recent polls conducted in Louisiana and Oklahoma both show a majority of support (56% and 53% respectively) for a change in the law providing for a $100 fine without jail time for those who possess an ounce or less of marijuana. Said Fendrick, “Everywhere you look you will see more and more people dissatisfied with the strict penalties associated with current marijuana laws, and an ever increasing number of southerners are ready for a sensible alternative to existing failed policies, including decriminalization.”As the public conversation continues to heat up around the threat of state-sponsored hacking, Microsoft is calling for what it calls a "Digital Geneva Convention." In a post on Microsoft's On The Issues blog (via Reuters ), Microsoft president and chief legal officer Brad Smith presses the need for an international agreement on rules to protect civilians from nation-state cyber attacks.
Just as the Fourth Geneva Convention has long protected civilians in times of war, we now need a Digital Geneva Convention that will commit governments to protecting civilians from nation-state attacks in times of peace. And just as the Fourth Geneva Convention recognized that the protection of civilians required the active involvement of the Red Cross, protection against nation-state cyberattacks requires the active assistance of technology companies.
On that last point, Smith's plan advocates for a "Digital Switzerland" — a neutral third party trusted to assist customers everywhere. Such an organization would be trusted with carrying out independent investigations and sharing evidence of specific nation-state attacks with the public.
As part of his plan, Smith envisions the Unites States and Russia in particular working together in a similar manner to talks that led to a deal between the U.S. and China over intellectual property cyber-theft in 2015:I have had the pleasure of interviewing one of the most talented AP mids in Europe, Maik 'MoMa' Wallus. He is currently playing for mousesports and has also represented Team Dignitas in the past.
We sat down for a talk about his way into League of Legends, his career so far, gaming houses, season 3 expectations and the Asian scene.
Thank you for finding the time to answer a few questions for us.
MoMa: No problem, I’m always glad to give some insight in interviews.
Why don't we start off with you introducing yourself?
MoMa: My nickname is MoMa and I play for mousesports. I consider myself being one of the best AP carrys in Europe. Currently I’m 21 years old, living in Germany, studying in the university besides professional gaming.
How did you first get into League of Legends?
MoMa: My brother told me about a new game, so I asked him what it’s about. He explained to me, it’s a newer version of Dota in Warcraft3. At first I wasn't really sure if I should give it a try, since I never played a single game of Dota. But then I tried it for some time and quickly felt the love for the game. I kept playing it, because I saw the constant improvements in the game from week to week (Updates, Champions, Designs, growing community, entering the professional gaming scene). These are all deciding factors why I kept playing this game longer than I ever played any other game.
Being a long time pro, how do you prepare for events?
MoMa: I prepare my personal skill almost every day in Soloqueue, personally I think that especially AP carrys have to play a lot as solo players to maintain their overall skill level. It’s also rather easy to improve as an AP carry playing solo, unlike bottom lane for example.
However, the most important thing is of course to practice as a team, prepare new strategies and raising your level of teamplay above the other teams. But still I believe that personal skill matters very much in League of Legends: if you have powerful individual players that are among the best in their specific roles, you don’t need a special strategy to win the game. Only to beat the very best teams you have to make use of good strategies.
What do you do on a typical day when you are not preparing for a tournament?
MoMa: Waking up at around 8-9 am, going to university or studying my lessons. 2-4pm I do sometimes sports like gym or running. Then in the evening I play with my team, or doing some games in solo queue or just hang out with friends.
Out of all the events you've participated in, does one in particular stand out to you - and why?
MoMa: DreamHack Summer 2011, Season 1 Finals. For me it was a fantastic event with spectacular games. I considered our team as the strongest in this time but we sadly lost to fnatic in a really great final. This was the best event I’ve ever been to. The only thing what was missing there, was playing in front of the audience, but it was still awesome!
The new mouz line-up has really proven to be effective. How does it feel being teamed up with so many big names, like Dedrayon and Candy Panda who have been a part of SK Gaming before joining mouz?
MoMa: It feels great, not only because they have big names. More because they are really good friends of mine for a long time already. Dedrayon is maybe the best friend I have in this game, and now he’s my jungler, it can’t be any better. When I was building up this new team for mousesports I was looking for four other players, who I can play over a long term: Strong character and personality, combined with gaming skills. People still don’t realize how important a good character in every team is.
Are there are any teams or players you fear going up against?
MoMa: You should never fear anyone, just show them your respect. Personally, I have the hardest time laning against Froggen. But mostly I fear those OP COWS coming from behind, giving you no chance to escape their ganks. :(
What expectations do you have for season 3?
MoMa: I expect our team to be one of the biggest contenders for the Season 3 finals, even if it’s still far away. You always need a goal and our goal is to become a top contender for Season 3.
Who do you think will win the season 2 finals - and why?
MoMa: Will see, I’m having a hard time predicting this, as it’s just too random currently. There’s no dominating team. But if I had to make a call, I would say some Asian team will win this year.
What do you think of gaming houses in general?
MoMa: It’s awesome for people who live their dream being a total gamer. But personally I think you leave too much behind and start a new life with your team, which can end good but maybe after some time you will regret this decision. I’m not able to leave everything behind (including friends, university, girlfriend & family) for a gaming house.
Will we be seeing you playing in the OGN tournament in Korea?
MoMa: Most probably not. I don’t think it’s possible for me right now, but you never know.
What do you think of the Asian teams?
MoMa: Really professional and serious coverage!
Any shoutouts?
MoMa: Shoutout to all my fans and supporters, also to mousesports, giving us great support overall. And of course special thanks to all our sponsors GeIL, Razer, MEDION, Intel, Thortech & CardCoaches.com who support us as best as possible.
Thank you so much for your time! I am looking forward to seeing more of mouz in the future.Looking for news you can trust?
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Donald Trump has a solution to crime in America’s black neighborhoods: stop-and-frisk.
Trump was in Cleveland on Wednesday for a conference of pastors at a local church, along with Fox News host Sean Hannity. As part of the event, Trump attended a town hall meeting on “African-American concerns,” according to the church’s website, that is slated to air Wednesday night on Hannity’s show. An excerpt of the transcript from the town hall shows an audience member asking Trump what he would do to help decrease violence in the black community.
Trump’s answer? Stop-and-frisk on a national level.
Trump will propose nationwide stop-and-frisk to address violence in black community 2nite on Hannity: pic.twitter.com/HDSPYtepqb — Alexandra Jaffe (@ajjaffe) September 21, 2016
“We did it in New York—it worked incredibly well,” Trump said of the practice, which empowered police officers to stop a person on the street for a pat-down if they suspected him or her of wrongdoing. In fact, data showed that the practice effectively turned into racial profiling that disproportionately targeted black New Yorkers. Studies also found that stop-and-frisk was ineffective in catching criminals or preventing crime. A federal judge ruled it unconstitutional in 2013.Canadian Christmas is back and with it, by popular demand, the 103rd edition of the Hoser’s Guide to Grey Cup! So grab a beer ‘eh and settle in for this year’s lesson.
Introduction
By using this guide to chart a course across the frozen tundra of Winterpeg, Manisnowba, you will be taken through every important watering hole Grey Cup has to offer while avoiding the sobering pitfalls of bad parties and the dreaded dry mouth. This is my 10th straight Grey Cup and I can say with great confidence that I am a hardened veteran of the Grand National Drunk. The Hoser’s Guide is all about the best places to party and where to find beer so if you can’t handle that then TAKE OFF EH!
I have much knowledge to impart which makes this year’s guide quite lengthy. Should you wish to jump ahead, this year’s Hoser’s Guide is broken up thus:
Finding Autographs and Pictures from current and ex-players.
The Boozy Laws of MB – where and when you can buy beer/liquor.
Getting Around – sorry, no Uber.
Team Parties – which to patronize and which to avoid.
The Hoser’s Itinerary – a day by day breakdown of where to be for GC weekend.
Wednesday – don’t bother.
Thursday – autographs and the Spirit of Edmonton.
Friday – TD MB and team parties.
Saturday – pancakes, street festival, parade and Atlantic Schooners.
Sunday – Carry the Cup and watch the Eskies v RedBlacks.
Fan March – get to carry the Cup, it’s not easy.
The Game – be prepared.
Post Game – the traffic.
Finding Autographs and Pictures
Over the years I’ve run into many present and retired players and never once came across anyone who wouldn’t sign an autograph or pose for a picture. Be on the look out for:
Players coming and going from hotels as you walk by.
Roped off VIP areas in the team parties.
Grey Cup rings on the fingers of the guy beside you.
Linemen at all you can eat restaurants.
The Boozy Laws of MB
MB ranks around the middle of the pack when it comes to liquor laws in this confederated land. The best part: you can buy beer from the “vendor” until 2am. Vendors are private beer stores run by hotels and some even offer drive through service. However, you can only buy liquor from the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission’s (MLCC) Liquor Mart stores (colloquially known as “the LC”). Hours for these establishments vary with the latest closing by 11pm.
Manitoba is one of the few jurisdictions where the drinking age is 18 and to prove it you only need one piece of government issued photo ID, unlike communist BC.
You won’t have much success walking around with an open beer so keep your Grey Cup Parade and Fan March roadies concealed in something nondescript, say a coffee cup or coke bottle. Winnipeg Police love watching beer sacrifices to the gods of asphalt, though they usually stop short of offering up a summons as long as you don’t make a scene and are behaving.
One final thing worth mentioning: the provincial minimum drink price is legislated at $2.25. You won’t find this at any of the official Grey Cup parties but if you’re adventurous and wander into into the seedy underbelly of the city you definitely will.
Getting Around
Thankfully, most of where you’ll want to be is downtown (I have never in my life said that about Winnipeg before).
There are FREE buses (Blue and Gold routes) going between IGF and the airport (Spirit of Edmonton) that will service all the downtown and Pembina Hwy hotels starting Thursday until Monday. Several other routes are free on game day with a Grey Cup ticket. Full details HERE.
It’s one bus to Club Regent Casino (Players’ Awards) from downtown (route 47).
Cabs are cheap compared to places like Toronto or Vancouver — $30 to $40 should get you from one side of the city to the other. However, Winnipeg isn’t exactly at the frontier of new technology so forget about taking Uber because it just isn’t available.
Pro-tip: There will be free buses taking fans from the end of the Fan March (The Forks) to IGF on game day.
All the venues with the exception of the Spirit of Edmonton, Club Regent and IGF are within walking distance of each other.
Team Parties
Not all team parties were created equal. A couple are dependable hits, others are sure misses. Over the years I’ve been to them all but not all of them every year and they do evolve. I’ve ranked them below out of five based on my own experiences, your mileage may vary. Rant against me in the comments or send an email.
Spirit of Edmonton (5/5)
From 4pm (Th) / 2pm (F, S) until 12:30am at the Victoria Inn
Why Edmonton?!?! WHY are you hosting Spirit of Edmonton at the Victoria Inn in the ass end of town, far, far away from everything else? It’s tragic because last year Spirit was hands down the best party! Great conversations are a certainty and easy access to drinks assured but I’m worried it won’t be as popular this year given the location. It’s free, the most diverse party and mandatory for 2015.
Touchdown Manitoba (5/5 for Bomber fans 4/5 for everyone else)
From noon until 5pm (F) at the RBC Convention Centre
This only runs from 12-5pm on Friday so don’t sleep in too long. It is a very well run show. Players will be here so keep an eye out. Like every Manitoba social there will be cold cuts served about half way through which go quick so be on the ball! There’s also a really kick ass silent auction. Last year I won the Drew Willy autographed football. Also, as per Manitoba tradition, as soon as the prizes come off the table, the place empties out so you’ll know when to leave.
As of press time tickets are almost sold out so snap some up quick!
Atlantic Schooners DownEast Kitchen Party (4/5)
From 5pm (Th) / 3pm (F) / noon (S) until 2am at the RBC Convention Centre
This was great at 101 in Regina but a real disappointment at 102 on the Thursday and Friday nights (with the exception of the band). I heard that the Saturday night was quite rocking though so I definitely recommend the same this year as I plan on going. It’s also one of the more diversified parties of the weekend. Also, lobster rolls!
Riderville (5/5 for Rider fans, 3/5 for everyone else)
From 12pm until 2am (Th, F, S) at the RBC Convention Centre
Riderville always has lots of attendees but it’s also the least diverse group of all the parties. This is the biggest team party. Check it out if you haven’t before.
Lion’s Den (3/5)
From 4pm (Th) / noon (F, S) until 1am at the Delta Winnipeg Hotel
They usually book a larger venue than needed so there’s no worry about being locked out. Last year they had live music but it was horrendous. I would’ve given the Lion’s Den 4/5 had it not been so difficult to get drinks at 102. Let’s hope they have it sorted out this time around. I spent Saturday night here last year and met a lot of great folk, including multiple retired players. Look for them in the VIP section if they have it again this year.
Stamps House (3/5)
From noon until 12am (F, S) at the Pony Coral Downtown
I had the misfortune of living in Winnipeg for many years and successfully avoided ever patronizing a Pony Coral. I suppose if country is your thing than this is the place to be. They are advertising prize giveaways so it does have potential.
TigerTown (2/5)
From 3pm (F) / noon (S) until 2am at the Fox and Fiddle
Last year the back half of the bar was a private party for the Box J boys and their invited guests. What’s the point of going to the Hamilton team party if you can’t hang out with the Box J Boys? If you don’t make it, don’t worry.
Toronto Argonauts Double Blue Bash (1/5)
From 2pm until 5pm (F) at Earl’s Kitchen and Bar on Main St.
I couldn’t get in last year because some marching band was trying to enter at the same time but through the glass wall I could tell it wasn’t worthwhile. Given the state of the franchise it’s not hard to understand why this party is only three hours long. The venue, Earl’s, is a great restaurant but Double Blue Bash is running concurrently (3-5pm) with Touchdown Manitoba (12-5pm) so it should be off the board for most of you.
Ottawa (1/5)
From 2pm until 5pm (F) at Earl’s Kitchen and Bar on Main St.
See above. Same venue, different three hours. I might check it out but only because they are in the game this year.
Montreal (-)
Looks like Montreal is boycotting the Grey Cup festival after not making the playoffs. You’re not missing anything.
The Manitoba Craft Beer Concert Series
My experience with these has been that they are WAY overpriced. Personally, I have never cared for any of the bands that have played the “Concert Series” over the years. I might pay $20 but certainly not $40. In 2007 (Toronto) I sneaked past the guards though the exit doors and it was actually really lively and a good time. In 2012 (Toronto, again) I purchased half price tickets from scalpers and it was completely dead. I still managed to have a good time though because I hung out with a couple of ex-players playing pool away from the stage in a VIP area. What I’m saying is this can be great, just don’t risk paying full price.
The Hoser’s Itinerary
There is a ton going on during Grey Cup weekend but don’t feel overwhelmed. You can do pretty much all of it in a few short days, I will teach you.
Well you will laugh, I guarantee that. Whether or not you cry depends how drunk you get I suppose.
Wednesday
You just wasted a vacation day; rookie.
Thursday
If you’re in town early enough you might be thinking about grabbing a bite at the Blue Bomber Breakfast, but you can’t, because it’s sold out. The only other thing to do until later in the day is check out the Street Festival at the University of Winnipeg but that’ll only kill an hour or two. Drinks are cheap on Thursday afternoon in Winnipeg, find a shady bar and feed the bartender money until the sun sets.
If, like me, you started the day working for the man but sneaked out early to catch an afternoon flight, you have arrived just in time. The Manitoba Liquor & Lotteries Fan Fest starts at 5pm at Club Regent Casino and looks very promising. The CFL Awards show starts at 7:30 but is already sold out. Instead, head on to the gaming floor and feed the black jack dealer money until 9pm when the CFLPA Official Players’ Party starts. It’s only $65 this year (I’m going). Bring a sharpie!
Failing that you could gamble on either Riderville or Schooners at the Convention Centre downtown. I won’t because it was a let down last year on Thursday night.
I highly recommenced Spirit of Edmonton as an alternate to the Players’ Party, it’s a pretty safe bet.
You’re drunk, go to bed. Remember this is a marathon not a sprint and you have three more long days ahead of you.
Friday
You’re hungover, so am I, but you need to get your act together pretty quickly. The Commissioner’s State of the League address is at 11am at the Fairmont. You likely skipped breakfast so grab a quick bite afterwards. Don’t worry about hitting the Calgary pancake breakfast at the U of W today because it’s too much of a detour, you can go tomorrow.
Afterwards, head over to the Convention Centre for Touchdown Manitoba starting at noon. Don’t dither too long or you’ll miss the free food and the silent auction. The cure for your hangover is here: beer. Have six and before you know it the prizes will be off the table and the crowd, like your blood, thinned. You really shouldn’t be hungry because of the cold cuts but if you missed them try to catch the tail end of the Double Blue Bash at Earl’s on Main and order dinner.
At this point I recommend reconnoitering TigerTown at The Fox and Fiddle and perhaps eating there after a few pints if you haven’t already.
The latter part of the evening affords many more options and it should be hard to strike out. I recommend trying the Lion’s Den before Stamps House. Should those fail you could try Riderville or the Schooner’s but I would head to Spirit of Edmonton before it came to that, saving the Convention Centre for Saturday.
Go to bed, you’re drunk.
Saturday
You’re feeling a bit worse than yesterday but this is to be expected. Get up solider! Beer doesn’t drink itself.
Now’s your chance to raid the Calgary Grey Cup Committee Pancake Breakfast. It starts at 11:30 and goes until 1:30. In all my years I have never made it out of bed in time for it (which I guess makes me a terrible Grey Cup soldier). From noon until 2pm cheerleaders from across the league will be performing in the Duckworth Centre (U of W) just beside the free pancakes. There’s a 100% chance of Duckworth being dry so don’t sweat missing it, the cheerleaders make appearances throughout the weekend at all venues.
This is the perfect time to check out the street festival if you haven’t already. Make sure you bring your swag bag! Sounds like much of it’s inside this year and I have high hopes. This happens to be a convenient area to be in since the combined Grey Cup/Santa Claus parade will march on by starting at 4:30pm. I advise wearing (or bringing) your beer jacket for this as the forecast is f—ing cold.
After the parade there is something called a “Parka Party”.
You may be wondering, WTF is a parka party?
I haven’t a clue. The Grey Cup festival website describes it as featuring music, games and family fun activities. “Family fun” usually means no booze so I’ll leave it at that.
Saturday is THE party night of the weekend. Even the locals whom aren’t going to the game will be out and if nothing else, Winnipeg is a football town. This is the night to go the Convention Centre. I suggest the Atlantic Schooners DownEast Kitchen Party, mostly because I’m not a big Riderville fan but do try your luck there if so inclined.
Unless you are a fan of either 54-50, Queen City Kids or Loverboy then skip the Manitoba Craft Beer Concert Series. Traditionally Grey Cup concerts are held in general admission venues where people can mingle, this is just a concert at an arena.
If the Convention Centre is a bust then there’s always Lion’s Den, Stamps House, TigerTown or my preferred backup — Spirit of Edmonton (which will likely have a long line).
Party hard, then find somewhere warm to pass out. You’re drunk again.
Sunday
The day of days! Canadian Christmas!
If you’re still wearing last night’s clothes then peel them off, take a shower and grab an Irish Coffee. You’ll need a bit of energy if you’re going to have your picture taken with Lord Grey’s legacy at the Fan March!
Fan March
The ONLY thing you should concern yourself with before the game is the Fan March. However, you can’t just walk up behind it and expect to have it handed to you, it’s very well organized. You need a wrist band to hold the cup. These are handed out by volunteers moving around various parts of the crowd. I’ve found them most often at the back of the march.
Getting a wrist band is fairly easy if you have a great get up since they will seek you out for photos and publicity.
If your wardrobe is lacking then your strategy should be thus:
Head to the back of the march or gravitate towards one of the volunteers if you see one. They are all dressed the same and stand out. In the above picture they are wearing grey jackets with yellow gloves. Be slightly aggressive when you spot one, don’t be Canadian and let someone else’s mom in front of you (I made this mistake once). They only hand out a few at a time before moving on. Be passionate! Everyone wants to hold the cup but you’re the biggest fan there is so make it clear to them. If that fails hopefully there is someone persuasive in your entourage who can intervene on your behalf (“NOOO! You don’t understand what this will do to him, he’s the biggest fan in Tuktoyaktuk… etc”). Make sure your crew is AHEAD OF YOU and ready to take pictures of you and Lord Grey’s legacy. Pose well.
The Game
Prepare for extremely long lines. Getting in will take a while because security is tighter. There will be way more people buying beer than a normal game, the corollary of which is there are way more people trying to pee than a normal game. Also, in addition to cracking, the concourses of IGF were designed much too narrow, add that to the fact everyone is wearing three layers of clothing and getting from A to B becomes infuriating even for the Dalai Lama. Plan your beer, bathroom and food breaks strategically. In Edmonton I was literally seconds away from pissing myself trying to get into the men’s room and I never even sniffed a beer.
Post Game
Getting home after the game from IGF is a nightmare which has to be one reason why there is a party right beside the stadium this year. Most post game parties I’ve been to have been unofficial and disappointing. This year features an official after party at the Max Bell Field House beside IGF. I think it’s a great idea. $25 (+fees) gets you in and I’ll probably be there if not in a cop car for wearing a mask.
Congratulations, you’re suffering from liver sclerosis! The good news is that the liver is capable of regeneration and as long as you didn’t beat it down too hard then you can book your flights to Toronto and Grey Cup 104!
I can be sighted starting on Thursday evening at Club Regent and at as many of the parties as I can get to throughout the weekend. Stop and say hello if you spot me, we’ll have a beer or three.
If you haven’t already check out the 103rd Grey Cup Festival, it has all the events and times listed as well as links to tickets.
bbbbbllllllLLLLLLLLUUUUUUUEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!Top Algorithmic Successes
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eternal question of rain-on-your-wedding-day has spawned two decades of thinkpieces (here’s the Times in 2008, Salon in 2014). “Ironic” even has a section on its Wikipedia page entitled “Linguistic usage disputes.” It’s hard to even talk about the literary device now without hearing someone lament the song. Irony, apparently, was described by Socrates, animated by Shakespeare and O. Henry, and killed by a 1995 radio hit. RIP.
Thankfully now Morissette may be free. Last night November*, she went on James Corden’s Late Late Show to reveal a new version of “Ironic” updated for modern situations. (“It’s a traffic jam… when you tried to use Waze.”) And, most importantly, it included this admission:
It’s singing “Ironic”
When there are no ironies
Here’s the video:
Sweet relief. Now maybe, as a culture, we can put this conflict behind us—until Lorde writes a song called “Metonymy.”
***
* Update from reader James Thoroman (posted by Chris while Rob’s away):White House press secretary Sean Spicer responded Wednesday to late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s emotional plea that lawmakers leave ObamaCare in place, saying Republicans are working to accommodate those with pre-existing conditions.
Kimmel discussed his newborn son's open-heart surgery during his Monday monologue on ABC, saying that before ObamaCare his son would have been denied insurance later in life on the grounds that he has a pre-existing condition.
Spicer said that President Trump is "fighting for" the issues raised in Kimmel's dialogue.
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“We share that concern for the Kimmels' child as well as any child that needs care and that’s frankly why the president fought so hard to improve the bill like he did this morning to make sure there’s that extra layer of protection for anyone with a preexisting conditions, no matter their stage in life,” Spicer said.
“That’s why we’re fighting so hard for this. But most importantly, I think in the end of Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue, he said we need some of these things that aren’t Republican or Democrat, that are American policies, and I think that’s what the president is fighting for right now.”
A new Republican ObamaCare replacement bill would allow states to apply for waivers for some ObamaCare requirements, including rules about pre-existing conditions. That protection would be replaced with "high-risk pools," with the latest healthcare compromise floated Wednesday adding $8 billion to fund the pools — although critics say that is far too low to cover the costs of the pools.
Kimmel's late-night monologue, which called for expanded health access, went viral.
"We were brought up to believe that we live in the greatest country in the world, but until a few years ago, millions and millions of us had no access to health insurance at all," Kimmel said.
"Before 2014, if you were born with congenital heart disease like my son was, there was a good chance you would never be able to get health insurance because you had a pre-existing condition. You were born with a pre-existing condition, and if your parents didn’t have medical insurance, you might not even live long enough to get denied because of a pre-existing condition."
Kimmel’s emotional plea that lawmakers retain protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions also caught the attention of former President Obama, who tweeted about it.The first national poll about marijuana legalization taken since voters in Colorado and Washington State approved legalization ballot measures, finds the country evenly split on the issue. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, 48 percent of American adults favor legalizing possession of small amounts of marijuana while 50 percent of adults oppose it.
The poll once again confirms that there is a significant generational divide on the issue. A majority of all voters under they age of 65 support legalizing marijuana, with voters under the age of 30 being most supportive. According to the poll, 55 percent of adults under the age of 30 believe marijuana should be legal.
The main source of opposition to changing our current marijuana laws is senior citizens. As a group they overwhelmingly oppose marijuana reform. Just 30 percent of Americans over the age of 65 think marijuana should be legalized while 67 want it to remain illegal.
What this generational divide means is that it is only a matter of time before a solid majority of Americans support marijuana legalization. The simple fact is people most opposed to marijuana reform are dying out and being replaced by a young generation that wants to end marijuana prohibition.
It will be interesting to see if opinions about marijuana legalization change dramatically in the next year or two. Once the initiatives in Colorado and Washington State have been in effect for awhile providing Americans with tangible examples of what legalization looks like, that could potentially cause many people to rethink their position on the issue.I hope you own yourself some Bitcoin or, as we’re fond of calling it, “make-believe space tokens”, because it’s comin’ in hot this morning dammit.
In yet another truly absurd leg higher, the cryptocurrency that sane people love to hate is up above a laughable $6,600 on Wednesday and by God it looks like it wants to go higher still.
This of course comes on the heels of yesterday’s news that CME is about to launch futures for this piece of made-up shit. Here’s BBG’s Camila Russo:
This paves the way for more institutional investors to enter the space. It could open the floodgates to investors who have been standing on the sidelines as bitcoin soared over 500% this year. The CME had prepared for this by starting a bitcoin index last year, and the futures will be settled in cash based on that index. The CBOE said in August it’s also planning to launch bitcoin derivatives and the CFTC registered cryptocurrency trading platform LedgerX as the first federally regulated cryptocurrency derivatives exchange and clearinghouse. With bitcoin futures becoming mainstream, the next logical step seems to be a bitcoin ETF, as the SEC had cited the lack of derivatives as one of the reasons for rejecting approval of the funds. ETFs and derivatives are likely to make bitcoin trading a lot more palatable for hedge funds and mutual funds, as the instruments will allow them to hedge for the digital asset’s volatility and avoid some of the hassles of investing in bitcoin directly.
As of this morning, Bitcoin’s “market cap” is now at a comical $110 billion.
Not too much further now. Only $493,400 to go before John doesn’t have to pull a Steve Bannon on live television:
As DealBreaker’s Owen Davis notes, now that everyone is invited to the party, this could continue for the foreseeable future:
Suffice to say there’s a mass of silently suffering hedgies out there yearning for nothing more than a few measly bps of their firms’ portfolios to be devoted to bitcoin. But one obstacle more than any has made it such a tough sell. Beyond the obvious quibbles – that bitcoin is almostuniversally shunned by banks, near-synonymous with bubble, reminiscent of a pyramid scheme, and pervaded by fraud and manipulation – the only real drawback has been that unless you’re cool with shady exchanges domiciled in weird Balkan states you’ve never heard of, bitcoin couldn’t be reliably hedged. Until now.Research has found that nearly 40 percent of Canadians are affected by sleep disorders in their lifetime, which can lead to serious health consequences. Contributors to sleep disorders include long working hours, social and family responsibilities, irregular shift work and illness. Psychological disorders, treated or untreated can also contribute to sleep disorders, as the study found.
Dr. Frank Ryan from the University of British Columbia Hospital suggests caffeine and energy drinks can temporarily boost energy and alertness, but notes, “The problem is over time, you incur a sleep debt which you can never fully repay. This is probably going to have long-term health consequences. That’s the risk.”
A common sleep disorder is sleep apnea, where the individual stops breathing throughout their sleep. An estimated 15 percent of men and five percent of women suffer from sleep apnea. Dr. Ryan added, “The problem is that about 80 percent of people with sleep apnea remain undiagnosed because we don’t have adequate facilities for investigating and managing these people, unfortunately.”
Sleep apnea alone can contribute to serious health risks such as hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, depression, and heart failure. Sleep disorders in general can also contribute to a weakened immune system, impaired vigilance, and can increase the risk of accidents.
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends at least seven hours of sleep to maintain overall health. To improve sleep researchers suggest avoiding blue light – the kind that is emitted from technological devices.
Dr. Ryan concluded, “If you wake up in the morning feeling refreshed, and if you’re able to get through the day without feeling drowsy even when doing boring tasks, then you’re likely getting good quality sleep. If not, and you’re pursuing good ‘sleep hygiene,’ then you may well have a sleep disorder that you need to talk to your doctor about.”
Sources:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/sleep-disorder-ubc-1.3294306Should the State of Arizona carve out an exemption to its marijuana ban for the pot-worshipping, neo-Zoroastrian Church of Cognizance? That was but one of the legal issues at stake during oral arguments on February 18 before the Arizona Supreme Court in the case of the State of Arizona vs. Danny Ray Hardesty. A member of the Church of Cognizance, Hardesty was popped back in 2005 in Yavapai County for tokin' while driving.
His defense? Marijuana use is central to his religion. Indeed, cannabis is a holy substance in the Church of Cognizance, and it's up to members as to how often and when they partake of the "sacred herb," as it's referred to. The church's "Declaration of Religious Belief," for instance, states that marijuana, "increases cognizance, promotes tranquility, extends longevity, promotes health and welfare."
This same declaration even includes an oath of allegiance to the weed, which proclaims, "I do honor marijuana as the Teacher, the Provider, the Protector...Praise be to Holy Marijuana, the Righteous Teacher of my faith!"
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But before you dismiss the CoC as just an excuse for marijuana enthusiasts to get wasted with impunity, keep in mind that the Arizona Supremes are at least entertaining the notion that CoC's weed-worshippers have a claim under the Arizona Free Exercise of Religion Act.
The 1999 law is based closely on a federal law called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it says that government may "substantially burden a person's exercise of religion," only if there's a compelling government interest, and if the government uses "the least restrictive means of furthering that compelling government interest."
The issues before the court are both procedural, and substantive. Hardesty's lawyer argued that his client was not allowed to use religious freedom as a defense during his trial. (Hardesty was convicted and got 18 months probation.) This is counter to the AFERA law, which stipulates that, "A person whose religious exercise is burdened in violation of this section may assert that violation as a claim or defense in a judicial proceeding..."
A larger issue concerns the "least restrictive means" test. The state argues that a universal ban on marijuana is the least restrictive means for regulating its possible religious use, which seems laughable on its face, considering the legalization of medical marijuana in certain states, and considering the United States Supreme Court's 2006 decision in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal. (Say that three times fast.) In that decision, a potentially more hazardous drug, the hallucinogen DMT was allowed to be offered in a ceremonial tea used by an obscure religious sect. The Supreme Court came to its conclusion using the RFRA, the federal version of our state law, each of which uses almost the same wording.
But if it seems as if Hardesty's lawyer Craig Williams should have carried the day, given these facts, he seemed to stumble when the argument moved from the procedural realm to the substantive. Already, the state had conceded that the CoC was a religion and that Hardesty's belief was sincere.
Williams just wanted the opportunity to go to the jury with the defense that Hardesty was simply following the tenets of his religion, which allows him the use of ganja whenever he feels like it. But when the AZ Supremes wanted him to hypothesize about what outcome he wanted in regards to the "least restrictive means" test, Williams wouldn't go there.
The Supremes peppered him with questions trying to get Williams to play imaginary ball, but Williams resisted,
"I would argue that the facts of the case aren't important here," Williams told the Supremes. "It's the procedure that's important."
Williams' stance seemed to frustrate the justices. And Vice Chief Justice Rebecca White Berch even offered up a hypothetical on Williams' behalf.
"Would it be enough to say...if my client is endangering public safety by his use, then the religious exercise exception falls away?" wondered Berch.
Williams agreed, but he still seemed unprepared to provide a compelling argument for why the state's ban was far too broad, and did not allow for religious exceptions.
The justices didn't leave Assistant Attorney General Joseph Parkhurst off the hook. They asked the state's representative if the government's universal ban would be the least restrictive means of burdening the religion in question if the pot smoker had his altar in his back yard, and only smoked marijuana there during religious ceremonies. But Parkhurst stuck to his guns and rationalized a universal ban on pot, arguing that the evidence of marijuana's ill-effects was overwhelming and incontrovertible.
Justice W. Scott Bales recalled what U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roberts had said in the Ocentro case, that, "It's the typical bureaucratic argument to say if we make an exception for you, we'll have to make one for everybody...[Roberts] rejected that as a rationale for the universal prohibition of DMT."
The justices' decision in Hardesty is due a few weeks from now. I was unable to contact Hardesty himself for this article, and his legal beagle Williams did not return my call. But I did get hold of the man who helped found the CoC, Dan Quaintance of Graham County, Arizona.
Although Quaintance said his church did not condone Hardesty smoking reefer and operating a vehicle at the same time, he suggested that the circumstances of Hardesty's bust were significant.
"He was out in the middle of a forest area," related Quaintance of Hardesty, in his deep buzz of a baritone, "on a dirt trail, going 5 mph...There's hardly a danger to society at that point."
As for the oral arguments before the Arizona Supreme Court (which can be watched online at the court's Web site), Quaintance commented that he liked Justice Berch's hypothetical for a least restrictive means of burdening a religion like the CoC: If a person is a danger to the public, they lose their religious exemption for using pot as a sacrament.
Quaintance claims he can trace the use of cannabis back to the earliest reaches of Zoroastrianism, considered by many to be the world's oldest monotheistic religion. He believes that ancient Zoroastrian holy texts refer to cannabis in a substance called haoma, a sacramental drink described in the Zoroastrian holy book, the Avesta. (Quaintance says believers have to smoke it because of the costs associated with acquiring enough cannabis to make the drink.)
The CoC has been around since the nineties, according to Quaintance, and the church claims a couple of hundred members, many of whom maintain their own "monastaries," referred to as I.O.M.M.s, or "Individual Orthodox Member Monastary." Quaintance's theology is a lot more involved than you might anticipate. And he comes across as a very thoughtful individual who has done a great deal of personal research into the history of religion.
But Quaintance has paid a steep price for his religious beliefs. Where he and his wife Mary Quaintance used to partake of the sacred herb daily, they have been denied the holy hemp for the past three years, forced to undergo regular drug tests to make sure they're clean. See, the Quaintances were arrested in 2006 in New Mexico by the U.S. Border Patrol with 172 pounds of marijuana in their car.
The federal judge in that case, U.S. District Judge Judith Herrera, rejected the Quaintances' religious freedom claim: the insistance that the Pope of Pot and his lady had a right to the 172 pounds of bud because it was to be used in worship. Herrera found that the pair's religious beliefs were not sincere. But if there's one thing that Dan Quaintance seems to be, it's sincere, even if you find his beliefs to be kooky as all get-out.
Still free on bond, the Quaintances were sentenced recently. (The Hardesty case has no immediate impact on theirs: Hardesty is in state court; the Quaintances, federal.) Dan got five years in the slammer. His wife, two to three years. Their petition to remain out pending appeal has been denied, and he has to report to Terminal Island, California before 2 p.m., March 11 to begin serving his sentence. He is 56 years old. His wife Mary is 53, and is currently experiencing heart trouble, so the government is going to let her be treated before she has to report to Victorville, California to begin her incarceration.
The Quaintances have two children and five grandchildren. The most recent grandkid was born premature and had to be flown to Tucson Medical Center. The family sounds very close, as they all live together on adjacent lots surrounded by a fence in Pima, Arizona. Dan and Mary Quaintance have been married 35 years, and their separation from each other and their family will be a severe hardship.
"They've assigned us so far away, it's doubtful our family will be able to make that many trips to visit us during our incarceration," Dan Quaintance told me, sadly.
"I personally can't think of any greater hardship that a person might face than being taken to such great distances away from loved ones," Quaintance e-mailed me later. "I don't worry about the toll on me I worry about the punishment being inflicted on our family as a whole."
Sure, a lot of folks will scoff, say the Quaintances are just getting what they deserve, make light of them worshipping a plant. (You know, like the druids.) But as far as beliefs go, is it any wackier than believing there's some dude up in the sky with a big gray beard keeping score every time someone yells, "Jesus Christ!" at a stumped toe, or whatever? Hell, all religions are nuts, as far as I'm concerned. And the Quaintances make as good an argument for smoking a doobie as a sacrament as the Catholics do for doling out red wine to minors during communion.
Bottom line is the Quaintances shouldn't have to go to prison because marijuana use should be legal. The ban on it makes no more sense than the prohibition on alcohol did in its day. I say this as someone who has only occasionally partaken at parties. I don't have very good lungs, so it's not my recreational drug of choice. Sure, people who get stoned all the time can be obnoxious. But so can alcoholics.
One day, we will look back on the government's harassment of individuals for smoking something other than tobacco and wonder where this mania for punishing people came from. Unfortunately, that day won't come soon enough to help Dan Quaintance, who seems resigned to his fate.
"I am absolutely being persecuted for my religious beliefs," contended Quaintance. "But then every religion has its martyrs."An Italian Typhoon has crashed into the sea while performing its display during an airshow in Italy.
On Sunday Sept. 24, 2017, an Italian Air Force Eurofighter F-2000A Typhoon (most probably MM7278/RS-23) belonging to the Reparto Sperimentale Volo (Test Wing) has crashed into the sea at Terracina, 76 kilometres south of Rome.
Based on the several videos that have already emerged on social media, the pilot Capt. Gabriele Orlandi, for unknown reasons, was unable to /did not recover the aircraft at the end of a looping and didn’t attempt to eject from the jet.
Here below you can find a few clips that have been posted on Youtube so far. Many more are being uploaded on Twitter and Instagram as well:
The causes of the crash are under investigation, the Italian Air Force said in a press statement.
The following composite image was created using Photoshop and images posted on repubblica.it:
This is the second deadly crash of a Typhoon in little less than two weeks: a RSAF Typhoon combat aircraft involved in a mission against Houthi fighters over Yemen crashed into a mountain in Al Wade’a district on Sept. 13, 2017.
Top image credit: screenshots from Michele F. videoIn the footnotes of a speech U.S. Federal Reserve Bank Chairman Ben Bernanke would have given to the House Financial Services Committee on Feb. 10, lies a unique and startling disclosure.
Hosted on the Federal Reserve’s own servers, the written testimony of the bank’s chairman explains in plain text what expanding the Fed’s powers will do.
“The Federal Reserve believes it is possible that, ultimately, its operating framework will allow the elimination of minimum reserve requirements, which impose costs and distortions on the banking system,” footnote number nine, at the bottom of the page, explains without additional qualification.
Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT), who is not running for reelection, is currently pushing a financial reform bill that would grant the Fed unprecedented new powers to regulate financial markets, including insurance companies and small lenders, under the auspice of forcing such firms to lessen their exposure to risky investments.
Wondering how that would have prevented a collapse the likes of which nearly sank the financial system at the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, Forbes writer John Carney mocked Dodd’s plan as “incredibly stupid.”
“[The] Federal Reserve had regulators in place inside of Lehman Brothers following the collapse of Bear Stearns. These in-house regulators did not realize that Lehman’s management was rebuking market demands for reduced risk and covering up its rebuke with accounting sleight-of-hand. When Lehman actually came looking for a bailout, officials were reportedly surprised at how bad things were at the firm. A similar situation unfolded at Merrill Lynch. The regulators proved inadequate to the task.”
Yet, by the Federal Reserve’s stated assumption, that it will one day be able to eliminate the requirement forcing financial institutions maintain even a fraction of their depositors’ assets, it’s proposed mass-regulation of the financial sector sustains a brand of logic, however skewed.
Unhinging banks from even basic deposit standards would essentially create a class above the daily requirements of capitalism, resting atop a pool of funds with infinite depth, removing the need for what’s currently known as “fractional reserve banking.”
Such a system is described by Investopedia as such: “A banking system in which only a fraction of bank deposits are backed by actual cash-on-hand and are available for withdrawal. This is done to expand the economy by freeing up capital that can be loaned out to other parties. Most countries operate under this type of system.”
What Bernanke is flatly stating is the need for that fraction, representing the actual wealth by which the bank’s capital multiplies, could soon be eliminated for the U.S. Federal Reserve, making free-floating, infinitely self-replicating capital a pervasive reality.
Only a few other nations have endowed their fiat currency with such buoyancy, their numbers including Mexico, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom.
“The truth is that the financial system that we have created makes inflation inevitable,” opined Business Insider writer Michael Snyder. “The U.S. dollar has lost more than 95 percent of the value that it had when the Federal Reserve was created. During this decade the value of the dollar will decline a whole lot more.
“That doesn’t sound like a very good investment.
“But that is what happens when you give bankers power to make money up out of thin air.
“And things are only going to get worse.”
In the op-ed, Snyder points to one member of Congress, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), as someone who “realizes” the alleged grievous failings of the Fed, quoting Paul from a recent hearing of the House Financial Services Committee hearing.
“The Federal Reserve in collaboration with the giant banks has created the greatest financial crisis the world has ever seen. The foolish notion that unlimited amounts of money and credit created out of thin air can provide sustainable economic growth has delivered this crisis to us. Instead of economic growth and stable prices, (The Fed) has given us a system of government and finance that now threatens the world financial and political institutions. Pursuing the same policy of excessive spending, debt expansion and monetary inflation can only compound the problems that prevent the required corrections. Doubling the money supply didn’t work, quadrupling it won’t work either. Buying up the bad debt of privileged institutions and dumping worthless assets on the American people is morally wrong and economically futile.”
Paul, who ran away with the top honors at the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conference, earning the influential conservative activists’ pick for the GOP’s 2012 presidential nomination, was not shy about his feelings on the Fed’s conduct during a Feb. 24 hearing, saving his harshest criticism for Chairman Bernanke.
Watch:
He accused the Federal Reserve Bank of laundering money connected to the Watergate scandal, and making loans to Saddam Hussein ahead of the first U.S. invasion: claims which Bernanke dismissed as “bizarre.”
At the end of Rep. Paul’s speech, committee chairman Barney Frank (D-MA) pledged that his committee would probe the claims.
Days later, Frank wrote a letter to Bernanke asking for an internal investigation.
“According to a 2008 book, ‘Deception and Abuse at the Fed,’ by University of Texas Professor Robert D. Auerbach, then-Fed Chairman Arthur Burns tried to block lawmakers’ probes into the source of $6,300 found on the burglars of the Democratic National Committee’s offices in Washington’s Watergate complex in 1972,” Business Week noted. “Burns, who served as Fed chief from 1970 to 1978, died in 1987.”
The report also noted that, the book’s author had investigated the Fed prior to the Gulf War and saw his probe repeatedly obfuscated, only to discover that the Fed had completely neglected oversight on more than $5.5 billion which was sent to Iraq from a U.S.-based branch of an Italian bank in the 1980s.
Citing the Fed chairman’s objection to allowing any oversight of its activities, Rep. Paul asked if the Congress could perhaps be allowed to go back 10 years and open the bank’s books, to study how the institution operated.
“Would you like to know … what kind of shenanigans they’re involved in with foreign countries and foreign central banks?” he asked. “Possibly, you’re working right now to bail out Greece, for all we know.”
“I have no knowledge of anything remotely like what you’ve just described,” Bernanke replied.
“I think eventually though, because this system is not viable … we will get to the point where something will have to be done about this financial system,” Paul said.
An audit of the Federal Reserve is one of Rep. Paul’s core issues, and he’s pursued it for 30 years, according to his Web site. Paul’s Audit the Fed bill obtained bipartisan majority support in the House and is currently pending in the Senate. Sen. Dodd’s financial reform legislation does not include a Fed. audit.
America’s main global economic rival, China, has repeatedly increased reserve requirements for its’ state-owned banks since the U.S. financial system began exhibiting such marked instability.Early life Edit
Episcopate Edit
Feast day and relics Edit
Tomb of Theodore Romzha Romzha was beatified as a Martyr for the Faith by Pope John Paul II in Lviv on 27 June 2001, with 1 November assigned initially as his feast day. At the request of the Eparchy of Mukacheve, the Congregation for Oriental Churches transferred the feast day to 31 October, effective 2009. Romzha died shortly after midnight 1 November, according to Moscow Time, the Soviet-imposed time zone throughout Ukraine from 1930-1990; however, according to local time, Romzha died before midnight on 31 October.[citation needed] In 1998, the relics of Blessed Theodore were found in a tomb in the crypt of Holy Cross Cathedral in Uzhhorod, and then transported to Budapest, Hungary for medical examination. On 27-28 June 2003 his relics were translated and carried in solemn procession back to Uzhhorod, where they are enshrined in a side chapel at Holy Cross Cathedral. In commemoration of the event, a second feast day, the Translation of the Holy Relics of Blessed Theodore Romzha, is celebrated on 28 June.[citation needed]
Notes Edit
Further reading EditArtist and activist Karen Fiorito is concerned that the U.S. is moving towards "dictatorship" so she created a roadside billboard in Phoenix that depicts President Trump surrounded by imagery that looks like swastikas and nuclear mushroom clouds. (Reuters)
There are many words that could describe the President Trump-ridiculing billboard that went up in Phoenix on Friday — menacing, hateful, apocalyptic.
But there’s one adjective that’s particularly vexing to the people who live on Grand Avenue near Fillmore Street: enduring.
The billboard lampoons Trump using a medium more common for advertisements about lite beer and HVAC companies. And the people who designed and erected it say it will glare out over the streets of Phoenix for at least as long as Trump is president.
Trump leers out from the billboard and is flanked by mushroom clouds and Swastika-style dollar signs. It’s a not-so-subtle dig at where Karen Fiorito, the artist who created the image, sees the country going if the president is left unchecked.
“I hope that people feel inspired to stand up and speak out and to not be afraid,” Fiorito told The Washington Post. “I hope that people come together and unify and stand up against what I think is a very dangerous path that we’re on.
“And if we don’t do something … then the powers that be will just continue on this path toward total annihilation.”
A billboard created by artist Karen Fiorito in Phoenix. (Courtesy of Karen Fiorito)
There are more digs at Trump in the details, which the people on the north side of Phoenix will certainly have ample time to examine. The mushroom clouds are in the shape of laughing clowns. And Trump is wearing a flag pin on his lapel — but it’s a Russian flag.
The anti-Trump message was commissioned by La Melgosa, a Phoenix gallery that owns the billboard and has commissioned artwork on it before, Fiorito said. It is on a business-filled street that leads to Phoenix’s downtown.
[These protesters wanted to humiliate ‘Emperor’ Trump. So they took off his clothes.]
Fiorito says she’s used billboards to tackle other political topics in the past: one that criticized President George W. Bush in 2004 and an anti-Fox News billboard a year later. She has also launched billboards about the California drought.
“For me as an artist, billboards are the best platform you can have to get your message out to as many diverse people as possible,” she said. “You’re talking directly to the public. You’re not showing in a gallery — you’re going out to reach every Joe Schmoe.”
Billboard artists have used similar methods to reach the masses since the 2016 campaign. A pro-Trump billboard in Russia, showing Trump next to Russian President Vladimir Putin, says, “Let’s make the world great again — together!” Then there was the billboard on Interstate 94 in Detroit, which was a string of words in Arabic, followed by Trump’s name in English. The translation: “Donald Trump, he can’t read this, but he is afraid of it.” The creators told The Washington Post it was a dig at Trump’s anti-Islamic remarks.
Reactions to Fiorito’s billboard have varied. Some people are upset that they have to see Trump’s face every day for at least four years. Another neighbor said poking fun at the president was disrespectful.
“I thought swastikas are very crude and violent,” neighbor Jeff Whiteman told Phoenix CBS affiliate KPHO. “We have a leader of our country and we should respect him whether we agree with him or not.”
[Pro-Trump rally in Berkeley turns violent as protesters clash with the president’s supporters]
On Sunday, two days after the billboard went up, Fiorito posted on Facebook saying Trump supporters “keep calling me every five minutes, leaving harassing messages, sending threatening emails, and trying to hack all of my accounts (Facebook, Gmail, etc).
“But that wasn’t enough so now the scumbags are signing me up for things online … for donations of clothing and weird s— like that. Who knew they were so thin skinned?”
Fiorito said many of the critics likely didn’t realize what was on the other side of the billboard:
The word “unity,” spelled out in sign language.
The back of the billboard. (Courtesy of Karen Fiorito)
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Trump to skip White House correspondents’ dinner: ‘No reason for him to go in and sit and pretend’
‘Stupid Watergate’: John Oliver mocks Trump’s Russia scandal — and the president’s response
The billboard mocking Donald Trump: ‘He can’t read this’Police arrested a Ruskin man who steered his tiny, one-person helicopter onto the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol Wednesday, surprising spring tourists and prompting a temporary lockdown of the Capitol Visitor Center.
Capitol Police didn't immediately identify the pilot or comment on his motive, but Doug Hughes took responsibility for the stunt on a website where he said he was delivering letters to all 535 members of Congress in order to draw attention to campaign finance corruption.
"As I have informed the authorities, I have no violent inclinations or intent," Hughes wrote on his website, thedemocracyclub.org. "An ultralight aircraft poses no major physical threat — it may present a political threat to graft. I hope so. There's no need to worry — I'm just delivering the mail."
FBI agents were at Hughes' Ruskin house Wednesday afternoon. They wouldn't say specifically what they were looking for only that they are assisting with this investigation.
Hughes has been practicing his flying skills for a while at the Wachula Municipal Airport. David Seace calls him a "natural."
"For the minimal amount of training he did, he did quite fabulous at flying,” said David Seace, a friend.
He said Hughes never told people here about his plans.
"As far as this goes, it's just unthinkable, it's unthinkable,” he said.
A close friend and co-worker of Hughes, Mike Shanahan said although Hughes had talked about pulling off this stunt for a couple years, he never thought he would go through with it. In fact, he thought he had talked him out of it a while back.
“I said it's too dangerous. They will kill you. They will shoot you down and they will imprison you and whatever pieces are there for the rest of your life,” said Shanahan.
Shanahan said this all started when he and his fellow postal worker started up a website, the Civilist Papers, a two man crusade to bring attention to campaign finance reform.
"This was about two years ago. Nothing was happening. It's like nobody really cared," he said.
That's when he said, this gyrocopter idea, took flight. Shanahan said he didn’t learn his co-worker was actually going through with it until he saw it on CNN. Shanahan said he didn’t think the stunt was worth it.
"I think it was too dangerous. I do not want him in jail," he said. “I understand what he did. It was a stupid thing, but it was also very brave and very patriotic. He wants to save this country. He wants to save our democracy and he was willing to do anything for that, including die.”
Capitol Police identified the aircraft, which landed about a half city block from the Capitol building, as a "gyro copter with a single occupant."
House Homeland Security panel Chairman Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said the pilot landed on his own, but that had he made it much closer to the Capitol authorities were prepared to shoot him down. "Had it gotten any closer to the speaker's balcony they have long guns to take it down, but it didn't. It landed right in front," McCaul said.
Witnesses said the craft approached the Capitol from the west, flying low over the National Mall and the Capitol reflecting pool across the street from the building. It barely cleared a row of trees and a statue of Gen. Ulysses Grant.
John Jewell, 72, a tourist from Statesville, North Carolina, said the craft landed hard and bounced. An officer was already there with a gun drawn. "He didn't get out until police officers told him to get out. He had his hands up'" and was quickly led away by the police, Jewell said. "They snatched him pretty fast."
Elizabeth Bevins, a tourist from Atlanta, said she was standing across the street from the Capitol when the helicopter flew in around 20 or 30 feet high, and it "just sort of plopped down on the lawn."
Downtown Washington is blanketed by restrictions on air traffic that generally prohibit aircraft from flying over the White House, the Capitol, the national Mall and key buildings without special permission.
The situation was under investigation and streets in the area were shut down. Emergency vehicles were dispatched to the area and a robot bomb detector was sent over to the craft.
Amid the commotion, the small craft presented a strange sight sitting on the green lawn of the Capitol, its rotors slowly spinning.
Reports from the Associated Press was used in this story.Coming Soon
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A teenage boy and his friends get caught in a clash between Brazilian witchcraft and Japanese Shinto spirits in their neighborhood.
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While investigating a murder, a detective is drawn into a battle between the visible world and an underground realm inhabited by mythical creatures.
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Family Reunion
River's |
gender-reassignment surgery, Lucy’s husband had become a woman.
Their relationship and Bobbi’s dream will be questioned. Yet both have solid footing.
“It took a lot of soul- searching on my part,” says Lucy, 50, who grappled with the change before deciding to stay beside her spouse. “It made me think about what is love, what makes a woman.”
If she qualifies for the tour, Gold Canyon’s Bobbi Lancaster would be allowed to play. The LPGA several years ago rewrote its rulebook after players voted to remove the so-called “female at birth” requirement. And she would become the latest in a small but growing list of athletes who have crossed or blurred gender boundaries, including Fallon Fox, who on Tuesday came out as the first transgender athlete to compete in mixed martial arts.
Bobbi readily acknowledges she is raising questions about ethics, fairness and even simple physiology. She has questions herself. Although the physical changes of hormone treatment have been measured, there is little understanding of the practical effects on an athlete.
She also hopes to inspire others. Her game, and her life, are not about smashing someone else’s expectations. They’re just about being Bobbi, who doesn’t “buy into the lie anymore, the lie that there’s something wrong with me.
“I’m who I’m supposed to be.”
Hiding a secret
Robert Lancaster grew up in Canada, in the small southern Ontario farming community of Ridgetown, just 5 miles north of Lake Erie. His father, a World War II paratrooper, was an accountant who also helped organize tournaments at Ridgetown Golf and Curling Club. It was there Lancaster’s love of golf was born.
He loved his parents, but his relationship with his father wasn’t easy. According to Lancaster, Doug Lancaster, who died in 1984, was an abusive alcoholic who never knew of Robert’s struggles.
The young Lancaster embraced summertime because he would spend it at his grandfather’s farm. He loved animals, loved the outdoors and loved wearing his cousins’ dresses when they weren’t looking, like the white, short-sleeved ballerina-style one with pink flowers.
He was top-of-the-class smart but had no confidantes and “incredibly poor social skills.”
“When you’re hiding big secrets, it’s hard to have close friends,” Lancaster said.
Inside, he was unsure who he was supposed to be.
Golf game thrives
In 1960, the family relocated to the city of Hamilton, just a half-mile from the prestigious Hamilton Golf and Country Club.
He caddied and played as much as he could, imitating the walk of George Knudson, one of Canada’s top pros, and the swing of Arnold Palmer. At 11, he won a caddie tournament at the club, beating peers who were in their late teens.
At 14, he accompanied his dad to the Canadian Open at Mississaugua. While stopping for water near a putting green, a man asked him, “Who’s your favorite golfer?”
Lancaster gasped. It was his favorite golfer, American pro “Champagne” Tony Lema.
“You are,” Lancaster said.
“How about Jack?” asked Lema, who was standing next to Jack Nicklaus.
“Nah,” said Lancaster, who was about to echo words he had heard from his father: “He’s too fat.”
Everybody laughed, but Lancaster didn’t mind.
“From that moment, I was hooked,” Lancaster says, looking back. “I was going to be a golfer, a pro golfer, inside the ropes.”
Golf was going to be Lancaster’s identity, he thought, but his insecurities would creep up around the course, too. If Lancaster won a tournament, he would often fail to show up for the award ceremony.
And he would win. A lot. He was captain of his high-school team and one of the top collegiate golfers in the region while attending McMaster University.
His game was self-taught. He never took lessons and his dad never dished out advice; in fact, he watched his son compete only once.
At 19, he played in a club championship. He was leading by a large margin, on his way to firing a final-round 65, when he stepped to the 18th tee and decided to play a conservative shot on the tricky final hole. As his second shot rolled safely on the green 15 feet past the hole, he spotted his father in the distance.
As others congratulated him after finishing his round, his father walked away. He later approached his son and belittled him for playing conservatively, “like he was never so embarrassed and that he hoped to never be that embarrassed again,” Lancaster said.
“It was just the way I was raised,” Lancaster said. “It was always ‘You’ve got to do better.’”
For all the inner turmoil, his golf game thrived. He competed in numerous Canadian amateur tournaments and at one Ontario Open found himself in the same field as the players he idolized.
In spite of his father’s pressures, Robert had a strong swing and an eye for the game. He was sure of himself on the course.
Elsewhere, he was less sure.
On verge of a meltdown
During medical school at McMaster, Lancaster met and married his first wife, a nursing student. Lancaster tried to fend off the urge to cross-dress, but couldn’t stop himself from doing so in private. His wife tried to be accepting, and even made dresses and skirts for him.
His family practice in Canada was a success. He was highly regarded in his community for his nurturing demeanor and a gentleness his patients embraced.
He and his wife had three children, two of whom were adopted.
With three children around, he didn’t wear women’s clothing for a long time.
“I didn’t want to screw with their heads,” Lancaster said. “I felt sinful, defective.”
As the children got older, the family hungered for a change of scenery and relocated to Phoenix in 1991. Lancaster worked at a family practice based out of St. Joseph’s Hospital. He loved the job but found his growing identity crisis was taking a toll on his marriage.
But even as the marriage was crumbling, a new relationship started to blossom.
Lucy Krasner was fresh off a divorce when she joined the practice as a nurse practitioner in 1995 and had no interest in diving into another relationship.
Yet “it quickly became evident we had this incredible connection,” she said. “I remember saying to him, ‘Can’t you see it? It’s just here.’”
In time, Lucy had a new job, Lancaster’s divorce was final, and the two moved in together. His secret remained secret.
Even the night Lucy discovered it, she didn’t really know. At a formal dinner in Scottsdale, she put her arm around her husband and felt a bra through his tuxedo.
“I had no idea,” she says now. She was confused, dismissing it as “kinky.”
The two married in 1999 and later built a home in Gold Canyon. Robert continued with his successful private practice and played golf. Lucy worked as a nurse practioner and bred and raised award-winning Havanese show dogs.
Lancaster had started poring through medical literature and found a psychiatric name for what he was experiencing: gender dysphoria, a condition in which a person feels there is a mismatch between their biological sex and their gender identity.
“When you’re feeling sinful, and you feel like you can’t share this with anyone, and you know society’s attitudes about it, and medicine says you’re nuts, you take it all with you,” Lancaster said.
Within a year, Robert started to “melt down.” There were days he couldn’t get himself to go to work in the family practice that he loved.
Lucy was worried. She went into the den, opened up his briefcase and started looking for answers.
There, inside a zippered pocket, she found a stack of letters. They were suicide notes.
Each was addressed to a relative. One was addressed to Lucy.
She confronted him and he bared his soul. He knew he had gender-identity issues and didn’t want to live that way anymore.
Several years later, the couple were visiting Lancaster’s mother in Canada. On the day of their departure, Lucy was packing to leave when her brother-in-law yelled from the kitchen. “You’d better come here,” she remembers him shouting. “Bob has fallen asleep at the table.”
When she reached the table, Lancaster’s head was hanging over the pancakes. His hand was in the orange juice. He had suffered a stroke.
Path to self-discovery
It was soon discovered the stroke was caused by a hole in Robert’s heart that he later had surgically repaired.
“I decided I’m not going to keep living life the way I’ve been living,” Lancaster says now. “I could be gone in six months.”
Lancaster began a journey of self-discovery. He saw counselors, took hormones and read everything he could about those with similar experiences.
He was on the path to reaching a conclusion that would give him peace: There was nothing wrong with him. From the beginning, he was wired differently, he learned. It wasn’t a choice. It just was.
He started to explore the idea of gender-reassignment surgery. For him, everything was finally becoming right.
For Lucy, everything was wrong.
“I’m slowly dying,” she said.
She would worry: “I’m not a lesbian, but now will everyone think I am?”
The surgery came in April 2010. Lucy couldn’t bring herself to be there. She visited afterward. At home, she struggled with what to do. She’s grateful for the dogs, which kept her from simply running.
“I’m a logical person, and this didn’t make sense to me,” Lucy said. “I had to find a way to understand it and ultimately accept it. I’m a scientific-based, empirical person. I don’t deal with emotion; I deal with science.
“It helped me understand there is some science to it.”
Science would help her find the answer.
Legally able to compete
Although the exact cause of gender dysphoria is not known, many doctors theorize that it may be caused by chromosomal abnormalities or hormone imbalances during fetal development.
Transgender athletes competing against other women is not new, but also not common.
The most famous instance is also one of the first: tennis player Renee Richards, who underwent gender-reassignment surgery in 1975 and sparked a groundbreaking New York Supreme Court decision in 1977 that said she was legally a woman and could compete that way.
There have been just a handful of similar cases. Denmark’s Mianne Bagger, 46, who had gender-reassignment surgery in 1998, competes on the Ladies European Tour.
The more Lucy came to understand the science, and her spouse’s happiness, the more she saw a possible future.
“The relationship is as strong as it ever was and probably more so because we have been through a challenge together and survived,” Lucy said. “We have found new ways to express our love for each other.”
‘What’s your dream?’
As time passed, Lancaster believed she could return to competitive golf.
She played in tournaments, including USGA events last summer. She competed in the USGA Senior Women’s Amateur Championship in Hershey, Pa., in September after finishing second in a qualifying tournament in Carefree.
She has experienced both success and failure.
At a U.S. Women’s Amateur Public Links qualifying event, she was battling for the final spot but lost in a playoff.
At the U.S. Women’s Open qualifier, she was so nervous at the first tee that she drove the ball into the dirt and it popped up right in front of her. She calmed down and eagled the last hole, but it was clear to her that there was work to do.
Her confidence has taken a dramatic shift, she said, since seeing sports psychologist Chris Dorris. During their first meeting, Lancaster told him, “You know, I’m transgender. There’s something wrong with me.”
Lancaster said Dorris got in her face and said, “I don’t ever want to (expletive) hear you say there’s something wrong with you again.”
She believes that now.
“Transgender people, there’s nothing wrong with us,” she said. “We’re just people. I’m not simple. And I’m not a psychiatric diagnosis. …
“He helped me like myself, be comfortable with myself. Now I can put my game face on.”
During the second session, Dorris asked, “What’s your dream?” At their next meeting, Lancaster said, “To be on the LPGA Tour.”
That is her focus now. She put together “Team Bobbi,” which includes Dorris, a swing coach, a personal trainer and a rules coach.
Lancaster has played in two Cactus Tour events, a respected local tour, and plans to compete in a local qualifier for the USGA Women’s Open in June. In thefall, she hopes to participate in LPGA qualifying school.
She certainly understands the questions about fairness, which is why she has opted for the LPGA Tour and not the senior version, the Legends Tour.
“If I were to compete against women my age, I would have an unfair advantage,” she said. “My body got exposed for a long time to testosterone.”
Ten years ago, her swing was measured at 109 mph at a Hot Stix club fitting in Scottsdale. Today, it’s 96 mph.
While it is clear that testosterone levels and muscle mass drop significantly after hormone therapy and surgery, evidence about how much is limited.
“I applaud the LPGA for giving me an opportunity to play,” Lancaster said.
So does her swing coach, Mark Atchison, 36, an assistant pro at Superstition Mountain Golf and Country Club.
“You look around all the time and see people wishing they did something,” Atchison said. “Here is someone willing to put everything into it to try and make it happen.”
In an e-mail, LPGA spokesman Mike Scanlan said that “we will not speculate or comment about a player who is not a member of our organization, though we certainly wish her well in her endeavors.”
Most sports organizations have had to address the issue. The International Olympic Committee approved a transgender policy in 2003, and the NCAA did the same in 2011.
Lancaster, who still runs a private practice and does research for speech therapists, is ready to forge on and has many of her longtime patients by her side.
“I’ve never known a more compassionate human being in my life,” Gold Canyon resident Julie Stimple said.
Ultimately, Lancaster hopes to educate and inspire others.
“I’ve got my own dreams,” she said. “But also, if I can turn somebody on, I don’t care if it’s golf or become the best docent... just get a dream.”Image caption Analysts say the accusations may damage Deutsche Bank's reputation in South Korea
Deutsche Bank employees manipulated South Korea's stock market last year, financial regulators have said.
As a result, it has been banned from trading certain securities and derivatives, and regulators have called for staff to be prosecuted.
The Financial Services Commission started a probe after the KOSPI index fell 2.8% in the last 10 minutes of trade on 11 November.
Deutsche Bank said it was "disappointed" with the findings.
Massive Sell-off
Deutsche Bank was investigated by regulators because they claim the company's employees made illegal profits by manipulating the stock market.
The regulators say Deutsche Bank employees pushed through $2.2bn (£1.4bn) worth of trades during the last 10 minutes of opening time on Korea's main KOSPI stock index.
According to the regulators, the Deutsche Bank employees had built up large positions in derivatives that allowed them to impact the market when they were suddenly sold.
Deutsche Bank will continue to cooperate with the Korean authorities in relation to the investigation of this matter Deutsche Bank
It says the trading made the employees profits of about 44.9bn won ($41m).
It also claims that the manipulation was done in collaboration with staff at Deutsche Bank's Hong Kong operation.
Regulators now want to prosecute five Deutsche Bank employees, who work in the company's Hong Kong, New York and Seoul offices. They did not give the names of the employees.
'Very regrettable'
Deutsche Bank expressed regret over the penalties and the referral of its employees and South Korean unit to prosecutors.
However, it said it would continue to cooperate with South Korean authorities.
"Deutsche Bank will continue to cooperate with the Korean authorities in relation to the investigation of this matter," it said in a statement.
"Deutsche Securities Korea (DSK) regrets sanctions imposed by the Financial Services Commission and the referrals of DSK and employees are very regrettable," it added.TORONTO — The pained, eyes-to-the-sky glances of Maple Leafs defencemen said it all.
Auston Matthews is back in town, displaying zero rust during his first summer scrimmage with the boys. He showed Friday he can stickhandle in a phone booth — if they were still around — and then come off the boards to make multiple dekes around defenders and tuck the puck past the goal line.
Of course, it’s about to get much harder for Matthews to maneuver, now that the NHL has seen how he dazzles. But, there’s lots of time and room for Matthews to grow into a premier centre. He’s still a teenager, at least for a couple of weeks.
If there’s a sophomore jinx perched like a buzzard outside the Air Canada Centre, it must first overcome a rested, robust Matthews, who has had none of last summer’s distractions these past few months.
No world championships, draft hype or busy appearance schedule that had him crisscrossing two continents from March until late June. No NHL scouting combine or a World Cup in September, filming TV bits or time needed to get settled in Toronto.
After coming off the ice Friday with Mitch Marner, Zach Hyman, Connor Brown, Nikita Zaitsev and the rest of the young Leafs, Matthews underlined how a quiet summer could help, approaching main Leaf camp in less than two weeks.
“For sure,” he said. “It was nice not having so much stuff going on around you, being so hectic with the combine, the draft and everything. It was more relaxing. It was nice to spend a little more time training.”
Matthews is singing the praises of Pilates, a fitness system designed to alleviate back pain and improve balance. It’s an ideal workout for a 6-foot-2, 200-plus pounder who feels the slings and arrows for 82 regular season games.
“I focused a lot on body posture this summer,” Matthews said. “I started doing Pilates, just kind of opening myself up more a bit, being more upright and (with the goal of) avoiding other injuries.
“I think I’m more flexible (remember that dandy deke goal against Carolina with his legs split open by a trip?) and I feel more flexible. As far as training goes, it was the same as the last four years, the same person and it seems to work. I feel good and I’m pretty excited to get going.”
Matthews, who scored 40 goals as a rookie to set a Leaf record, has been almost off the radar in Arizona after the NHL awards, in which his first-place vote totals among writers ran 164-3, ahead of Winnipeg Jet Patrick Laine. He traveled a bit, mostly next door to his birth state in California.
“Nothing crazy,” he said of long journeys. “I haven’t spent too much time at home the past couple of summers. It was just nice to be home, in general.”
The Scottsdale native has a few days to get used to some game conditions before the main Leaf camp opens. Though he and Hyman had wonderful chemistry on and off the ice last season, the addition of Patrick Marleau has many figuring coach Mike Babcock will eventually get around to putting the veteran on Matthews’ left side ahead of the low-scoring Hyman, with William Nylander likely staying on the right.
Matthews had a brief talk with Marleau after the latter signed for three years and nearly $19 million US. Matthews, who turns 20 on Sept. 17, wasn’t even born when Marleau was drafted second overall in 1997 by San Jose.
“He‘s played 19 years, he’s been in the Stanley Cup finals, he knows how to win,” Matthews declared. “When I talked to him he was pretty excited to be here.
“All three of those guys we picked up are veterans who can definitely help us now, as a young team. They’re guys who’ve been there. Ron Hainsey won a Cup last year (in Pittsburgh), Dominic Moore is a Toronto native and been in the league a while.
“As an individual and as a team, we all want to take a step forward this season.”
MAKING PLAYOFFS ‘NOT GOING TO BE EASY’
Auston Matthews is already adept at NHL math.
Last year at this time, few thought his Maple Leafs could make the playoffs, that is until Matthews began his Calder Trophy run and team-high 69 points with a four-goal debut. An impressionable group of talented rookies joined the march. Toronto’s old guard, which had struggled in previous seasons, played well and Frederik Andersen’s goaltending also factored into a 95-point year, the club’s first post-season berth in a full schedule since 2003-04.
But with the majority of pundits now calling on the Leafs to get back there with ease, a word of caution from young Matthews.
“Only 16 teams make it and it’s not going to be easy. We surprised some teams last year," he said Friday. "That doesn’t really matter now. It’s a new season, they’re going to know that we have some firepower and they’re not going to take us so lightly.”
Despite 40 wins, the Leafs were still a wild card entry last year. Florida and Tampa Bay, two strong teams who were stunned to be outsiders last April, are among clubs expected to be better in 2017-18. The Lightning were just a point away from Toronto at the end — without Steven Stamkos in the clutch — and the New York Islanders had 94 as well.
While others in the top eight in the East could fall in points, none are forecast to take a long tumble out of the running. The Leafs will need to keep making strides and avoid injuries.
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Pay packets are up to 11 per cent smaller than in 2008 for millions of workers, a study claims – with under-40s among the worst hit.
The wage squeeze has been felt most in the East Midlands and London, says the report by the Resolution Foundation.
The economic think-tank reckons it will be another three years before pay gets back to where it used to be at the time of the credit crunch – nine years ago.
While typical hourly pay for those aged from 22 to 39 is down 11 per cent, workers in their fifties and sixties have fared less badly.
(Image: PA)
It has dropped five per cent for those in their fifties and just two per cent for those in their sixties. Pay worsened again at the start of the year. Real average weekly earnings fell by 0.4 per cent from January to April.
The research shows part-timers are the only people whose hourly pay is back to where it was before the crash.
Resolution Foundation analyst Stephen Clarke said: “The pay squeeze made an unwelcome return at the start of 2017 and looks set to stay for the rest of the year at least.
“What’s most worrying is that pay packets had still not recovered from the last squeeze when this latest one hit.
“The wages of younger workers are still more than 10 per cent lower than they were back in 2008. This latest squeeze means it will take many more years for their earnings to fully recover.”
(Image: Getty)
The one bright spot is the impact of the National Living Wage, which has benefited millions of workers since it was introduced two years ago.
The findings come as UK business leaders warn that much-needed growth in the private sector has slowed in the past three months.
A CBI survey of 762 firms in the manufacturing, distribution and service sectors shows growth has risen by six per cent – compared with 13 per cent in the previous three months.
CBI chief economist Rain Newton-Smith said: “Growth has slowed for a second successive month and expectations for the quarter ahead have cooled.
“With the economy shifting down a gear – and higher inflation eating into household incomes – it’s vital the Government creates the right environment for businesses to continue contributing to the country’s prosperity.”Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, captured national attention on Tuesday with a marathon filibuster that defeated a draconian abortion omnibus bill in the state Senate. (Though the victory may be short-lived: Gov. Rick Perry has called a second special legislative session for July 1, giving antiabortion lawmakers 30 more days to try to pass the measure.)
Davis spoke with Anderson Cooper on Wednesday night about the experience of standing and speaking for 11 hours straight ("I underestimated how difficult it would be") and what the Texas legislative showdown could mean for the future of reproductive rights in Texas -- and democracy in the United States:
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I think the most important thing we accomplished is we empowered the voice of people in Texas -- people who wanted to stand against this big government intrusion to their personal lives and liberty... What I think this is has done is empower people to understand that when they involve themselves in a democracy they truly can make a difference. They made a difference in the Texas Capitol yesterday, and I think this will linger, Anderson. I think that even if this bill passes in this next called special session, the reaction to it won't be a partisan one; it's a reaction coming from Republicans,, Independents and Democrats alike, which is saying: Gov. Perry, Lt. Gov. Dewhurst, stay out of my private decision making.
Davis also addressed the time stamp on the final vote, which was initially changed on official records to falsely indicate that the vote had taken place before the midnight deadline, telling Cooper: "I know it was done intentionally."Ian Kerner, a sexuality counselor and New York Times best-selling author, blogs about sex on Thursdays on The Chart. Read more from him at his website, GoodInBed.
With an estimated 40 million Americans stuck in sexless marriages, mismatched libidos could be the No. 1 sex-related issue facing couples in long-term relationships.
Generally, at the start of a relationship, the thrill of infatuation keeps us sexually motivated - the whole “can’t keep your hands off of each other” phase - but once we settle into a sense of routine, gaps in libido that may have previously been masked become revealed. Sex drive is very individual, and no two people can reasonably expect to always be in sync over the course of a long-term relationship, regardless of their love for each other.
Mismatched libidos are so common partly because our individual sex drives interconnect with so many other aspects of our lives, and numerous factors can lead one or both partners to experience diminished desire at one point or another. If you stay in a relationship long enough, it’s almost guaranteed that at some point you’ll be dealing with one or more of these issues and that your libido or your partner’s will change:
- Stress, depression, and anxiety
- Age, health, and medical treatment
- Lifestyle issues such as sleep, exercise, nutrition, and tobacco and alcohol consumption
- Relationship boredom
- Diminishing sexual attraction to one’s partner
- Relationship issues and anger
- Lack of sexual enjoyment during partner sex
- Milestones such as having kids that often test a relationship
- Lack of prioritization of sex
Unlike a general sex rut, in which both partners experience diminished desire, libidos that are starkly mismatched can present a whole new array of problems. When you want sex but your partner doesn’t, the rejection can sting - and highjack your relationship emotionally: Your self-esteem can plummet and an inner rage can seethe.
The ego is extremely frail when it comes to sex, and even being rejected once or twice can lead you to give up altogether. On the other hand, if you’re not feeling in the mood, even a hug or a kiss can feel like a sexual overture and create a sense of sexual pressure. Mismatched libidos can be complex, so it’s worth seeking out a therapist or counselor to help cope with them, especially if the problem has been going on for a while. In the meantime you can visit one of our experts in our forum at Good in Bed and here are some tips to help you get in sync:
- If you’re in a relationship in which non-sexual physical intimacy has dried up to the point where any gesture of intimacy comes off as an overture to have sex, it’s probably a sign that you need to cultivate more non-physical intimacy in your relationship. Recent research shows that kissing is paramount to men’s sexual satisfaction, according to researcher Debby Herbenick, Ph.D. Men who report engaging in more kissing, cuddling, and touching with their partners tend to be more sexually satisfied in their marriages. If sex is like a plant and easily prone to withering, then non-physical intimacy is a vital nutrient, like the sun. Create a zone in your relationship where you can be physical and affectionate without the pressure of those activities leading to sex.
- Don’t give up on sex, especially if you’re the partner with a higher libido. I offer this advice a lot to new parents, especially dads who often find themselves feeling like a third wheel or who are frustrated that their wives are so disinterested in sex. It’s easy to turn off and tune out, and many new parents have gone months, even a year or more, without having sex. But a couple has to restore intimacy, which often requires the patience and loving persistence of the higher-desire partner. Life is full of ebbs and flows, and common milestones—like having kids—can transform a relationship and often one’s sex life.
- Communicate about the issue, figure out what’s going on, and come up with a plan. Usually the issue just goes unacknowledged too long, leading to a sense of silent desperation. But relationships come with lots of difficult conversations - about money, kids, in-laws - and talking about sex shouldn’t be swept under the rug, either. When sex drive disappears (from an individual or a relationship), it’s generally a sign that something else is going on. Sex is a clue and a motivation to get to the bottom of the problem.
- Make the conversation sexy. It takes more than just constructive communication to get in the mood. That’s why so many sex therapists and counselors give their patients homework. The brain is the biggest sex organ, so find something sexy to say about your partner, share a fantasy, do something that is simultaneously sexy and boosts your partner’s self-esteem.
- Enjoy your sexuality on your own. Masturbation isn’t a substitute for the thrill and sensuality of skin-on-skin partner sex, but if you’re the higher-desire partner it can help take the edge off and fill natural gaps in libido. For lower-desire partners, just because you have less interest in sex with your partner that doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t enjoy your own sexuality. Sometimes masturbation can provide a sexual jumpstart.
- Pay attention to how you handle the issue. When a little dry spell starts to become a permanent rut, we usually deal with it in one of two ways: lashing out and being mean, or holding a grudge and acting like everything’s fine. Neither option is healthy. Left unattended, mismatched libidos can create issues that spiral out of control and lead to unfortunate consequences, such as infidelity.
- Last of all, have sex. Try it - you’ll like it (we hope). This is especially true if you’re the type of person that wants to want sex, but just doesn’t. Sometimes you have to put your body through the motions and wait for your mind to follow.
If, despite these tips, you really feel like your libidos are irreconcilably mismatched, see a professional. Visit the website for the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists at aasect.org to find a therapist. With the right care and feeding, your sex life can thrive.Here, in its original layout, is Joan Didion’s seminal essay “Self-respect: Its Source, Its Power,” which was first published in Vogue in 1961, and which was republished as “On Self-Respect” in the author’s 1968 collection, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Didion wrote the essay as the magazine was going to press, to fill the space left after another writer did not produce a piece on the same subject. She wrote it not to a word count or a line count, but to an exact character count.
Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.
I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships that hampered others. Although the situation must have had even then the approximate tragic stature of Scott Fitzgerald's failure to become president of the Princeton Triangle Club, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nevertheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honour, and the love of a good man (preferably a cross between Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca and one of the Murchisons in a proxy fight); lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed wonder of someone who has come across a vampire and found no garlands of garlic at hand.
Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself: no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. With the desperate agility of a crooked faro dealer who spots Bat Masterson about to cut himself into the game, one shuffles flashily but in vain through one's marked cards—the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which had involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation—which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something that people with courage can do without.
To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable home movie that documents one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for each screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice or carelessness. However long we post- pone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously un- comfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.
To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one's underwear. There is a common superstition that "self-respect" is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect, Jordan Baker had it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than in men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."
Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named corespondent. If they choose to forego their work—say it is screenwriting—in favor of sitting around the Algonquin bar, they do not then wonder bitterly why the Hacketts, and not they, did Anne Frank.
In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and with United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for re-election. Nonetheless, character—the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life—is the source from which self-respect springs.
Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had |
0 points for a loss
No Bonus Points available.
As a reminder, the scoring for The Elflympic Games was:
14 points for a win
6 points for a draw
1 point for a loss
2 points for a Touchdown
2 points for an Interception
1 point for a Completion
2 points for a Long Bomb-range Completion
The biggest win in terms of Touchdowns at the Elflympics was a 5-0 win with 6 completions and an interception. In a normal scoring system, this would net 15 points, the same as a 1-0 or 2-1 grind. In Elflympics, it granted the player 32 points, worth over double the value of a single win. It would have taken some incredible dice to purely place this on luck, though this is most likely a factor. But it would have still needed a coach to push that luck, and to know when to hold back. Undoubtedly he could have stalled for a 2-0 win, with little to no completions. But because the rules rewarded the crazy plays, he kept going and secured a significant lead going into round two.
There were many other games with similar stories too. The final on the top table was an immense 4 – 4 on Touchdowns and 6 – 7 on completion points, netting the two players an incredible 20 and 21 points respectfully for the overall winner and the runner up.
Interestingly, they knew how many points each other had going into the final, so each knew exactly what they needed to win. If the 2nd place coach wanted to win, he needed to either outscore his opponent or draw, but really rack up the bonus points – or prevent his opponent from doing so. The coach in 1st place just needed the draw – provided he didn’t rest on his laurels and let his opponent farm points. (In the end, it came down to a Perfect Defense roll on turn 16 that prevented a very likely one-turn-touchdown for the touchdown, the win, and the tournament!)
The question is: was this good playing, and did it deserve extra points? If so, how much is too much?
Going into the final the two teams were 8 points apart. The game itself was the last game still being played, and was one of the most tense matches I’ve ever watched!
But lets look at the broader picture. An important aspect that many people are concerned with when it comes to Bonus Points in BB tournaments is what is called the ‘primacy of W/D/L’. What this means basically is that regardless of what happens, the person that wins the most games should win the day, and should not place higher than someone that did not win as many games. If you have the same amount of wins, then the person with the most amount of draws etc.
How did The Elflympics handle the primacy of W/D/L?
These are the results after round four. Now, lets substitute the scoring system for the 15/5/0
There are obviously a few differences! Interestingly Wobert still comes out on top. The biggest casualty is HungDonkeyman’s Pro Elves that dropped a mighty fourteen places. They had managed to place 5th with a fairly unimpressive W/D/L of 1/1/2 because of his 23 passing points and 16 Touchdown points. On the flip side, Barney’s Norse rocket from 13th to 3rd. While they had a relatively decent 3/0/1, with 53 points in total, they had only scored 5 Touchdowns with 0 Passing Points at all. This meant that despite a great performance they didn’t place as high as they should have, were this a normal tournament. Barney’s Norse only conceded three touchdowns all day, less than one a game, which suggests a well-fought grind in several games. While this is good tactics in normal Blood Bowl, in the Elflympics it meant that they did not place in the top half, landing slap-bang centre table.
It shows that a team with a poor W/D/L can place well, if they score well in bonus points. Conversely, a team with a good W/D/L can place low if they play a more conservative game.
Ultimately, this is sort of what I was hoping for. I wanted a crazy no-holds-barred day where people would be rewarded for pulling off the risky plays.
Was it broken? The fact that it came down to the last turn of the last game suggests to me that there was never a clear advantage to one team.
Was it fair? People went in knowing the rules from the outset.
Does it undermine the NAF sactioning process? Hmm, I think people who have been to more tournaments than me will have to answer that. There are teams that placed low in the tourney but did well in terms NAF ranking.
Was it competitive? Every award was contested up to the last game, from Casualties to Completions to Touchdowns. I think next year more people will bring elf and agility 4 teams, seeing how nine of the top ten races were agi 4 teams.
Was it fun? I hope so!
Will it be running again? You betcha 🙂
-T
p.s. if you want to play with the numbers yourself, here’s the Score file. I’m sure there are better analyses can be taken from the results.
AdvertisementsThe ongoing battle between the United States government and Silicon Valley tech companies over encryption exploded last week when a federal judge ordered Apple to unlock an iPhone. In doing so, the government invoked a 227-year-old law signed by President George Washington, himself. But what does one of the United States’ earliest laws have to do with the latest in communications technology?
Related Content How the NSA Stopped Trying to Prevent the Spread of Encryption And Decided to Just Break It Instead
To make a long story short, Apple has so far refused to comply with government agents, who have demanded that the company helps break the encryption on the iPhone that belonged to one of the San Bernardino shooters responsible for killing 14 people in California, last year. Since the attacks, the F.B.I. has received a warrant for the information on the iPhone, but they have been stymied by its encryption, which is why they’re looking for Apple’s help. In an attempt to make Apple create a backdoor into the phone’s operating system, the U.S. government has invoked the All Writs Act of 1789.
The legal issues around the All Writs Act are complex, but at its core, it gives federal judges the power to issue orders to compel people to do things within the limits of the law, Eric Limer writes for Popular Mechanics. In its original form, the All Writs Act was part of the Judiciary Act of 1789, which established the federal justice system from the Supreme Court down to the lower federal courts. The All Writs Act allows federal judges the power to issue court orders, which makes sense considering that "writs" is an old-fashioned term for "formal order." At one point in history, writs were fairly common, but over the centuries, courts have tended to use them only in extraordinary circumstances where there are no other laws that apply to the situation at hand, such as this case, where the government wants access to information in a password-protected cell phone. The vagueness built into the All Writs Act has leant itself to new readings throughout American history, Laura Sydell reports for NPR.
"The law actually seems to be keeping up with technology by being so broad that we're just reinterpreting it all the time," Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics Program at Santa Clara University's Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, tells Sydell.
The government has cited the All Writs Act in the past, from a 1977 ruling forcing phone companies to help set up devices that record all numbers called from a specific phone line to the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999 which required all cellphone providers to be able to geolocate their customers’ phones. The writ does have its limits: a federal judge ruled in 2005 that the All Writs Act could not be used to force a phone company to allow real-time tracking of a phone without a warrant, Eric Lichtblau and Katie Benner report for the New York Times.
Whatever the result of this current case, the dispute will have major legal implications for the fight over encryption in the future. While the F.B.I. says the court-orderd bypass, which would have Apple create software to disable the feature that wipes the data on the phone after 10 incorrect password attempts, would only be used in this particular case, Apple’s chief, Timothy D. Cook recently fired off an open letter arguing that allowing this would set a dangerous legal precedent for user privacy in the future.
Editor's Note, February 24, 2016: This post has been updated.Sabah Select XI 0 QPR 5
Heidar Helguson scored on his return to action and Djibril Cisse netted twice as QPR won their opening pre-season friendly in Malaysia, where Park Ji-sung was handed the captain’s armband.
Bobby Zamora put them ahead by tapping in the loose ball after Anton Ferdinand’s header had been parried.
Helguson, who missed much of last term with a groin complaint, doubled the lead after the interval following good work from Cisse.
Jay Bothroyd fired in the third before Cisse finished superbly for the fourth and then scored again, this time cleverly rounding the keeper and slotting home.
Flagship signing Park made his debut along with fellow recent arrival Andrew Johnson, while Samba Diakite featured for the first time since his permanent move to the club was rubber-stamped.
On-loan Manchester United defender Fabio also made his debut, coming on as one of 11 substitutes for a second half in which the hosts visibly tired and Rangers’ forwards were able to take advantage.
Goalkeeper Robert Green, who was given an extended break because of his involvement with the England squad at Euro 2012, has joined the R’s squad in Asia and could play in Friday’s game against Kelentan.
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Find us on FacebookLots of people have a pet hamster or guinea pig, but Melanie Typaldos decided to opt for a much larger rodent as a pet. In fact, she went for the largest rodent in the world – a capybara that weighs around a hundred pounds.
Caplin Rous the pet capybara: we don’t think he can actually read
Now her pet capybara, named Caplin Rous, has become a bit of an internet star, with his own blog at gianthamster.com, a Facebook page and a Twitter stream with over 3,000 followers.Caplin lives with Typaldos in her home town of Buda, Texas, where he goes for walks on a lead, swims in her pool, does tricks and even used to accompany her into work. However, she told the LA Times that the work visits stopped when ‘someone complained there was a furry, pig-like animal in the building.’Caplin Rous’s name is a reference to the movie The Princess Bride, which featured the fearsome Rodents Of Unusual Size in a key scene.Caplin, now two-and-a-half years old, has been with Typaldos since he was 11 days old (he was bred in captivity, not taken from the wild, but even captive-bred capybaras need to get used to their owners from a very young age). The idea of getting a pet capybara came from a trip to Venezuela, where Typaldos’s daughter Coral got to hold a juvenile capybara and was instantly smitten.But Caplin warns anybody else thinking of getting a pert capybara that, while they make good pets, there are downsides – she tells people to read the blog, which includes several incidents where Caplin has bitten her.Hey! We’re Part & Parcel, and we’re making the best boots you’ll ever own. Don’t believe us? Read on.
All we’ve ever wanted is a quality and stylish boot that zips—preferably without breaking a sweat. And after talking to hundreds of women who felt the same way, we decided to do something about it.
We made the most delicious black, leather riding boot in four calf widths: 16”, 18”, 20” and 22” because we believe that you #DeserveFit.
Right at this very moment, 67% of women in this country don’t fit into the boots that are on the market (say what?!). Standard boots are made with a 15” calf circumference, and most wide calf options are made with a 16” calf.
To top it off, the wide calf options that are available are generally made with synthetic materials (read: pleather) and/or involve elastic panels for fit.
You’re probably thinking, “That's crazy!” And, yeah, we didn’t think it made much sense either. Meet the Ultimate Wide Calf Boot. Made to fit you, this boot comes in four calf widths with some seriously amazing features.
The Ultimate Wide Calf Boot features:
A full zip because getting a boot on your foot should be easy
V-cut gore that is subtle but flexible for a fit that works with you, not against you
An ultra-comfortable (and slightly wider) footbed
An almond toe for super-chic, long-lasting style
A low 1.25” heel made for all-day wear
Want a closer look? Here are the details all up close and personal:
We built this product with a slightly wider footbed for added comfort, while the almond toe elongates the leg for A+ style—these were the favorite features of our fit models, hands down.
We went with a nylon zipper for all-weather wear. This thing won’t get stuck, rust, or be hard to zip up and down. Oh, and we chose a full zip because getting this boot over jeans shouldn’t just be easy, it should feel good. The v-cut gore is there to add a little stretch when you need it.
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Hint: They go with EVERYTHING. We've designed these bad boys to be comfortable, stylish, and durable. From weekend errands to cocktail parties, and everything in between, you’ll find real inspo from real women here.
We worked with hundreds of women of all shapes and sizes to offer these calculated calf widths and sizes without the need for big, ugly panels of stretchy fabric. The result is four calf widths: 16”, 18”, 20” and 22” so that more women have access to quality boots that actually fit.
For the most accuracy, we recommend measuring your calves the good old-fashioned way, with a measuring tape.
You can also use the fit photos below to help guesstimate your calf size based on how wide calf boots have fit in the past. We're using a very common 16" wide calf boot in the photos below.
Guesstimating your calf size:
Full zip but poor fit: Have you typically been able to zip a wide calf boot but found it tight? Consider the 16" or 18" version.
Have you typically been able to zip a wide calf boot but found it tight? Consider the 16" or 18" version. Partial zip: Have you typically been able to zip a wide calf boot about halfway up your calf? Consider the 18" or 20" version.
Have you typically been able to zip a wide calf boot about halfway up your calf? Consider the 18" or 20" version. No zip: Have you never been able to zip a wide calf boot at all? Consider the 20" or 22" version.
One more note about calf size and fit:
If you find that you’re in between calf widths, we recommend sizing up—especially if you’re planning on wearing these with socks and jeans. So, if your calf measures just over 16" you may want to consider getting the 18" boots.
Finding your shoe size:
We’re also offering the boot in a wide range of shoe sizes: women’s size 6-12 and everything in between. The feedback we’ve gotten from our fit models is that the boots run true to size, so you can feel confident in placing your order.
You should know that no matter what, you’re getting a great deal. After the campaign is over, the Ultimate Wide Calf Boot will retail for $199. The reward cost listed below is the price you’ll pay for the boots when you back this project (hellllllo discounts)!
Early Bird Backer #1 - $99 (50% discount) SUPER SUPER limited edition, this reward is only available to the first 50 backers. You’ll receive a pair of the Ultimate Wide Calf Boots for 50% off the retail price, our style guide, and a very heartfelt thank you. Trust us, this deal won’t last long.
Early Bird Backer #2 - $135 (32% discount) This reward is limited to 200 backers. You’ll receive a pair of the Ultimate Wide Calf Boots for 32% off the original retail price, our style guide, and a very heartfelt thank you.
Boot Backer - $175 (12% discount) This reward is unlimited! When you choose this reward, you’ll receive a pair of the Ultimate Wide Calf Boots for 12% off the original retail price, our style guide, and a very heartfelt thank you.
#PARTANDSOUL Backer - $225 Become a #PARTANDSOUL style council member when you choose this reward! You’ll receive a pair of the Ultimate Wide Calf Boots (plus our style guide and a very heartfelt thank you), and you’ll join our #PARTANDSOUL style council, where you’ll be an ongoing part of our community. Help decide future products, receive early access to new releases, and more!
Boutique Backer - $1500 Want to stay ahead of the curve? If you’re a boutique owner, this is the perfect option for you. Choose this reward, and you’ll receive a complete size run to sell in your shop. 15 pairs of boots—you choose the sizes!
Rockstar Support - $1 This is your nod that you love us! We’ll be eternally grateful for your support and partnership in moving the fashion industry forward to include women of all shapes and sizes. We’ll include your name in a special section on our website, and you’ll receive a thank you from the team.
Fall Fashionista - $25 Love fashion, but not looking for a wide calf boot? This is a great option for you. You’ll get everything included in the Rockstar Support reward PLUS a style guide highlighting all of our must-haves for FW2017.
We’re the best of friends, bloggers in our former lives (we’re talkin’ 2008 here), and retail experts. We come with a combined 15+ years’ experience in e-commerce and technology. We’ve been stylists, designers, merchants and marketers. But most importantly, we know when to ask good questions and trust our intuition.
We worked with the best in the business to help us craft the Ultimate Wide Calf Boot. This team designed one of the first wide calf boots to hit the market and have worked with us to bring the Ultimate Wide Calf boot to life.
We'll use the money we raise on Kickstarter to fund our first full production run.
Once the Kickstarter campaign closes, we’ll be in touch via email to get your size information. From there, our order gets placed into production. We estimate we’ll begin shipping in March 2018!
Right at this very moment, less than 1% of the boots made will fit almost 70% of women in America.
Most standard width boots are made with a 14-15” calf circumference, and the majority of “wide calf” or “extended calf” options that exist on the market are made with a 16” calf circumference. BUT, according to the CDC, more than 60% of women in America have a calf circumference larger than 16”!
And to make matters worse, major retailers in this country are perpetuating the notion that we should fit into their standards of “normalcy”. They are going as far as to suggest that women “wrap feet in plastic” if boots are too tight to slide on. We’re not even kidding. See it below.
Part & Parcel was founded on the belief that all women #DeserveFit, and that size shouldn’t limit ability to express style. If you believe that all women #DeserveFit, support our campaign and help spread the word.“Be honest with yourself, and you will find the motivation to do what you advise others to do.” ~Vince Poscente
What if you could only tell—and more importantly, only believe—the truth? Not the half-truth, the white lies, or the other grey in between, but the pure, beautiful, and unadulterated truth.
If I had to pick one super power, it would be to know the liars from the truth-tellers. I would walk around in public places, eavesdrop on conversations, and know immediately if someone is lying or being honest.
I would go to social events and exercise my super power by posing my burning questions to friends and strangers alike. I would sit in the courtrooms of the world, and know instantly if the victim is lying or telling the truth. How fascinating, how disconcerting, how shocking it would all be!
Most of all, though, I would use my super power to listen to the voices that I hear in my own head, from the loud inner critic, the large ego full of opinions, and the years of social conditioning and upbringing; and I would be able to tell, without a shadow of a doubt, the lies from the truths. Oh yes!
I grew up in Tehran, and witnessed not only the horrible 1979 Iranian revolution but also the terrible war that ensued between Iran and Iraq. Even though I was very small, I remember the horror, the bombings, the sirens, and the oppression.
Mostly, I remember the way our teachers would brainwash our small little minds and fill it with the new regime’s lies. I remember that our families needed to play it safe while still helping us draw some faint distinction between those lies and the truth.
I moved to America when I was 15 years old, and today, even though I know the difference between a lie and the beautiful truth, some days the inner critic returns and insists on the lie.
But I don’t think I am alone. We tell ourselves lies, half-truths, and anything but the pure truth every day.
We are paying for them, you know? They create new doubts in our mind and new fears out of thin air.
They make us a little blind to our own amazing opportunities. Most of all, they bruise our self-esteem, crush our self-confidence, and leave us looking for it everywhere except the very place that we will find it: within ourselves.
Your confidence lives inside you. It does not deplete itself or run away and desert you. It is a permanent part of who you are. But with enough lies, you can silence even the greatest force of confidence.
The solution: Stop lying to yourself and stop believing the lies that you hear.
The simplest and most powerful thing you can do to make that happen is believe in yourself.
Here are 7 lies you need to stop telling yourself:
Lie #1: You are not worthy of love.
Everyone in this world is worthy of love, and that includes you. The great thing about love is its abundance—it does not run out—and you can start with the first rule of confidence, which is to love thyself.
Self-love is totally in your control. It is a choice that you can make every day, as well as a shift in how you view love. If you can love yourself deeply and truly, you will generate plenty of love for the world around you, and you will start to see yourself as entirely worthy of love in return.
Lie #2: You are not enough.
Says who (other than you)? Maybe there were people who told you this lie at some point in your life. Maybe you started fabricating it on your own. Either way: it’s not true.
There is a difference between improving the person you are to be the best that you can be—a lifetime journey that we all share—and not being enough as a human being.
You are more than enough! You are good enough, smart enough, beautiful enough, and then some. It starts with believing it before you can live it.
Lie #3: You do not deserve happiness.
This is the silliest lie of all. What have you done not to deserve this happiness that is your birthright? Who has dared implant such a falsehood in your head?
Yes, you deserve happiness in abundance, and the funny thing is you cannot have happiness while you hold on to the lie. Happiness flows to you when you fully expect it, not when you resist it. Stop resisting it. Start inviting it.
Lie #4: You are not unique or special.
This one still shocks me. Every human being—all seven billion of us—is born with unique fingerprints and unique voices. Does this gift form Mother Nature alone not shock you? It is the best perspective to instantly remember that you are oh so unique. There is not another one like you. There never will be. Know this. Exploit it. Enjoy it. Remember it.
Lie #5: Your dreams are too unrealistic or impractical.
It takes reading one inspirational biography or life story to switch you out of this mindset, so pick your favorite hero and go.
People achieve the impossible. They do it every day and in every age, every demographic, and every social condition. They rise up to the occasion and defy the norms. Nobody has to give them permission so they can live out their dreams and make waves in their own life and many around them. Why are you waiting for permission then?
Decide if your dream is practical or not, achievable or not. Then go make it happen.
Lie #6: Your circumstances dictate your success.
So many of us go through life carrying the shadows of our past and tainting our future. If we had great failure in the past, we let it define our identity and severely limit our potential for any future success.
Then we hear success stories of those who did not let any disadvantage dictate their success, those who blatantly ignored their shadows, shunned their current circumstances and defined their new future with brilliant colors!
How did they do it, we wonder? Can we too let go of these dark shadows? Can we walk into a new light, no matter what our past may have been and what our current circumstances suggest? I believe we can.
Lie #7: You are not worthy of wealth.
Wealth is personal. Some define it in the strength of their finances and some with the depth of their inner peace, and for some, one leads to the other.
How you define wealth is your business, just know that how you feel about it will affect your confidence. If you do not feel worthy of achieving your own state of wealth, ask yourself why? What self-limiting beliefs are you telling yourself that creates this condition? What better story can you believe so that you attract the wealth that you seek?
Telling yourself the truth can be the best habit you can develop, and asking questions and talking things through with yourself can be the easiest and quickest way to establish this habit.
You can kick start this habit by eradicating these seven lies first. Your reward is a renewed, strong and solid sense of confidence in yourself and your amazing abilities!
Photo by Sadie Hernandez
About Farnoosh Brock Farnoosh Brock is a published author, speaker and coach. After her corporate career, she started Prolific Living which she now runs with her husband. She loves traveling, green juicing, Ashtanga yoga and fantasy fiction. Grab her FREE affirmation morning audio.A full 38 pages of Title 30 of the Municipal Code in Glendale, Calif., in Los Angeles county, are dedicated to the regulation of signs. The rules dictate the portion of a sign's height that is allowed to rise "above any parapet or eave line" (half), the body responsible for OKing murals ("the design review board") and the required vertical plane angle on marquee signs ("less than twenty (20) degrees").
But even Hammurabi's Code is useless if it's not enforced. And so it is with Title 30 of Glendale's Municipal Code. Since its 1995 adoption, restaurants in the San Fernando Valley city of 190,000 have openly flouted the size restrictions set forth in the law. There are now 60 pole-mounted restaurant signs in Glendale that are bigger than they're allowed to be -- most of them advertising major fast food chains.
Glendale's City Council, or at least a highly vocal contingent thereof, wants that to change.
"It's a matter of aesthetics," Councilman Ara Najarian told the Glendale News-Press. "These signs are something you see in East L.A.," referring to the downtrodden, largely Hispanic neighborhood 14 miles to Glendale's southeast.
The Council has actually been trying to get the restaurants to change their signs for years, but it's proven to be a complicated process than you would expect. In the past week, councilmembers have written a resolution that would take a harder stance. It's told restaurants that they have to make signs compliant with city code within the next two years.
But one aspect of the decision is ruffling feathers. The L.A. Times explains that businesses that do not plan to change their signage within the foreseeable future -- many of them large fast food chains with established graphic design strategies -- are exempt from the terms of the crackdown until March of 2014.
So a California town tries to fight the fast food with a high-profile municipal law and instead falls flat on its face. Sound familiar?Everton are reportedly chasing FC Augsburg centre back Ragnar Klavan.
According to German publication Borlife, Everton manager Roberto Martinez is interested in signing one-time Eredivisie title winner Ragnar Klavan from FC Augsburg.
The report states that the 29-year-old is being targeted by the Toffees following an excellent season and the move would be a dream for the player, who is said to have made a move to England his prime target.
Described as reliable, strong in the tackle and a goal threat, he sounds like an ideal replacement for Sylvain Distin after it was announced he would not be offered a new deal by Everton, with the Mail indicating he had fallen out with Martinez.
Who is Ragnar Klavan?
The Estonian international, with 100 caps to his name, is an experienced defender who has built up his reputation during his time in Holland.
He signed for Heracles Almelo from Valerenga, where he was sparsely used, in 2005 and became a regular for the club before Louis van Gaal, while with AZ Alkmaar, brought him in on loan to help with their title challenge in January 2009.
He featured 12 times in Van Gaal’s side and helped AZ win their first Eredivisie trophy since 1981. He made his move permanent at the end of the season. He went on to play a further 66 games in three seasons with AZ before moving to Germany.
In 2012, he moved to Augsburg, where he is currently playing his football, and became a regular in their starting line-up. In fact, according to whoscored, Klavan was rated the 22nd best central defender in the Bundesliga last season.How much do you know about the Tour de France through the years?
It now seems like an age since the Tour de France‘s Grand Départ in Utrecht on July 4, and with just two racing stages plus the ceremonial procession through Paris left, Chris Froome is looking good for his second yellow jersey.
But long before the Kenyan-born Brit made headlines with his help towards/challenge of Bradley Wiggins‘s win in 2012, many hundreds of riders had taken part in the Grande Boucle.
>>> The Tour de France 2015 route
This cycling quiz sets out to test your knowledge of the world’s greatest sporting event, from its humble beginnings in 1903 to the spectacle we see today.
Questions overlook much of the ‘Lance era’, for obvious reasons, but your knowledge will need to extend beyond the last 20 years if you are to have any hope of a decent score.
Rated from Tour legend down to lanterne rouge, see what kind of racing aficionado (completely unofficial) you really are.
Photographs by Graham WatsonImage copyright EPA Image caption Australia has adopted a range of measures to stop asylum seekers arriving by boat
A small wooden boat suspected to be carrying asylum seekers has been sighted off the north-west coast of Australia.
Crew working for oil and gas producer Modec spotted the boat within 500m of their floating oil tanker, about 150km (93 miles) from the Dampier coast.
A Modec spokesman said "a large number of people" appeared to be on the boat.
If confirmed as asylum seekers, it would be the first "illegal" vessel entry into Australia since June 2014.
At that time, 157 people were intercepted about 16 nautical miles from Australia's Christmas Island, in the Indian Ocean, and taken to the mainland.
Australia has adopted a number of measures to stop asylum seekers reaching Australia by boat.
Seaworthy vessels
Modec Australia country operations manager Gary Kennedy told the BBC the company had contacted Australian authorities about the boat, which appeared to be seaworthy.
Neither the Australian Maritime Authority nor Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton would comment.
Australia and asylum
Many asylum seekers - mainly from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq and Iran - travel to Australia by boat from Indonesia
The number of boats rose sharply in 2012 and early 2013. Scores of people have died making the journey
To stop the influx, the government has adopted hard-line measures intended as a deterrent
Everyone who arrives is detained. Under a new policy, they are processed in Nauru and Papua New Guinea. Those found to be refugees will be resettled in PNG, Nauru or Cambodia
Tony Abbott's government has also adopted a policy of tow-backs, or turning boats around
Rights groups and the UN have voiced serious concerns about the policies and accuse Australia of shirking international obligations
Mr Kennedy said the boat, which looked like a fishing vessel, was spotted early on Monday, West Australian time.
"It came inside the exclusion zone [around the production facility], which is why we alerted authorities," Mr Kennedy told the BBC.
High spirits
Modec staff told him the people did not seem to be under "duress", the vessel looked seaworthy, and the weather and sea conditions were not dangerous.
"The feedback [from staff] is that they appeared to be in high spirits," said Mr Kennedy.
He said he had been told the people were Vietnamese but that had not been confirmed.
Mr Kennedy said it was possible Modec would be asked to assist the boat but so far no such request from Australian authorities had been made.
The West Australian newspaper has reported that there may be children on board the boat.
Last month, migrants headed to Australia told the UN the crew on their boat was paid by the Australian navy to turn back to Indonesia.
At the time, Prime Minister Tony Abbott would say only that his government used "creative strategies" to stop migrant boats.Anyone hoping to spice up their gluten-free diet need look only at the billions of beady-eyed, shrimp-size cicadas currently emerging from the ground in the eastern United States.
"They definitely would be gluten free... they do not feed on wheat," said Gene Kritsky, a biologist and cicada expert at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. The bugs are also high in protein, low in fat, and low in carbohydrates, he added. (Related: "Cicadas as Food: Summer's Low-Fat Snack.")
Members of Brood II, one of the largest groups of periodical cicadas, have been crawling out of the ground and carpeting trees from North Carolina to Connecticut since early May. By July, they will be gone—not to be heard from again for 17 years.
Cicadas spend most of their lives underground sucking sap from tree roots. The plant-based diet gives them a green, asparagus-like flavor, especially when eaten raw or boiled, according to Kristky, who prefers his Brood II bugs blanched and tossed into a leafy green salad like chunks of chicken.
Gross? Not really, said Jenna Jadin, an entomologist who wrote the online cookbook Cicada-Licious: Cooking and Enjoying Periodical Cicada in 2004 while a graduate student at the University of Maryland in College Park.
She notes in her book that crawfish, lobster, crab, and shrimp are part of the same biological phylum—arthropods—as insects. "So popping a big juicy beetle, cricket, or cicada into your mouth is only a step away," Jadin writes. (Related: "U.N. Urges Eating Insects; 8 Popular Bugs to Try.")
The entomologist is now a science and technology policy fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. She's been too busy to add recipes to her cookbook, but when asked if she had new ideas for 2013 Brood II emergence, she suggested a cicada-inspired cocktail.
"Right now, craft cocktails are a big deal, so a cocktail with a candied cicada in it would be a good update," she said. The next day, she had the recipe in hand:
Red Eyes
2 shots vodka
½ shot Campari
½ shot extra-dry vermouth
1 shot fresh orange juice
Shake all ingredients together with ice in a shaker and strain into a chilled glass. Garnish with two candied cicadas* on a stick, if desired.
More of Jadin's ideas include Martha Stewart-inspired Maple Cicada Cupcakes—roast the bugs for 10 to 20 minutes, then stir them into a cupcake batter with a wooden spoon—and Cicada Bahn Mi, a Vietnamese-style sandwich with cicadas first blanched, then sautéed until brown.
Healthy Eating?
Jadin's cookbook begins with a disclaimer from the University of Maryland asking would-be cicada eaters to first consult a doctor because, like with all foods, certain individuals may have an allergic reaction.
More recent research indicates that mercury from sources such as coal-fired power plants accumulates in the bodies of periodical cicadas, which spend 13 or 17 years underground. "Now, whether that is a concern or not, I would say no," Jadin said.
People already eat fish, which are known to have mercury in their bodies, she |
will discuss international security issues, including Syria.Here is our selection for the best Portuguese releases of 2016. You might be wondering “where’s my country’s top ten?” and you are right to wonder. Sadly our team is small and based in Lusitanian lands. But hey, if you want to make your country’s top ten, send it to us and we’ll publish the fuck out of it, the more music the merrier. Then again, if you live in Sweden or Germany, we have probably already heard it because your countries are Heavy Metal Mammoths, we have Moonspell.
Anyway, here are the best musical works from Portugal in 2016 according to us.
Brutal Brain Damage – Bang Bang Theory – Do you like cowboys? Do you like Grindcore? Have you searched every inch of the web in search of these two things combined? Then this is for you! Brutal Brain Damage throw brutal shows only because they make brutal music and in 2016 they drew this awesome album and shot us right in the face with it. They were also responsible for one of the most sublime live performances of Sublime Torture Fest IX.
Mr Mojo’s Self-Titled EP – Awesome, groovy, crusty stoner from the north. Another act that is also really good live (most of these bands we saw live which explains in part why they are here), their self-titled debut ep is heavy, powerful and nut-dropping. We are psyched for what they will throw at us in the future.
Sinistro – Semente – We have already proclaimed our love for this release in a previous review that also came out on Loudness Magazine. In short, doom metal greatness with a touch of grace. Each song is unique and intense from start to finish.
Gorgásmico Pornoblastoma – Delírios de um Defunto – One of the best goregrind acts in the country, their live performances are wild, intense and just as brutal as their music. If you like Jig-Ai, these guys will also give you massive boners. The best example of true portuguese grind, no baloons, no lame jokes and no bullshit. This album absolutely enrages you, its violent, it’s fun, it’s easy to digest but only for the true fans of extreme music. So underground, their album isn’t even available on youtube, that shit is for normies anyway.
Névoa – Re Un – Ambient Black Metal done right, the mix of sombre melodies with intense blastbeat action is exquisite and sublime. Their shows are also quite mysterious and filled to the brim with all the creamy elements that we love about ambient and black metal. Re Un is certainly worth a lot of listens.
Misantropia – Power Hating Slaves – Crust punk awesomeness defines perfectly Misantropia’s ep Power Hating Slaves. A fun ride of musical destruction, bloodshed and telling the police to stick it where the sun will never shine. They are also really good live so we recommend you catch one of their shows and get a copy of Power Hating Slaves.
Colosso – Obnoxious – We have no idea where these guys came from, but suddenly they were everywhere, on everyone’s lips and all over the web. Do you know why? Because they are fucking good that’s why. All these people talking about Colosso and their amazing new album coloured us intrigued so we gave Obnoxious a listen, this we will never regret. Sometimes, popular opinion is a good thing.
Morte Incandescente – …O Mundo Morreu! – Pure unadulterated, straightforward, in your face Lusitanian black metal of the highest quality. These two guys know exactly how to make things darker, grimmer and necro, Satan has a special place in his heart for this band and we assure you he listens to this album every day. Another band that is amazing and imposing when playing live shows and another that is so underground, their album is nowhere on youtube, so enjoy this video instead.
Skinning – Slaves of Insanity – One of the most brutal bands around unleashed this brutal death gem earlier this year, so early that it seems people forgot about it, not us! Skinning is fucking great, I can’t believe we didn’t send them to Wacken that one time, but then again, I remember the competition being fierce.
Benthik Zone – Cyclum Vitam D’Aqua Pollutio and Alienum a Daemonum Inferni Squali
These guys came out of nowhere and unleashed two incredible EPs on the same year, that’s why we are including both here. Their atmospheric black metal is an ocean deep, mind wracking journey we highly recommend. They also have one of the most awesome band photos we have ever seen, it looks like god is pissing his pants in their presence. We only included the later EP here, if you want to listen the other one, find it on youtube you lazy fuck.
That’s was our selection for the best portuguese records of 2016, remember, if you disagree, rant about it in the comments, you are more than welcome.
If you like our list, tell your friends, spread it around and like our facebook page.
“Disclaimer, we don’t actually dislike Moonspell.”
Text by J.P. Alves and Jonny RamosExcello
EXCELLO LAUNCHES ZOWIE EUROPEAN STARCRAFT 2 SERIES
24th of September 2013, Arouca, Portugal – Excello Launches ZOWIE European StarCraft 2 Series
Excello, a competitive gaming tournament organizer, is proudly announcing the launch of a European StarCraft II Series of tournaments sponsored by ZOWIE GEAR.
The ZOWIE European StarCraft II Series will be divided into four open qualifiers for the European Region and five country-specific qualifiers ran in cooperation with ZOWIE GEAR partner shops in those countries. Two people will qualify to the grand finals from each open European qualifier while the country-specific qualifiers will grant the winner one spot in the grand finals. On top of the slots to the Grand Final, all the tournaments will offer a ZOWIE MiCO for the winner and a ZOWIE G-CM mousepad for the runner-up.
The tournament will have over 1000€ worth of prizes with cash and ZOWIE products up for grabs.
ZOWIE European StarCraft II Series Schedule:
Finnish Qualifier - Thursday 3rd October by www.starcraft2.fi and www.jimms.fi
and European Qualifier #1 - Sunday 6th October
UK Qualifier - Thursday 10th October by www.webhallen.com and www.maxfps.se
and Iberian Qualifier – Saturday 12th October by www.clickfiel.pt and www.vsgamers.es
and European Qualifier #2 - Sunday 13th October
German Qualifier - Thursday 17th October by www.caseking.de
European Qualifier #3 - Sunday 20th October
Swedish Qualifier - Thursday 24th October by www.kustompcs.co.uk
European Qualifier #4 - Sunday 27th October
Danish Qualifier – Tuesday 29th October by www.webdanes.dk
Polish Qualifier – Thursday 31st October by www.neogear.pl
RO16 Group – 4th – 11th November
RO8 – 12th-14th November
Finals Day 15th-22nd (TBD)
Prizes
Grand Final:
1st – 175€ + ZOWIE MASHU headset
2nd – 75€ + ZOWIE CELERITAS
3rd – ZOWIE FK + ZOWIE CAMADE
4th – ZOWIE FK
Qualifiers:
1st – ZOWIE MiCO
2nd – ZOWIE G-CM
All European StarCraft II players can compete in the qualifiers and those that wish to follow all the action will be able to do it as Jonathon ‘Wardí’ Ward will be casting all the qualifiers and Grand Final with guests at www.twitch.tv/definitive_esports.
ABOUT EXCELLO:
Excello is an international gaming tournament organizer that was founded back in 2004. During its seven years of existence, Excello has spearheaded the industry with many innovative and game-changing strategies. Today, Excello is growing faster than ever before.
From grand-scale tournaments to minor events and gamer gatherings, Excello has continued to be a highly regarded choice for top-quality tournament hosting, for both players and affiliates. Following the motto of defining excellence, the staff of Excello shares an undying and undeniable passion for gaming.
ABOUT ZOWIE GEAR:
ZOWIE GEAR is an innovative manufacturer of competitive gaming gear, founded in late 2008 with a mission to develop the best competitive gaming gear available.
We are not limited by shareholders telling us what we can or cannot do. We are a free-minded company consisting of experienced and creative individuals, united in ZOWIE on a common ground; our passion for gaming. No boundaries. No compromises. Just gaming.
ZOWIE GEAR has no ambition to become the biggest manufacturer of competitive gaming gear. We just want to be the best. If we can develop products that will increase a gamer’s performance by just 1%, we will do it. This is our mentality.Bitcoin is the first cryptocurrency, and the one that’s achieved the most widespread success. However, in the five years since the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009, a number of new ideas have emerged about how to implement cryptocurrencies, and what features can be implemented on top of them. Many of these ideas have been implemented in the form of “altcoins” — alternative cryptocurrencies that implement variations on the Bitcoin protocol with new or different feature sets.
Transaction Speed
One major limitation to Bitcoin is the time it takes for a transaction to receive enough confirmations to be effectively irreversible – often up to an hour. Since it’s unlikely that a given transaction (especially a small one) will be the subject of a double-spend attack, often it’s only necessary to wait for the first confirmation. However, this level of trust runs counter to some core principles of Bitcoin.
One solution to this is to reduce the size of the transaction blocks on which confirmations occur, allowing confirmations to happen more frequently. DogeCoin and LiteCoin transactions can both be confirmed in a couple of minutes. This does have its tradeoffs, though — namely, it causes the blockchain to grow faster, and leads to reduced overall network security due to wasted hashing power.
On the other side of the equation, NXT implements a protocol that it calls “transparent forging,” which allows the network to predict which miner will be signing a given block, and send transactions to them directly. In principle, as the network grows, this will allow it to approach transaction times of a few seconds.
Privacy
Bitcoin implements pseudonymity within the network itself, but the blockchain retains a log of all transactions between all wallets, even if the owners of those wallets are not known. This alone can be used to track users and invade their privacy. DarkCoin is an altcoin designed to fix this, by incorporating ‘bitcoin tumblers’ into the protocol. In the DarkCoin blockchain, transactions that occur at similar times are mixed together and then redistributed, making it difficult to determine which wallet sent a given transaction.
Proof-of-Stake
The proof-of-work system used by Bitcoin has fundamental problems – it burns computational power doing fundamentally useless work (in a distinctly environmentally unfriendly fashion), and, on top of that, it also encourages pooled mining, which leaves the network vulnerable to 51% attacks by pool administrators.
Proof-of-Stake, in contrast, allows users to compete on the basis of how much money they have, and not on how much hashing power they can muster. This eliminates the carbon footprint of mining, and allows for greatly increased security against 51% attacks. Several leading cryptocurrencies use proof-of-stake, partially or in whole, including BlackCoin, NXT, and PeerCoin.
DNS Resolution
One of the side effects of the existence of cryptocurrency blockchains is that they make it possible to imbed secure, trustless, tamper-proof data in a distributed and universally accessible fashion. One obvious application of this is DNS resolution – translation of machine-readable data like public keys and IP addresses into human-readable data like URLs. NameCoin is a cryptocurrency designed explicitly to provide a DNS service in its blockchain, although it’s been plagued by domain squatters and other problems. NXT implements a more flexible version of the same thing in the form of the NXT Alias system.
Right now, no single cryptocurrency implements all of the best features. Even beyond that, there are still new ideas possible in the future — Zerocoin promises to make transactions entirely anonymous using zero-knowledge proofs. One thing is sure, though — there’s plenty of room for innovation in the cryptocurrency space, and will be for some time.No, I did not give up pressure cooking! I used an easy and little-known technique for extracting juice in the pressure cooker to make a blackberry extract.
Don’t let the name fool you. Italian Soda was not invented in Italy but San Francisco (my home in America for almost 25 years) in their local Italian American neighborhood – North Beach! In Italy, fruit syrups are used for desserts, to add to water, shaved ice or granita. The idea of adding a fruit syrup to sparkling water is a uniquely American innovation and gives this recipe the “creds” to be called Soda.
My family foraging for blackberries used in this recipe (and many other delicious desserts) from our secret spot in the middle of our local urban jungle outside of Rome, Italy.
Making Extracts with Your Pressure Cooker
The advantage of extracting juice using your pressure cooker, as opposed to a centrifugal press, is that the end product is already sterilized and can last longer. In addition to a pressure cooker, you will also need a trivet, heat-proof container (or un-perforated insert), and steamer basket.
You can either use the ones supplied or sold by your pressure cooker manufacturer:
Or make one yourself from suitable substitutes (see the Pressure Cooker Accessories Page for details):
You can make extracts from fruits, herbs even flowers (make sure the flowers are edible, grown without pesticides and can be extracted using steam distillation). Some fruits can be used whole (as in berries), while others just need to be cut in half or roughly sliced (no more peeling or coring!!)
To make extracts, add a cup or two of water in the base of the pressure cooker, then the trivet, heat-proof container and on top of that the steamer basket. Place the fruit in the steamer basket, pressure cook, and the cells of the fruit will burst open and dribble their little juice in the container, below. The fruit will remain plump, because the steam will have taken the place of the juice but most of the flavor will have been lost and dribbled down into the container below. This is also what happens when you pressure cook something for more than the recommended pressure cooking time – that’s why over-pressure cooked food is so tasteless – all of the juice has left the food and gone into the bottom of the pressure cooker. The trick here, is to catch the flavor without having to do too much work to get it out of the fruit (like peeling, coring, squeezing, filtering, etc.).
The resulting extract can then be mixed with sugar, as in this recipe, to make a syrup to be drizzled on desserts or mixed with water or cocktails, used as a base for making a jelly or used in cooking to add that extra zing of flavor.
Juice Extraction Pressure Cooking Times:
High Pr. (2) Berries
strawberries, rasberries, etc. 12 min. Vegetables 15 min. Fruits with Pits
cherries, plums, peaches, etc. 18 min. Fruits with Cores
apples, pears, etc. 25 min.
Pressure Cooker Accessories Pr. Cook Time Pr. Level Open 5 L or larger trivet, steamer, heat-proof bowl 12 min. High (2) NaturalStudent Housing
Studies around the country have confirmed the value in offering students on-campus housing to improve student success, recruitment and a positive campus climate. In 2014 Bellevue College engaged Spectrum Development Solutions to examine the feasibility of student housing on campus. Subsequently, we hired NAC Architecture to design Bellevue College’s first Student Housing building.
As of Fall Quarter 2018, our H building is open and accepting applications for occupancy. This project is approximately 132,725 SF building with 400+ beds in 137 units. The unit options are a mix of Studios, 2 Bedroom, 2 Bedroom/4 bed (double occupancy) and 4 bedroom apartments. All units include in-unit kitchens and private bathrooms.
A pizzeria is located on the main level of the HUB and a multi-purpose meeting room is located on the second level. The project features private study areas and lounges on each level.
The building (construction began March 2017, and completed in August 2018) is designed to be highly sustainable, earning a LEED Platinum certification.
Total Project cost: $51 Million
Project Status: Open to Residents
Project Completion: August 2018
For more information about the operations of student housing, layouts, rental costs, or how to apply, please visit the housing website.
Renderings (jpg)
Landscape features (pdf)
Site Plan (pdf)If you live somewhere cold, then chances are this winter took a toll on your lips. Luckily, lip balm is an easy and cheap product that you can make at home – and get ready for those dry summer months. Using just two ingredients, you can make your own lip balm that is completely natural, good for your lips and skin, has a great scent, and costs very little.
By making your own lip balm, you will increase your self-sufficiency for very little money invested.
This stuff is really simple. You’ll need beeswax and coconut oil. Really, that’s it. Even better, if you already raise bees, then this lip balm will cost you almost nothing, and you’ll have a new use for the wax you get.
But if you don’t raise bees, order some beeswax or pick it up at the local food co-op or craft store. Try to get organic; you don’t want that industrial stuff that’s made downwind from some pollution factory in China. You should be able to get a pound of coconut oil at the supermarket.
You will also need something to put the lip balm into. You can buy the little twist-up tubes online for fairly cheap, or reuse some old jars. I prefer the tubes just because I don’t like the idea of sticking my filthy fingers into the lip balm.
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And that’s it. The beeswax will run you about $10 a pound, and the coconut oil will be about $7 or $8. This recipe uses a 2-to-1 mixture, so if you’re planning on using the entire pound of beeswax, you will need to pick up two pounds of coconut oil.
Be warned, though: Making three pounds of lip balm is getting into the industrial range of production. The standard lip balm tube is only three-sixteenths of an ounce. So three pounds of wax and oil will give you somewhere in the neighborhood of 240 tubes of lip balm. Of course, you always can sell it or give it away.
Melting The Wax And Oil
Melting the wax and coconut oil together is the most time-consuming part of making the lip balm, but it will still only take a few minutes. The beeswax will melt slower, so be sure to either buy the small pellets of wax, or grate it yourself into much smaller pieces.
You can use a microwave if you’d like, but use it in 30-second intervals and stir the wax often. But the best way is to use a double-boil method. You can even do this on top of the woodstove if you’d like, but just watch that it doesn’t get too hot.
To use a double-boiler, just heat up a small amount of water in a pan until it is simmering. Then, put the ingredients into a metal bowl, and put that bowl in the simmering water. This will melt the wax and oil quickly, while not allowing it to burn at all. The wax will melt much more slowly than the coconut oil, so feel free to start the wax first and then measure out the oil and then add it.
Get the water simmering, and then add one tablespoon of grated or pellet beeswax to the metal bowl. Then add two tablespoons of coconut oil to the bowl as well. Let it melt slowly, and stir it once in a while. It should take less than 10 minutes for the whole thing to be liquid.
Pouring It Into Tubes Or Containers
While the mixture is melting, set up a level surface to pour the lip balm into your containers. You might want to put down a piece of wax paper, which will make any spills easier to clean up. There are two ways to get the lip balm into the containers: Pouring or using a baster.
The baster is a good way if you have the lip balm tubes, but I’ve found that it’s easier to just take my time pouring the mixture out of a measuring cup with a sharp pour spout.
When it’s all melted and is a nice clear liquid in the bowl, you can take it off the heat. The wax will start hardening right away, so be sure to set up your tubes/containers before you remove the balm from the heat.
Everything You Need To Know To Become A Self-Sufficient Homeowner
When the whole thing cools, it will shrink a little bit as well. So, whatever container you’re using, don’t fill it all the way to the top on the first pour. Leave a little room, and then you can top it off for a nice, even surface all the way across. Otherwise, you’ll likely end up with a hole right in the middle, and if you’re giving these away as gifts, it won’t look too impressive.
This recipe of three tablespoons will give you about five to seven tubes of lip balm, and it will have a nice dull yellow color and a wonderful coconut flavor, with no artificial colors or flavors.
Adding Vitamin E Or Oils (Optional)
If your lips are really in need of some help, get liquid vitamin E, and add five or ten drops to the melting wax. The vitamin E will really help heal any badly chapped lips.
If you want to try other flavors, you can also add a few drops of essential oils of your choice. Peppermint and lemongrass are wonderful additions to the flavor and scent of the lip balm. Pick one you like and just add it in. The coconut flavor is fairly powerful, so start with a few drops of essential oil, and then add more after mixing if it’s not strong enough.
Making your own lip balm at home with only a couple of ingredients is rewarding, frugal and healthy. And if you have bees or were looking for a reason to get bees, you can add lip balm to the list of things that your bees can help you with.
Do you have any tips on making all-natural lip balm? Share them in the section below:
Don’t Stop At Lip Balm. Hydrogen Peroxide Can Perform Miracles On The Homestead. Read More.UPDATE 6.30pm: Metroid Prime 4 is being developed by a new team, and not Metroid Prime trilogy developer Retro Studios.
This detail was confirmed at E3 this week in a roundtable interview attended by Eurogamer.
But Metroid Prime producer Kensuke Tanabe is still aboard and heading the project. You can find a link to our previous chat with Tanabe about the future of the Metroid Prime series just below.
ORIGINAL STORY 5.15pm: In a bombshell announcement, Nintendo has confirmed it is developing Metroid Prime 4 for Nintendo Switch.
A simple logo was teased during the company's E3 Spotlight presentation today - and nothing else.
It comes, perhaps, as something of a surprise. It has been 10 years since the release of Metroid Prime 3, and since then the series has taken various other guises.
But after last year's panned Metroid Prime: Federation Force spin-off, Nintendo appears to have taken fan feedback on board and announced the game many thought might never be made.
That said, there have been hints at the project previously. Federation Force ended with a nod to a potential Metroid Prime 4 storyline.
A fourth Metroid Prime has also been on the cards for a long time. Way back at E3 2015, Metroid Prime series boss Kensuke Tanabe told me it was bounty hunter Sylux's ship that appeared in the post-credits scene for Metroid Prime 3, chasing series heroine Samus Aran, and that he would like to feature the character of Sylux more fully in a future game.
"Personally I'd like to create a story centring around Sylux and Samus," Tanabe told Eurogamer. "We've done a story based on the Hunters, and this time around we're doing a story on the Galactic Federation. I would like to cross the two over in the future. And of course see a little more of Samus."
At the same time, Tanabe also said the next numbered Metroid Prime game would skip Wii U and arrive on Nintendo's next console, then code-named NX.
It only took a couple more E3s... but it's finally happening.ActiveRecord callbacks are awesome little devices which allow you to “hook” in to the life cycle of an ActiveRecord object. But from a quick Googling of “ActiveRecord callbacks”, you might not come to the same conclusion. Within the first ten results (as of this writing), there are four which are either looking for or providing ways of circumventing the triggering of callbacks.
Why would you want to skip callbacks? I can think of lots of reasons, but every single one of them is the result of models being too tightly coupled to other objects and responsibilities. Examples: sending emails, logging, updating related or unrelated tables, etc. If your callback stays within its object’s area of responsibility it should never need to be skipped.
Generally speaking - and I do mean “generally” - an ActiveRecord model has one responsibility: interacting with the database. When your model exceeds that one mandate, it immediately becomes more difficult to maintain. I would even go so far as to say that for every responsibility added to a model or any other object, the difficulty of maintenance doubles (No hard numbers; just shooting from the hip.)
To avoid this exponential growth in model maintenance pain, I’ve come up with three guidelines to determine if using a callback is appropriate.
Guideline #1: Use callbacks only if they can be run every time and in every circumstance they are triggered.
This rule is pretty straightforward, but let’s look at it for the sake of clarity.
Callbacks are executed every time their triggering event occurs (e.g. A before_save callback will be triggered before every save event). If there is any instance in which it shouldn’t be called, then think about moving the logic to a decorator object.
Consider also, context. If a callback cannot be issued in every circumstance (e.g. development, production, and test), that is a warning the callback needs to be refactored into something less coupled.
Guideline #2: Never create callbacks which exceed the model’s responsibility.
If a class has more than one responsibility, then the responsibilities become coupled. Changes to one responsibility may impair or inhibit the class’ ability to meet the others. – Uncle Bob Martin Single Responsibility Principle
As mentioned previously, the responsibility of an ActiveRecord model is to interact with the database. When we require our models to send emails, create files, or what have you, we exceed our model’s one responsibility. This doesn’t sound like a bad thing at first, but as requirements change - and they always change - the model will be required to do more and more in order to meet the added responsibilities.
By limiting callbacks to the scope of the model’s responsibility, we simplify maintenance and testing and keep the application prepared for further growth.
Guideline #3: If you have to stub callbacks during testing, you are violating one of the previous rules of thumb.
RSpec now has a nifty little method called any_instance which it inherited from Mocha. This method allows a developer to apply a bit of logic to “any instance” of a particular class. In the past I have used any_instance to keep my models from sending emails during testing. I did this because the emails were dependent upon more than just the one model and would therefore fail during unit testing. By stubbing out the callback I was saying 1) my callback couldn’t by executed every time and in every circumstance, and 2) it was exceeding the model’s responsibility. In other words I was violating the first two rules of thumb.
I’m sure there are valid reasons for stubbing your callbacks during normal unit testing (what some call integration testing), but in general, stubbing every instance of a callback in order to get a test to pass is an implication your callbacks have exceeded their responsibility.
I have said somewhat facetiously, “callbacks are the devil.” I usually say something like this after dealing with a callback which was doing more than it should. Callbacks, like any tool, can be exceptionally useful and are no more “the devil” than any other tool. It’s when we make our tools exceed their responsibility that they get a little devilish.
Further Reading:Close
U.S. President Barack Obama (L) shakes hands with Colombian singer Shakira (C) as Colombia's President Juan Manuel Santos looks on during a ceremony to restitute land to Afro-Colombians displaced from their homes by armed rebel groups in San Pedro Square in Cartagena, April 15, 2012. Obama is on a state visit to Colombia following the Americas Summit which ended earlier in the day. (Photo : REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque)
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The Colombian pop singer, Shakira, who sang the Colombian national anthem at "The Summit of the Americas" this past weekend was the aim of heavy criticism by the media and her fellow Colombians after mispronouncing words of the national song.
The mispronounced words were "sublime" and "surcos" which she had replaced with "ublime" and "surco".
Although the pop singer did err while singing the anthem before top Latin American leaders, her presence at the summit meant much more than that.
READ MORE - BAR RAFAELI'S SEXY BIKINI PHOTOS
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In an address, Shakira urged businessmen to participate in "philanthrocapitalism" with the purpose to improve this world and lift it to a better level.
Shakira concluded her address by saying, "I want to invite you all to be part of an early childhood movement in the Americas. Let's design a clever strategy together to build education centers, fund programs for children aged zero to six years old. Agencies can all make a difference."
Original Anthem Audio
Edited Audio
© 2015 Latinos Post. All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.In short, it was the best debut Marquette fans have seen in at least 14 seasons, possibly longer.
Since the 2000-2001 season, 72 different players have donned the Marquette uniform and logged at least one minute of game time. During these 14 seasons, Marquette fans have witnessed the debuts of some of their greatest players. Included on the list are 5 of the top 10 career scorers (Jerel McNeal, Lazar Hayward, Dominic James, Travis Diener, and Wesley Matthews), one of the top 5 career rebounders (Hayward), player with the second highest career scoring average (Dwyane Wade), top two career 3-point shooters (Steve Novak and Diener), three of the top 7 assist men (James, Diener, and McNeal) three of the top 10 shot blockers (Scott Merritt, Ousmane Barro, and Chris Otule), and four of the top 10 steals leaders (McNeal, James, Hayward, and Diener). Some of the greatest players in Marquette history have started their careers during this great decade and a half of Golden Eagle hoops.
Luke Fischer’s debut was better than every last one of them.
Paint Touches went back and collected the stat lines from the debuts of all 72 players who have suited up for Marquette in the past 14 seasons. When you average all of their stats together, you get the following average stat line for a Golden Eagle’s first game:
13.21 minutes, 4.47 points, 2.44 rebounds, 1.08 assists, 0.51 steals, 0.375 blocks, 1.01 turnovers, 1.64 fouls, 1.57 FGM,.343 FG%.
Compare that to Luke’s debut:
33 minutes, 19 points, 9 rebounds, 1 assist, 0 steals, 5 blocks, 1 turnover, 3 fouls, 9 FGM,.819 FG%
Clearly Luke far outpaced the average. He was well above the mean in points, rebounds, blocks, turnovers, FGM, and FG%. In fact, he actually ranked number one in several categories. Fischer had more minutes, points, rebounds, blocks, and FGM in his debut game than any other Marquette player of the last 14 seasons. He is a category leader five times over. If that wasn’t enough, he is also second in FG% (min. 4 FGA) trailing only Davante Gardner who went 7/7 from the field against Prairie View A&M back in 2010.
To give some context (and to have a little fun), here is a list of the top 10 Marquette debuts since the 2000-2001 season.
10. Jimmy Butler: 11/14/08 vs. Houston Baptist. 24 minutes, 10 points, 4 rebounds, 1 assist, 0 steals, 1 block, 0 turnovers, 3 fouls 5/8 FG
9. Jerel McNeal: 11/18/05 vs. Rice. 31 minutes, 14 points, 6 rebounds, 1 assist, 2 steals, 2 blocks, 8 turnovers, 3 fouls, 5/7 FG
8. Jae Crowder: 11/12/10 vs. Prairie View A&M. 15 minutes, 11 points, 7 rebounds, 0 assists, 0 steals, 0 blocks, 0 turnovers, 0 fouls, 5/8 FG
7. Trent Locket: 11/11/12 vs. Colgate. 19 minutes, 7 points, 7 rebounds, 3 assists, 5 steals, 0 blocks, 1 turnover, 1 foul, 3/7 FG
6. Davante Gardner: 11/12/10 vs. Prairie View A&M. 13 minutes, 17 points, 5 rebounds, 0 assists, 0 steals, 2 blocks, 1 turnover, 1 foul, 7/7 FG
5. Dan Fitzgerald: 11/18/05 vs. Rice. 24 minutes, 9 points, 8 rebounds, 8 assists, 1 steal, 0 blocks, 2 turnovers, 1 foul, 3/6 FG
4. Vander Blue: 11/12/10 vs. Prairie View A&M. 28 minutes, 7 points, 7 rebounds, 5 assists, 4 steals, 3 blocks, 4 turnovers, 3 fouls, 2/3 FG
3. Dominic James: 11/18/05 vs. Rice. 30 minutes, 16 points, 6 rebounds, 9 assists, 1 steal, 1 block, 2 turnovers, 3 fouls, 4/12 FG
2. Dwyane Wade: 11/15/02 @Villanova. 33 minutes, 17 points, 5 rebounds, 4 assists, 2 steals, 1 block, 0 turnovers, 3 fouls, 8/17 FG
1. Luke Fischer: 12/16/14 vs. Arizona State. 33 minutes 19 points, 9 rebounds, 1 assist, 0 steals, 5 blocks, 1 turnover, 3 fouls, 9/11 FG
What can be taken away from this list (besides that Rice and Prairie View A&M are apparently great teams to have debuts against) is that pilot performances are typically not a player’s greatest outing. They tend to be low scoring affairs where the new player spends more time trying to keep up rather than producing. It takes a really special player (or Dan Fitzgerald…apparently) to come in and make an impact from day one. On this list of 10, five made it to the NBA, two made it to the D-league, one has the talent (but not the body) to be in the NBA, and the others played in Europe. While it may be too early to tell what Fischer’s career as a Golden Eagle will look like, it is safe to say that he is in the company of greatness. Luke’s debut was quite the early Christmas present for Marquette fans. Let’s hope it becomes the gift that keeps on giving.by Bernard K. Means, Director
One hundred years ago on September 1, 1914, in the Cincinnati Zoological Garden, the last known passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) died. Her name was Martha.
The skies of North America once teemed with these creatures, but by the end of the 19th century, their numbers were decimated by the twin perils of over-hunting and habitat destruction. The birds must have been striking as the darkened the sky in the thousands and tens of thousands, particularly the more colorful males.
We can expect the remains of passenger pigeons to be present in historic and pre-Contact archaeological assemblages, but they may not be readily identified as such since zooarchaeological type collections are often built from examples of recently deceased animals–not long extinct species. Knowing that this is an issue, the Virtual Curation Laboratory (VCL) began to scan skeletal elements from passenger pigeons shortly after the VCL was established in August 2011 to comply with the requirements of a Defense Department (DoD) Legacy Program funded-project (#11-334) “Virtual Artifact Curation: Three-Dimensional Digital Data Collection for Artifact Analysis and Interpretation” (Means 2014; Means et al. 2013a, 2013b). The basic goal of this project was |
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The Bulls got off to a good start, a balanced start, with Brad Sellers keeping the Hawks’ defense honest as he made a series of open shots. When he left the game for Pippen, the fans cheered lustily, and Sellers welcomed Pippen back with a slow, clasped double high-five. When the Bulls went through a short doldrum in the first half, it was Cartwright—not Jordan—who called for the ball. He put it up over Malone with his slow, mechanical shot with the deceptively light touch.
It was a rough game; three times Cartwright fell hard to the floor, once landing firmly on his knees with a thud that threatened to crack the hockey ice under the floor boards. Yet as the fourth quarter opened with the Bulls ahead 77-74, again it was Cartwright calling for the ball. Toward the end of the game, Collins went to what Pippen calls the “big line-up,” with Pippen and Jordan at guards, Sellers and Grant at forwards, and Cartwright at center. Pippen had 13 points, Grant and Sellers 14, Cartwright 17, and Jordan 16—balanced as balanced could be.
Then the offense began to fizzle. Jordan and Pippen were taking turns setting up plays, but both threw passes away. Atlanta pulled ahead 100-93 with 90 seconds left in the game. Jordan rallied the Bulls, however, on two consecutive possessions, and John Paxson made a three-pointer to tie the game, throwing up the shot from his shoulder with two hands, like a four-year old. Sellers forced Wilkins to take a poor shot in the final seconds, and the teams were tied 102-102.
Cartwright controlled the tip to open the overtime period, but Jordan was almost immediately called for palming the ball. He was irate, screaming at the official (although he did, indeed, appear guilty), and from that moment on he was at that higher level. He ran the offense from the point-guard position, and on defense he hounded the other team’s point guard and double-teamed the ball on passes to nearby players. When the ball was passed across to the other side of the court, he guarded his man with an almost vulturous aspect: His shoulders were hunched, his arms hung low, his mouth was open, and his gaze was directed down, unfocused, as if he were relying on some higher sense.
With the Hawks double-teaming him on offense, Jordan worked the pick-and-roll with Grant to give the Bulls the lead, then—having set himself up–drove in for a mighty stuff over the Hawks burly Antoine Carr. Then he signaled his teammates wide and went one on one against Reggie Theus, rocking him back oril1is heels and putting a jump shot up and in from the free-throw line. As the final seconds ticked down and the Bulls led 112-110, it was Jordan–and Jordan almost exclusively—who handled the ball. He was fouled, and his two free throws touched nothing but net to clinch the victory.
Had the game been played during the play-offs—or even now, after the football season—it would have been the talk of Chicago for a week. Collins said afterward, ‘’To win that game, might be a game you look back on in the season at some point and say, ‘That game might have been a big turnaround for us.’ ” Yet the Bulls followed this game with a difficult West Coast road trip that left the Hawks game behind as simply one of those regularly erratic tastes of the Bulls playing at championship caliber. Or maybe what it was, was the Bulls playing as a team up to a certain point, and then failing, and Jordan playing at championship caliber to save the game. The paradox of the Bulls is that they never would have won that game if it hadn’t been for Jordan, but they may never develop into a solid team if Jordan doesn’t allow them—and himself—to fail from time to time.
And what’s he supposed to do, let them lose?
After that game, as the Bulls opened the locker room to the media, 11 guys prepared to answer questions from a group of reporters. One man threw his gym bag over his shoulder, cut through the open door, and was gone down the gangway. No one tried to stop him.
ShareTyronn Lue called coaching the Cleveland Cavaliers “the hardest job, by far.”
Even with a roster that has tapped its payroll to feature the best basketball player on the planet and two additional All-Stars, Lue conceded he faces issues no other coach in the league has to deal with on ESPN’s NBA Lockdown Podcast.
Many of those challenges, he said, come from learning to ignore the outside noise. Lue said he understands now that reporters have jobs to do: They have to write a story or sell a book. He gets it.
"But it's just, I don't like it when they make stuff up,” he said. “If I didn't do a good job or I didn't do something [correctly], then I understand that. That's your job. You got to write it. But when you make stuff up, that's the part that I don't get that kind of makes me mad."
Lue received public scrutiny for his decisions to rest LeBron James, Kyrie Irving, and Kevin Love at multiple points throughout the season. He also chose to sit Irving and Love during the Cavaliers’ 26-point comeback in Game 3 of their first-round series against the Indiana Pacers, a move that wasn’t received well by several news outlets, according to ESPN.
"I don't like the media attention. That's why this job is just so tough because you're out in front all the time," Lue said. "It's tough because whatever you say, if you say one wrong thing — especially leading this team — it goes viral. It's a big deal.
"That's why I know that the media has to do what they have to do, because when you rest him, they cry, 'Oh, he should play! [Michael] Jordan would never sit!' And then you play him 42 minutes: 'He's playing too much!' Like, what? So if you don't play, you mad. If you play too much, you mad.... And I've come to the realization that it is what it is. That's why I just try to tune the outside noise out."
Regardless of his challenges, Lue coached Cleveland to a 51-31 record, tied with the Raptors for second-best in the East and trailing only the top-seeded Boston Celtics. The Cavaliers swept the Pacers in the first round and dispatched the Raptors in Game 1 of the second round, 116-105.
Cleveland is the prohibitive favorite to emerge as Eastern Conference champions and make a third consecutive NBA Finals appearance. So Lue’s issues, while very real in his world, are relative when compared to other coaches who may be on the hot seat across the league.The parking lot at the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s is without its longtime guardian. Egee Mabolis, the attendant who has presided over the notoriously stressful parking lot for years, was in a bike accident on November 20 that broke his spine and left him temporarily paralyzed.
Within days of the accident, a GoFundMe campaign sprouted up to support Mabolis’ care and recovery. Donations started coming in as word of the accident spread on social media. In just six days, more than $17,000 has been raised by more than 450 people.
John Eder, who started the campaign, is a Trader Joe’s employee and a friend of Mabolis (who is employed by a security company, not the store).
“It’s very moving,” says Eder. “In his job he gets an amazing amount of shit from people in the parking lot, and he’s always just, like, water off a duck’s back and responds with kindness.”
In an update posted three days after the GoFundMe page went live and a third of the $25,000 goal had been raised, Eder wrote “if you look through the comments you can see that Egee really touched a lot of people’s lives in a positive way, just by small kindnesses.”
Mabolis has a certain kind of “that guy” fame. If you have ever parked at the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s, you’ve seen him in his signature safari hat—and you’ve probably experienced the small kindnesses Eder refers to, too. It’s safe to say that he has calmly and confidently directed thousands upon thousands of anxious Angelenos toward open parking spots in one of L.A.’s most feared lots. That kind of cool is not something that goes unnoticed in this city. About two years ago, the LA Weekly published a feature about Mabolis which revealed more of his story: He is from Dinagat Island in the Southern Philippines, which has fewer than 20 cars, an interesting twist given that he believes his purpose is to make the Silver Lake Trader Joe’s parking lot a better place.
Eder said he talked to Mabolis yesterday and is considering increasing the fundraising goal (currently set at $25,000) because the cost of treatment is likely to be high. Mabolis told Eder he does not have health insurance through his employer. The support from the community has been “very moving,” Eder said. The Silver Lake store has posted flyers about the fundraiser and a paper hat that appeared on the store desk filled up with dollar bills. Another business in the area has offered to organize a matched donation, too, and customers have offered connections for rehab facilities and emotional support. Eder has faith Mabolis will be back in action someday.
“A lot of crew members in the store are really sporty,” he says. “He’s always a sought-after guy to be on the basketball squad. He’s in good shape. Hopefully it will serve him well in his recovery.”Continuing our Cellarmanship series, about the joys and how-to of storing and aging your beer at home, we interviewed the brewers at Avery Brewing Co. in Boulder. Matt Thrall is Avery’s head brewer and Andy Parker is the head of their barrel program. Avery’s barrel program has brought us some spectacular beers including, but not limited to, Rumpkin, Uncle Jacob’s Stout, Brabant, Immitis, and Muscat D’Amor. Avery’s non-barrel aged beers are also delicious, you may have heard of some of these: Hog Heaven, DuganA, Mephistopheles, Samael’s, The Czar, The Reverend, and Maharaja to name a few.
http://vimeo.com/video/59463153
In this interview we talk to Andy and Matt about the joys of drinking beer fresh. We talk about off-flavors and oxygenation in aged beer, especially Trans 2 Nonenal which imparts cardboard flavors in addition to sherry and port flavors. We open up a vertical of Avery’s Hog Heaven (and Mephistopheles for a later video). You might be surprised by some of the things they say about aging your beer at home. Also check out our previous interview with Eric and Lauren Salazar, of New Belgium, for more on the topic.
We’re curious, what is in your home cellar? What types of beer do you prefer to age? Are you sitting on anything special? What’s your most memorable experience with an aged beer? Have you had any go bad? Let us know what you think. Cheers!
***UPDATE – Be sure to check out our interviews with Crooked Stave and New Belgium as well!
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Stay updated with our email updates and like us on Facebook. We’re also on Twitter and Instagram at @focusonthebeer.Demon’s Souls is one of those games that’s hard to define. Sure people try, the most common phrase I hear describing Demon’s Souls, and all Souls games in general, is that it’s incredibly hard. While later Souls games certainly were about being hard at times, especially for marketing purposes (looking at you Prepare to Die Edition), Demon’s Souls wasn’t made to be difficult. The game has a strict set of rules that players have to follow, and it spends the first few areas easing the player into it. The tutorial is just a simple track for the player to follow and get used to the movement and combat controls, coincidentally it’s also impossible to die in the tutorial until the boss. After the tutorial the player is thrown into the first proper level. Later souls games would make it a point to beat the player senseless with an unexpectedly hard early boss or area, but Demon’s Souls unleashes only the most basic enemies on the player at first. The dreglings in 1-1 take upwards of six to seven hits to kill the player, and drop healing items nearly every death. From Software planned the first few levels perfectly, they treated it like an old NES game, where you couldn’t teach the players with long drawn out tutorials because cartridges didn’t have enough memory to account for it. Instead, developers would teach the players through clever little opening levels, that introduce each of the game’s mechanics individually, before they are thrown into the harder sections of the game. In the first level alone, Demon’s Souls introduces its players to mid level shortcuts, environmental interaction (things like cutting the chains in the tower with the cling ring to drop treasure), dodge and block timings, parrying, metroidvania elements (the locked door to the Mausoleum), traps, branching paths, dragon attacks, ambushes, consumables, and enemy elemental weakness; all without a single tutorial box popping up to describe how to use certain items. It also introduces the player to the most important gameplay aspect, and one that differentiates Demon’s Souls from its successors. Rather than bonfires or lanterns like later souls games, the checkpoints in Demon’s Souls are called Archstones, and they are only unlocked after defeating a boss. Rather than little checkpoints along the way to a boss like in the Dark Souls games, in Demon’s Souls you only have the one checkpoint until you defeat the boss and get the next. Due to this, From Software had to build each of the levels in a circular format with several shortcuts throughout the level. The level design of Demon’s Souls really shines because of this mechanic, it would have been easier for the developers to just have the levels just be a long line with checkpoints randomly placed along the way, but they chose to create these incredibly vertical, and believable levels that folded in on themselves time and time again.
Following the first real level, the player talks to a little being called the Monumental, and is introduced to the game’s plot. For the most part, a plot doesn’t exist. There’s a big fog covering the land, the player decides to jump in the fog to see what’s going on, now its the players job to beat all evil in the fog. But while Demon’s Souls lacks a plot, it excels at world building. Rather than having this complex story, From Software chose to create the magnificent world of Boletaria. Instead of searching for information about your current quest or what’s next for this kingdom, you search for information about what Boletaria was like before the fog, what each area was meant to be, and how each area turned into what it is today.. Demon’s Souls, much like its successors, is a game that is more about viewing and learning about the world around you, rather than following a set list of objectives.
I’ll touch on this subject only briefly because it stays the case in basically all souls games, and doesn’t just pertain to Demon’s Souls. While you do pick a class when you start a new game, your character isn’t limited down any one upgrade path. Souls games allow the player to specialize in whatever array of skills he wants, allowing for incredibly varied play styles, as well as a lot of replayability.
Regardless, the Monumental then opens up all of the Archstones for player use. This is where Demon’s Souls really shines. After only completing one boss, the player is given the ability to choose from five different levels to try next. I can’t imagine the nightmare that From Software must have gone through in trying to balance each of the archstones to be playable at early levels, but still challenging later, but they deserve an award because it is done incredibly well. The beginning levels of each archstone each have their own strength and cons to consider when choosing which one to beat first. If you’re playing a strength build, you can go to the Stonefang Tunnel and get the Crushing Battle Axe, if you’re playing a faith build you can go to the Valley of Defilement and get the Blessed Mace, or if you’re playing a magic or dex build you can go to the Shrine of Storms and get the Crescent Falchion. Speaking of the Shrine of Storms, first attempts at the level are always very hard to new players, because of the speed and relentlessness of the enemies. My first play through I spent death after death just trying to get up the stairs at the beginning of the level, and then one day, in my frustration I accidentally unequipped my weapon. Astonishingly, hitting a skeleton with my fist was insanely effective. After looking it up to make sure it wasn’t a glitch, I learned that the skeletons are weak to crushing damage, and since your fists are crushing damage and exceptionally fast, it just happens to be the most effective way of killing the mobs. Little things like that are what make Demon’s Souls so great. There’s always a simple, and relatively easy way to beat a level, and it all comes down to the player to discover that best way. For example, bringing up 5-1 again, but the first Shrine of Storms level takes the player on a long and hard trek, fighting many of the area’s harder enemies on the edge of cliffs; but if the player searches the level thoroughly, they’ll find a shortcut that cuts out ninety percent of the level, taking the player straight to the boss.
Speaking of bosses, this game has some amazing bosses. Sure, there are a few generic bosses, big fat dudes that are nothing more than a dps rush, looking at you Leechmonger and Dirty C
olossus, but for the most part the bosses of Demon’s Souls show some amazing creativity. There’s the Fool’s Idol, that can’t be killed until a mob in the level is killed before entering the boss fight, there’s Maiden Astraea, who if you kill her bodyguard/close personal friend in her boss room before confronting her, she will simply kill herself and lament the player for being so power hungry. There’s the Old Hero, who’s blind so if the player wears the Thief Ring, the boss won’t be able to find them unless they are attacking him, there’s the Penetrator Boss Fight, where an NPC helper will pop in to help you if you had saved him previously.
Demon’s Souls isn’t perfect, however, some cases show some very questionable game design. Drop rates for pure upgrade stones are brutally low, meaning that some players will spend months grinding for an item that has a.1% drop rate. World Tendency is a wonderful idea that From Software didn’t implement well enough. If only your tendency didn’t immediately drift to the server average when you logged online, then it would be much more feasible to complete all of the Tendency events even while playing online. There are few other petty niggles in the game, the Dragon God Boss fight is a test of patience more than an actual test of skill, magic is too powerful, with one ability being able to two to three hit nearly every boss in the game. These niggles don’t amount to anything more than little spots on an otherwise stainless masterpiece. Demon’s Souls, and to a lesser extent all Souls games, created the perfect experience for a person who likes their games to be a little unforgiving, their atmosphere oppressive, and their combat varied.Way back in the days of yore, we spoke of Alex Rodriguez with reverence. We watched in awe as a titan of physical ability attacked the science of hitting with an artist’s masterstroke, and manned his position with aplomb. How we marveled at the pure natural talent that looked to have a chance to be one of, if not the best shortstop of all time.
A-Rod closed the month 9-for-28 (.321) on @NYDNSports back pages. What a comeback! — Jesse Spector (@jessespector) February 28, 2015
This is not an article about the morality of Rodriguez’s choices. This article will not delve into how performance-enhancing drugs caused his body to swell and possibly, in turn, his statistics. That is a subject for a different corner of the Internet, and a different time. This article discusses the effect his extended sojourn from baseball could have on his body and statistics.
Rodriguez is 39, which is a fair bit older than the average ballplayer. Unlike most ballplayers his age, Rodriguez is pretty out of practice. You may have heard he worked on his swing with Barry Bonds during his time off. That’s a pretty good sensei to team up with when you’re looking to re-tool your swing. Yet it’s not Rodriguez’s efforts that will necessarily have the biggest impact on his level of success. Even before the drugs came into the equation, Rodriguez was obscenely talented, and it stands to reason that there’s some shred of divine physical blessing still inside him somewhere. Therefore we can form some sort of reasonable expectation that whatever loss of bat speed the former slugger has experienced may not be completely catastrophic.
Until Rodriguez can demonstrate otherwise, it’s a pretty safe bet that opposing pitchers are going to challenge him with fastballs in his weak spot. The following charts display the areas in which Rodriguez has been the most prone to swinging and missing at fastballs. The charts, conveniently displayed in the form of a GIF in sequential order, show that he’s been prone to whiffing in the top of the zone:
Without question, the fastballs will largely be headed north, and in staggering numbers. It’s not just that Rodriguez has trouble making contact there, it’s that ever since 2012 (the year after he’d torn the meniscus in his right knee), he’s been slugging more and more against fastballs in the lower half of the zone. Another GIF for your viewing pleasure:
Barring a scouting report out of spring training that speaks to the contrary, opposing pitchers have very little incentive to throw Rodriguez a fastball anywhere but in the top of the zone to minimize both the amount he’ll make, and the quality of that contact. Rodriguez’s contact rate peaked in 2010 with a mark of 79.8%, and since then it’s dropped steadily every year. In a limited sample size (181 plate appearances), Rodriguez managed to only make contact 72.2% of the time. That was the lowest mark of his career. He still managed a 113 wRC+ in that time because, of course, he’s Alex Rodriguez.
Like a good Jeff Sullivan article, I’ve used the above space to say that we (myself especially) don’t really know anything, and everything is just speculation at this point (Note: I'm not criticizing Jeff. He's a brilliant man). What we do know is that age is death to bat speed, and it’s a lot worse when one hasn’t seen big league pitching in quite some time. I wouldn’t bet against Rodriguez’s natural ability, and if he can cobble together a decent amount of plate appearances at DH, I would wager he can be somewhere near league average. Whether or not injuries wreak havoc on him is another factor entirely and it remains to be seen if he can even make it out of Spring Training intact. 2015 could very well be the swan song of the man who once was poised to be the one of greatest to ever play the game.
In a way, he still is one of the best to ever play. By fWAR he’s the 14th greatest of all time, just behind Mickey Mantle, and six home runs away from tying Willie Mays for fourth place on that list as well. PEDs did not grace Alex Rodriguez with a discerning eye for pitches and a beautifully destructive swing. Those gifts are what must now carry him to the finish line of his career. It is this, and not the pomp and circumstance and theatrics of his return to Yankee Stadium that will be the most fascinating part of his upcoming season. There’s a very real chance that all this will not end very well. Yet I’ll be damned if I miss what could be a very special show…
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All stats, charts and injury information courtesy of Fangraphs, BrooksBaseball, and BaseballProspectus.
Nicolas Stellini is a contributor at Beyond the Box Score and a member of the IBWAA. You can follow him on Twitter @StellintTweets.The Highlanders downed the Lions 34-15 but some late consolation tries may come back to haunt them after they missed out on a crucial bonus point.
Bernard Foley's shoulder injury has ruled him out of the Waratahs' semifinal rematch against the Highlanders in Sydney on Friday, meaning Kurtley Beale will get another chance in the No.10 jersey.
Foley hurt his shoulder in a final pre-season trial against the Highlanders on February 19 and was expected to spend three-to-four weeks on the sidelines.
He has been spotted at Waratahs training in recent weeks gradually building his workloads with running and passing drills, but the minimal physical contact at training on Tuesday was a telling sign that he needs another week's rest before a potential return against the Queensland Reds in Brisbane on March 27.
MARK METCALFE/GETTY IMAGES Bernard Foley trains with the Waratahs on Tuesday.
Waratahs assistant coach Nathan Grey said Foley - whose time off has been regarded by some as a blessing in disguise after a taxing stint in Japan after the World Cup - was not being held back for precautionary reasons.
READ MORE:
* Brumbies hold off NSW Waratahs in Canberra
* Highlanders tame Lions to top NZ Super Rugby conference
* Former Highlanders rugby player Seru Rabeni dies
* Highlanders ramp up search for Jamie Joseph's successor
* Highlanders defeat Waratahs in final preseason match
ROB JEFFERIES/GETTY IMAGES Waratahs first five-eighth Bernard Foley looks to offload as he's tackled in a preseason match against the Highlanders in a Super Rugby trial match in Queenstown last month.
"If he was good he'd be on [the team] for sure," Grey said.
"He trained pretty well today but he was in the red bib so hands were off Bernard today – no contact – so we've just got to grade that up during the week and see how he goes."
With NSW set to name their starting XV on Wednesday there are still question marks regarding the wing, hooker and No. 8 positions.
The Brumbies end their four-match losing streak against the Waratahs in style with a 32-15 win over their rivals in Round 2 of Super Rugby.
Matt Carraro and Reece Robinson are in a two-way race for the second wing spot with Zac Guildford, while Tolu Latu is understood to have the inside running at hooker ahead of fellow 23-year-old Hugh Roach.
Waratahs veteran Wycliff Palu is also a chance of starting at No. 8 Jed Holloway has a hip niggle that Daryl Gibson said he didn't think would keep him out of Friday's fixture but judging by the team's formation at training on Tuesday, Palu is well within the frame to retain the position he has made his own for years.
As defence coach, Grey has watched a replay of last year's semi-final at least 20 times; a game the Waratahs went down 35-17 to the Highlanders and one that still does not sit well with anyone in the squad.
"You've always got to learn from those experiences and we went into that game really confident and really positive that we could play a style of footy that would earn us the right to play in the final and we were outplayed, so that certainly still stings amongst the players and the coaching staff," Grey said.
Grey pinpointed the Hurricanes' tactical kicking game as a particular strength the Waratahs will need to be prepared for if they are to atone for their most recent loss to the Brumbies.
"They're a smart, well coached side and they play a good, exciting brand of football," Grey said.
"They're going to back their style of footy against out style. I think it is going to be an open game. The opportunities we create we've got to make sure we nail them and then on the other side of the ball anything they try and create from an attacking perspective that we're ready for it."0 of 32
Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
Week 3 is in the books, and the only thing for certain in the NFL is that parity reigns.
"Any given Sunday" is a common phrase in league circles, but this year it seems more prevalent as the amount of close games has kept fans glued to the edge of their seats. Even in Week 3 where we saw some blowouts, plenty of games came down to the wire.
For a bunch of NFL addicts like you and me, this season has been fantastic!
Some of you may be wondering where Matt Miller is, as he usually handles the power rankings while I take the picks each week. Have no fear, Matt is just getting some much-needed time off for the birth of his child. He'll be back at it next week.
So as not to mess things up too much, I used his last week's rankings as a baseline. So, some of the teams might be a tad higher or lower than if I'd used my own rankings as a starting point, but I didn't want to have Matt reinvent the wheel when he came back. Still, there were plenty of wild swings as some of the teams that we questioned after two games showed their true colors after three.On Wednesday the Cowboys signed rookie offensive tackle Dan Skipper from the University of Arkansas. He’s officially listed on the Cowboys’ roster at 6’ 10” and 311 pounds. Skipper took part in Cowboys Rookie Camp last week as a tryout player and was subsequently signed to the roster. Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett joked with reporters following Friday’s rookie practice that Skipper was listed at 6’ 9.40” on his coach’s information sheet, but the roster given to the media listed 6’ 10”.
That’s just a shade over Ed “Too Tall” Jones who was listed at 6’ 9” and played defensive end. The overall #1 pick of the 1974 NFL Draft, Jones played for the Cowboys for 15 seasons and went to 3 Pro Bowls and won a Super Bowl ring.
By the way, when you’re as tall as Skipper, you would be good at blocking things…specifically field goals and extra points. During his 4 years with the Razorbacks, he blocked 7 field goal attempts which is two shy of the all-time FBS record. He won SEC Special Teams Player of the Week Co-Honors multiple times in his career. His special teams prowess was in addition to his pancake blocks at left tackle where he earned first-team All SEC honors his senior year.
According to Cowboys equipment director Mike McCord, Skipper wears a size 19 shoe. That’s a size larger than Leonard “Bigg” Davis, who played guard for the Cowboys from 2007-2010. Leonard was so large at 6’ 6” 381 lbs, his nickname big had two GG’s (“Bigg”). He wore a size 18.
Skipper edges out another former Cowboy, Marc Colombo, for the title of tallest Cowboys offensive lineman in team history (“Too Tall” played defense). Colombo is 6’ 8”. He played offensive tackle for six seasons for the Cowboys (2005-2010) and now serves as assistant offensive line coach. For Colombo, he now has a player that he can truly see eye-to-eye with on the playing field as he’s coaching him.
As for the Cowboys’ all-time largest player in terms of weight, that title goes to offensive tackle Aaron Gibson who, according to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, became the first NFL player to tip the scales at 400+ lbs when he weighed-in at 410 during 2002 Cowboys Training Camp. Gibson joined the Cowboys on Halloween Day, 2001 and played one game later that season. He was released the following September after 2002 Training Camp and signed with the Bears. Gibson started his career with the Detroit Lions. He was their 1st round pick in 1999 and played 2 ½ seasons before joining the Cowboys.
Gibson was 6’ 6” and before you think he was as wide as he was tall, that’s not true. Like Leonard Davis and Marc Colombo, he was muscle, not fat. He was just a giant of a man, similar to Skipper.
Here’s what I remember about Gibson: when the Cowboys signed him, the equipment staff asked the Lions’ staff to send his helmet to Dallas because the Cowboys didn’t have a large enough helmet. Luckily the Lions wear a silver helmet just like the Cowboys; all the equipment guys had to do was swap the Lions’ logo for a blue Cowboys star.
As for the opposite end of the spectrum, the Cowboys’ brought in a player for a tryout during Rookie Camp that was only 5’ 6” tall. Kade Harrington is a rookie running back from Lamar. He was officially listed on the “Weekend Workout” roster at 5’ 6” and 184 lbs. If you think that’s too small to play in the NFL, think again. Trindon Holliday played six years in the NFL (2010-2016) as a return specialist and wide receiver. He’s only 5’ 5” and 165 lbs.
The comic relief of the Cowboys Rookie Camp was seeing Harrington on the same field as Skipper. Their height differential was 16” with Harrington at 5’ 6” and Skipper at 6’ 10”.Rep. Tammy Duckworth is challenging Sen. Mark Kirk for his U.S. Senate seat in Illinois, and the incumbent unleashed an incredible comment about her mixed-race heritage during tonight’s debate in Springfield.
Duckworth, a U.S. Army veteran who lost both legs in the Iraq war, was born to a U.S. Marine father and a Thai-Chinese mother. Her father’s family has been in the U.S. since before it was a country; she is a member of the D.A.R. Her opponent, Senator Kirk, responded to her citing this background as evidence of her reasoned decision-making on issues of defense by scoffing at how her Thai ancestors could have fought alongside George Washington.
Mark Kirk, we’ll remind you, has been busted multiple times for claiming military honors he did not earn or receive.Manor is poised for a reduced effort in next month’s Six Hours of Mexico, with its No. 45 Oreca 05 Nissan having dropped off the entry list for the fifth round of the FIA World Endurance Championship.
Both Richard Bradley and Matt Rao, who were initially entered alongside Roberto Merhi, have moved over to the team’s season-long No. 44 entry with Mexican driver Alfonso “Picho” Diaz Guerra (Toledano) for the Sept. 1-3 event at Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez.
Tor Graves, who has been in the No. 44 car since the start of the year, is currently not on the entry list. Manor has yet to officially comment on the changes.
The shakeup comes in the wake of rumors linking ex-Formula One driver Pastor Maldonado to a seat in the No. 44 car, alongside Toledano, who during a pre-event press conference in Mexico City was announced as having also secured a seat for the race.
According to the latest WEC entry list, Toledano also does not currently feature with the Manor squad.
The Graeme Lowdon and John Booth-led team has run two cars in every WEC race this year, except for the 24 Hours of Le Mans when it was limited to only a single entry due to the late addition of its No. 45 entry for the season.
Manor’s expected reduced effort results in a 11-car LMP2 field for Mexico, thanks to the one-off entry from Greaves Motorsport, featuring Bruno Junqueira, Luis Diaz and Roberto Gonzalez, for the event.If you liked the Supreme Court’s reinstatement of Habeas Corpus, vote Obama. McCain did not like it and will be in a position to appoint a justice who will vote with the four dissenters.
Bush dismissed the ruling as that of only 5 against 4. (Wasn’t that the margin that made him president in 2000?)
The US Constitution says, “The Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”
The Constitution diary says,
“The basic premise behind habeas corpus is that you cannot be held against your will without just cause. To put it another way, you cannot be jailed if there are no charges against you. If you are being held, and you demand it, the courts must issue a writ of habeas corpus, which forces those holding you to answer as to why. If there is no good or compelling reason, the court must set you free. It is important to note that of all the civil liberties we take for granted today as a part of the Bill of Rights, the importance of habeas corpus is illustrated by the fact that it was the sole liberty thought important enough to be included in the original text of the Constitution”
Robert Dreyfuss at The Nation on the conflict between Colin Kahl and Brian Katulis on the future of the US in Iraq. Kahl
‘proposes a policy called “conditional engagement” for Iraq that would leave a large contingent of American forces in Iraq for several years, and which would make America’s presence in Iraq contingent on political progress in Iraq toward reconciliation among the country’s ethnic and sectarian groups and parties.’
Katulis
‘ to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq, except for a small force to protect the American embassy. Katulis’ CAP plan also suggests a halt in the U.S. training of Iraqi government forces, while Kahl and CNAS want to continue to train the Iraqi security forces long after U.S. combat forces are withdrawn.’
McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Thursday:
‘ Baghdad – A roadside bomb targeted the major general’s convoy Sameer Al-Waeli, the head of the social attention in the ministry of interior, near Beirut square in Palestine street neighborhood. Six people were injured including three guards. – Gunmen threw a grenade on an army patrol in Safarat neighborhood (west Baghdad). 6 soldiers were wounded. – A roadside bomb targeted the Shaab’s mayor in Shaab neighborhood (east Baghdad). Five people were wounded including three guards. – A controlled explosion by the Iraqi army took place for a roadside bomb which was found in Ghade |
impossible to have your domains stolen — unlike Namecheap. And what’s more they are a dollar or two cheaper than Namecheap.
Moving away from Namecheap
After having Namecheap let someone into my account, and then seeing the systemic security failures at Namecheap it became clear to me that I would never be able to trust this company and it would be dangerous and foolish to keep any domains or hosting with them.
They had offered me a free year of hosting as a feeble attempt at compensation for wiping my 2 VPS servers; after making the decision to move everything away from Namecheap I told them I would not be using the free hosting as I would no longer be using their services. Instead I would like a refund for the hosting payments for the compromised servers.
Namecheap’s Offer: a 1 month refund
Ignoring the fact that for 2 weeks out of the last month, I had paid for the servers were sat completely empty and locked after they let a hacker erase them; this offer is still a slap in the face.
They seem to think that letting a hacker into someone’s account, and someone complaining that they were not completely satisfied with the service are basically the same thing…and both get a boilerplate response and 1 month refund.
I told Namecheap their offer was not acceptable; but now I’m basically blacklisted by them and no one will discuss the case, and they have ghosted all the chats and evidence in the hacker case and said that I will need a court order to obtain any copies of chats they had with the hacker about my account.
I still have some more stories up my sleeve so you can expect to hear more of my Namecheap rants in coming weeks.Brain scans from study. Credit: Science
(Medical Xpress) -- Researchers funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) at the University of Cambridge have identified a brain abnormality which is found in drug-dependent individuals as well as their siblings who have had no history of drug addiction. The brain abnormality identified by the researchers makes it more difficult for individuals to exercise self-control.
This research will help understanding about why some people with a family history of drug abuse are at a higher risk of addiction than others. The findings are published today in the journal Science.
Led by Dr. Karen Ersche, the researchers scanned the brains of 50 pairs of brothers and sisters, of whom one was dependent on cocaine while the other did not abuse drugs or alcohol. Their brains were compared with those of 50 unrelated healthy volunteers who had no personal or family history of drug addiction.
The researchers found that both the drug-dependent and their non-dependent siblings shared the same abnormality in the parts of the brain associated with how we control our behavior, known as the fronto-striatal systems. This kind of abnormality is typically seen in people who struggle with drug addiction.
Dr. Karen Ersche, of the Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience Institute (BCNI) at the University of Cambridge, said: It has long been known that not everyone who takes drugs becomes addicted, and that people at risk of drug dependence typically have deficits in self-control. Our findings now shed light on why the risk of becoming addicted to drugs is increased in people with a family history of drug or alcohol dependence: parts of their brains underlying self-control abilities work less efficiently. The use of addictive drugs such as cocaine further exacerbates this problem, paving the way for addiction to develop from occasional use.
Dr. Ersche added: Given that some forms of drug addiction are thought to develop out of bad habits that get out of control, its intriguing that siblings who dont abuse drugs show similar brain abnormalities as the ones who have been abusing drugs for many years. While we still have more work to do to fully address the reasons why some family members show a greater resilience against addiction, our results will provide the scientific basis for the development of more effective preventative and therapeutic strategies for people at risk of addiction.
Professor Chris Kennard, chair of the Neuroscience and Mental Health Board at the Medical Research Council which funded the research, said: Drug addiction devastates thousands of families in the UK and the MRC is leading a strategy for addiction and substance misuse research, by funding cross-discipline research that addresses the biological, medical, social and economic aspects of addiction and substance misuse. This research represents an important step towards understanding some of the factors which cause some members of a family to abuse drugs, while leaving others unaffected.
The next step will be to explore how the siblings who dont take drugs manage to overcome their brain abnormality in their daily life. The scientists want to understand what makes the non-drug using siblings resilient to addiction. A better understanding of what may protect them from drug abuse may provide vital clues for developing more effective therapies for those trying to beat their addiction.
The study was funded by the Medical Research Council and conducted within the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge, which is co-funded by the MRC and the Wellcome Trust.
Explore further Traumatic childhood may increase the risk of drug addiction: study
More information: www.sciencemag.org/content/335/6068/601.abstract
Provided by University of CambridgeHealthy eating really does cost more.
That’s what University of Washington researchers found when they compared the prices of 370 foods sold at supermarkets in the Seattle area. Calorie for calorie, junk foods not only cost less than fruits and vegetables, but junk food prices also are less likely to rise as a result of inflation. The findings, reported in the current issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, may help explain why the highest rates of obesity are seen among people in lower-income groups.
The scientists took an unusual approach, essentially comparing the price of a calorie in a junk food to one consumed in a healthier meal. Although fruits and vegetables are rich in nutrients, they also contain relatively few calories. Foods with high energy density, meaning they pack the most calories per gram, included candy, pastries, baked goods and snacks.
The survey found that higher-calorie, energy-dense foods are the better bargain for cash-strapped shoppers. Energy-dense munchies cost on average $1.76 per 1,000 calories, compared with $18.16 per 1,000 calories for low-energy but nutritious foods.
The survey also showed that low-calorie foods were more likely to increase in price, surging 19.5 percent over the two-year study period. High-calorie foods remained a relative bargain, dropping in price by 1.8 percent.
Although people don’t knowingly shop for calories per se, the data show that it’s easier for low-income people to sustain themselves on junk food rather than fruits and vegetables, says the study’s lead author Adam Drewnowski, director of the center for public health nutrition at the University of Washington. Based on his findings, a 2,000-calorie diet would cost just $3.52 a day if it consisted of junk food, compared with $36.32 a day for a diet of low-energy dense foods. However, most people eat a mix of foods. The average American spends about $7 a day on food, although low-income people spend about $4, says Dr. Drewnowski.
But it’s easier to overeat junk food, Dr. Drewnowski adds, both because it tastes good and because eaters often must consume a greater volume in order to feel satisfied. Still, even those who consume twice as much in junk food calories are still spending far less than healthy eaters.
“If you have $3 to feed yourself, your choices gravitate toward foods which give you the most calories per dollar,’’ said Dr. Drewnowski. “Not only are the empty calories cheaper, but the healthy foods are becoming more and more expensive. Vegetables and fruits are rapidly becoming luxury goods.”» The Hopper Legacy Chapter 1.6 - A House of Their Own
Ava and Odin named their daughter Beatrice, which means “Bringer of Joy.” Her parents would later tell her that her name was like a prophecy, because her arrival marked the beginning of some of the happiest days of their lives.
The couple soon received a letter with more good news. The judge assigned to their custody case had been appalled by Heather’s treatment of Lizette, and her parental rights were terminated. Ava promptly adopted her beloved Lizzy, and she and Odin took Ava’s last name, uniting them as a legitimate family.
Lizette had to share a room with her “Sissy.” She didn’t mind, except at night, when the baby’s cries woke her and she would begin to cry, too. The noise was unbelievable.
Ava had quit her job at the bistro. Daycare for the two young girls would have cost almost as much as she made working, and she didn’t want someone else to raise her children. She also wanted to focus on her gardening skills, so she went to city hall and registered as a self-employed gardener. She and Odin were saving for a bigger house, and the extra money she earned from selling her produce made a big difference.
The biggest difference, though, came months later, when Odin announced that he’d been promoted! He was now a Line Cook, and that position came with a sizable bonus. The couple agreed to begin the search for a larger home for their young family.
It didn’t take long. The Hoppers soon found a three bedroom home with a large garden area and room to expand. Ava thought it was beautiful. Odin thought it was big, and that was enough for him. The family moved in just weeks before Christmas.The video above was captured by the Lundie brothers and company from Takeitlive.
They’re stalwart players in the swim scene, always there capturing the video stream for USA Swimming at Grand Prix competitions, Nationals, Junior Nationals, etc. The video above was captured at the 2013 Santa Clara International Grand Prix.
Many thanks to the Lundie’s for producing this swimming video…in super slow motion.
For age grouper swimmers and masters swimmers, this is exceptional footage of the best athletes on the planet doing streamline dolphin kicks, breakouts, and flip turns.
See if you can find your favorite swimmer. Matt Grevers, Missy Franklin, Ryan Lochte and more are all in this swimming video.
For more visual fun, checkout the Lundie brother’s capture of a super slow motion finish in the men’s 50 freestyle.
2013 Santa Clara Grand Prix Men’s 50 freestyle coverage as reported by swimswam editor-in-chief Braden Keith:
This finish looked closer than it was, as American Nathan Adrian was right on his season best with a 21.76 to win this 50 free. Brazilian World Record holder Cesar Cielo was 2nd in 22.04, and Anthony Ervin was 3rd in 22.07.
Cielo, who has the most-watched knee in swimming right now, looked a little better off the start than he did at the Arizona Invitational last weekend, though he was still clearly nowhere near where Adrian was. The outcome was about the same for the Brazilian who had knee surgery in the fall.
Olympic silver medalist Cullen Jones took 4th in 22.41, and Tyler McGill was 5th in 22.64. McGill is focused wholly on the 100 fly this summer, but could be a darkhorse if he decides to swim this 50 free at Worlds Trials.
Of note, Matt Grevers swam a 23.91 in the B-Final butterfly. By comparison, Cielo, the defending World Champion was a 23.5 split in his 100 fly in prelims on Friday (before warming down the second 50 meters in freestyle.)Image copyright Getty Images Image caption Previous attacks on minority communities over blasphemy allegations have led to protests
A Christian couple in Pakistan have been beaten to death by an angry crowd after being accused of desecrating a Koran, police say.
Their bodies were burned at the brick kiln where they worked in the town of Kot Radha Kishan in Punjab province.
Police identified the victims only as Shama and Shehzad, AFP reports.
Blasphemy is a highly sensitive issue and critics argue the laws are often misused to settle personal scores and that minorities are unfairly targeted.
"Yesterday an incident of desecration of the holy Koran took place in the area and today the mob first beat the couple and later set their bodies on fire at a brick kiln," local police station official Bin Yameen told the AFP news agency.
A security official told the BBC that local police had tried to save the couple, but they were outnumbered and attacked by the angry crowd.
Senior police officials and government ministers have now arrived there to investigate the killings.
In May gunmen in the city of Multan shot dead a lawyer, Rashid Rehman, who had been defending a university lecturer accused of blasphemy.
And last month a Pakistani court upheld the death penalty for Asia Bibi, a Christian woman convicted of blasphemy in 2010 - a case which sparked a global outcry.
Since the 1990s, scores of Christians have been found guilty of desecrating the Koran or of blasphemy.
While most of them have been sentenced to death by the lower courts, many sentences have been overturned due to lack of evidence.
However, correspondents say even the mere accusation of blasphemy is enough to make someone a target for hardliners.
Muslims constitute a majority of those prosecuted, followed by minority Ahmadis.Yet Poznan also illustrates the threats posed to Poland’s success story, not to speak of Europe’s weaker economies. The kind of European Union infrastructure money that helped build the highway is being phased out. Empty state coffers in stricken countries, twinned with an emphasis on austerity rather than stimulus spending, threaten to crimp Poland’s growth as well.
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“In 2008, 2009, we never felt the financial crisis,” said Malgorzata Olszewska, director of global sales and marketing at Solaris. After a record year for the company in 2011, with over $450 million in revenues, sales have slackened as Greece, Spain and Portugal have more or less ceased making purchases, and Italy has become much more cautious. “That’s three markets that have completely fallen away,” Ms. Olszewska said. “We’re not pessimistic exactly, but more careful.”
Poles have good reason to hope they can defy the odds again. Poland’s economy was the only one that did not shrink in 2009, the year the financial crisis hit hardest. While nowhere near the 6.8 percent clip Poland achieved in 2007, growth is forecast at 2.7 percent this year, the fastest in the bloc, after expanding by 15.8 percent from 2008 to 2011.
Since the just-completed European soccer championship, which Poland hosted with Ukraine, many Poles have taken stock of their nation’s progress, and an unusual good mood has captured an often pessimistic country. “It offered proof that we had changed,” said Bazyli Glowacki, 36, outside the deluxe Stary Browar shopping mall, named after the former brewery it is housed in. “You have nicer stores. People are better dressed. The theaters have better plays on.”
Another Poznan resident, Stanislaw Skrzypczak, cited an old Polish expression for unexpected success to describe the recent improvements. “Poland caught God by the legs,” he said.
It was not just a lucky catch, however, but one that was underpinned by sound decisions in Warsaw. André Sapir, a senior fellow and economist at the Brussels policy organization Bruegel who specializes in European integration, said that Poland’s success was a result of good management of both monetary and fiscal policy, keeping its debts low and its exchange rate flexible. Poland exercised strong financial supervision, he said, preventing the kind of explosion of consumer borrowing in foreign currencies that went out of control in Hungary.
“They did a number of things simultaneously that were coherent and always understood that they had to be flexible,” Mr. Sapir said. One of their advantages, a large domestic market, could not be replicated by Poland’s neighbors. With 38 million people (more than the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary combined), Polish companies are less dependent on export markets than their peers.
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“I like to buy from Polish companies because the money stays here,” said Tomasz Niespodziany, 22, who cited the Piotr i Pawel grocery chain and the local Fortuna brewery among his favorites. He and his girlfriend were looking at rings together at a branch of the Polish jewelry chain Apart, which designs and produces its jewelry in and around Poznan and sells it in 180 stores across Poland.
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Apart taps a patriotic strain in the country’s consumers, using the Polish model Anja Rubik, who was also featured on Poland’s version of “America’s Next Top Model,” to sell its collection. It has also benefited from the new airports and improved roads, which speed distribution and bring down costs.
Ask around Poznan and residents offer all sorts of different explanations for their recent success. Some say history has inured Poles to such drastic turns in their fortune that they enjoy life while they can, spending their hard-earned zlotys. Others say they learned to be resourceful under the hardship of Communism, where a company like Apart once had to buy old gold jewelry and melt it down before it could make a new ring or bracelet.
Mr. Niespodziany attributed it to a positive form of incompetence. “Even the crisis doesn’t work in Poland,” he joked.
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Starting in 1997, the city of Poznan bought secondhand German streetcars from the 1950s and ’60s, nicknamed “Helmuts” after the hefty former chancellor Helmut Kohl. Today they share the tracks with state-of-the-art Solaris trams.
“That’s one of ours,” Ms. Olszewska said excitedly, pointing to a sleek green and yellow tram from the No. 16 line, gliding past the handsome stone building that houses the philharmonic here. A family-owned business started by her father, Solaris illustrates both the historical as well as the business ties between Germany and Poland. Ms. Olszewska’s parents left Poland after martial law was declared in 1981, settling in West Berlin. They returned and founded Solaris, which now employs 2,200 people in Poland and 200 abroad.
The company now exports top-of-the-line buses and trams back to Germany, with the first Solaris streetcars scheduled to hit the streets of Jena next year and Braunschweig in 2014.
Ms. Olszewska joined Solaris in 2004, the same year that Poland became a member of the European Union, moving back to Poland to live for the first time since leaving as a little girl. She now divides her time between Berlin and Poznan. The drive used to take up to four hours, but with the new road today she can do it in two and a half.
Asked where her loyalties lie between Poland and Germany, Ms. Olszewska, who has German citizenship and grew up speaking Polish at home and German in school, neatly sidestepped the question. “By now I feel like a European,” she said. “I feel at home in both countries.”Nathan Jones is confident he will return for the crucial clash with the Giants
MELBOURNE co-captain Nathan Jones is confident he'll be fit to return from a quad injury for Saturday's massive clash with Greater Western Sydney in Canberra.
Jones sustained the injury in the round 13 win over the Western Bulldogs, and his leadership and hardness around the contest would be a huge boost for the seventh-placed Demons.
The veteran's likely return will offset the absence of key forward Jesse Hogan, who broke his collarbone in last weekend's loss to North Melbourne.
Speaking on RSN radio on Tuesday morning, Jones said he just needed get through training this week.
"I've got a couple of sessions to get through but I should be right to go," Jones said.
"I could have potentially played last week, but it would have been cramming too much (conditioning) into the week.
"We decided to reduce the risk by getting three solid training sessions in (this week).
"With this injury I was lucky enough where I could get out there quickly and back into training kicking on my left foot."
Another likely inclusion for the trip to the nation's capital is Bernie Vince, with the midfielder available for selection after completing a two-match ban for striking Adelaide's Eddie Betts.
With the Demons still in the hunt for a top-four spot, coach Simon Goodwin has several players pressing for senior selection in the VFL.
Pushed out of the side by the return of Max Gawn from injury in recent weeks, versatile big man Cameron Pedersen looms as a replacement for Hogan.
Rookie Corey Maynard continued his good recent run with a team-high 28 possessions in Casey's 43-point win in windy conditions.
Second-year key forward Sam Weideman presented well in attack for 20 touches and latched onto a screamer in the final quarter before converting the set shot – one of his three goals for the afternoon.
Midfielder Angus Brayshaw gathered 22 disposals in his second game back from repeated concussions, while defender Josh Wagner added 22 touches of his own.Frederick Mark Gedicks
Brigham Young University – J. Reuben Clark Law School
William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal, Vol. 18, pp. 901-914, 2010
God of Our Fathers, Gods for Ourselves: Fundamentalism and Postmodern Belief:
” … there is also an ethical reason for wariness. One should pause at imposing absolute truth on those to whom the validity of that truth cannot be demonstrated unless they already believe it — indeed, absolute truth whose universality or validity may sometimes be in question even among those who claim to believe it. As Learned Hand once famously declared, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure that it is right.” This is the best safeguard of religious freedom in a pluralist democracy, a constant and present and humble reticence at imposing one’s own truth as the truth for all.”Noting that the Mafia fixed the 1919 World Series, Michael Savage reasons that it’s no stretch to believe the Democrats could manipulate the results of the 2016 elections.
“Think about it,” the talk-radio host and author told WND in an interview about his new book, “Scorched Earth: Restoring the Country After Obama.”
“If a gang can fix the World Series by bribing players, what do you mean, they can’t fix an election?” Savage said.
“It’s an evil, evil, evil, brilliant gang with unlimited resources and a press that they own have taken over America,” Savage said of the Obama administration and its Democratic Party allies.
Savage’s new book, released Tuesday, argues the nation has been undermined by terrorists from without, by anarchists from within, by a president and politicians with contempt for the Constitution and the law, and by a complicit liberal media.
“Scorched Earth” reached No. 10 overall, late Tuesday, on Amazon.com’s bestseller list.
Get Michael Savage’s “Scorched Earth: Restoring the Country After Obama”!
As WND reported Monday, Savage believes America “could be one bad election away from losing everything.”
Savage recently told his radio listeners Obama “has been floating balloons to steal the election, should Trump win.”
“First, they started with the lie that Russia is hacking into our election system,” he said.
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Then, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson announced his agency was considering declaring the election a “critical infrastructure,” giving the federal government the same control over security it has over Wall Street and the electric power grid.
“What they’re going to do is they’re going to say that the Russians hacked the election, the election is not a valid election, and in order to preserve America’s democracy, Obama has to stay in office,” Savage said, “or they have to start with a new election.”
In his new book, Savage shows how billionaire activist George Soros has poured millions of dollars into what Savage calls “the most dangerous subversive organizations in the United States,” including more than $30 million alone to Black Lives Matters.
In August, Soros was exposed in a massive document hack for manipulating elections in Europe via his non-profit organizations.
Savage has described Soros as “more evil than any other man on earth.”
“Why is this man permitted to ply his politics all over the planet?” Savage asked his listeners. “Just because he has a sick vision and he has billions and billions of dollars to spread around among communists and socialists, liberals, Hillary, all part and parcel of the same pack.”
While Savage writes that Obama’s “scorched earth policies” are turning America into a Third World nation of terror, riots, mobs and chaos, his detailed and lively documentation of the past eight years offers hope.
Noting his themes of “borders, language, culture” have been adopted by Trump, propelling him to the Republican nomination, Savage believes the common, working-class “Eddies” of America who won World War II will “come to our defense one more time.”
“They will stand shoulder-to-shoulder to honor the legacy of those who built this nation, who fought its wars, who bowed in prayer in a rich variety of faiths, and who raised the families that are the backbone of America.”
Get Michael Savage’s “Scorched Earth: Restoring the Country After Obama”!Everyone knows Andre Johnson is big, fast, and catches everything in his zip code. What everyone does not know, however, is that Johnson is also one of the greatest route runners to ever play the game. While Jerry Rice set unbreakable records by making every release and every cut look exactly the same on a snap-to-snap basis, Andre Johnson wins by making every route look maddeningly different. Unlike Rice, who would keep defenders guessing by not tipping his route until the last possible step, Johnson claims his victims by fooling his opponents into jumping at the wrong tipped route in the first place. A quick-footed dancer of the highest caliber, Johnson’s proficiency at stringing together multiple decoy routes into single packages has caused defenders’ heads to collectively spin for over a decade.
Some of Johnson’s finest work of the 2013 season came against the deservedly vaunted Richard Sherman and the Seattle Seahawks secondary. While 'Dre did have a fairly typical outing of nine catches for 110 yards, Johnson really turned heads (literally) in the final minutes of the fourth quarter. Lined up against the Big Bad Wolf himself, Johnson was tasked with beating Sherman on a deep out to kick start the Texans’ potentially game-winning drive. Take a look below.
Let’s break down this route frame by frame to really appreciate the football artistry taking place. The red line represents Johnson’s intended route before the snap. Starting by giving a quick jab inside to (ideally) widen Sherman away from the sideline and create space, Johnson then wanted to work back into that space with as little contact as possible. After clearing the legal five yard contact area, Johnson wanted to ride Sherman slightly back inside to prevent himself from getting "squeezed out" of his route. Following getting pressure on Sherman with physicality to the inside, which is no easy task, Johnson next wanted to motor down, break, and "flatten" a yard back up field on his way to the sideline with Sherman’s momentum still going in the opposite direction.
This technique is one of the more effective principles of route running called the "shoulder ride". Often used by bigger, more physical receivers like Anquan Boldin, Dez Bryant, and Calvin Johnson, the shoulder ride is a common technique used to gain separation through physics. Make the defender move in one direction, wall him off from your intended route with your own body, and then go the opposite way. The more difficult it is for the corner to plant and redirect through the receiver, the more likely a successful catch can be made. Here is a quick video detailing the shoulder ride concept.
Now let’s see what actually happened. Johnson starts off his route with the inside jab, but Sherman keeps his eyes locked on Johnson’s hips and does not bite.
Rather than going for contact, Sherman starts to open his hips just a couple of strides into the route. This tells me that he is trying to position himself to "stack" on the route rather than sliding into a "trail" position on Johnson’s hip.
As seen below, Sherman gets over top of Johnson in an attempt to choke off the stem of the route and impede his progress down field. "Stacking" is a popular technique for corners in defenses that run a lot of Cover One and Cover Three because its primary vulnerabilities, secondary releases to the inside and come back routes back underneath, are covered with underneath linebackers and a safety in the middle of the field (circled in blue). With Sherman not on his hip, Johnson has to adjust his route to not only free himself to get down field in a timely fashion, but also to make Sherman get back inside so that he can break to the sideline uncontested as originally intended.
In order to get Sherman back to the spot that he wants, Johnson threatens a skinny post by slightly motoring down to cut back underneath Sherman to the inside.
Now that Johnson is running free with good body positioning inside of Sherman, the real fun can begin. Sherman is forced into catch-up mode to play the skinny post because a deep reception in the number two seam would be the "worst case scenario" on this particular play. Once Sherman fully opens his stride to use his excellent makeup speed against the threat of the skinny post, his longer frame turns from an advantage to a disadvantage.
Johnson has Sherman’s hips turned vertical, and unfortunately for Sherman he does not have the foot quickness necessary to plant and close on such an absurdly gifted route runner. Chalk this one up to a future Hall of Famer teaching a lesson to one of the best youngsters in the game.
Speaking of one of the best youngsters in the game, Andre Johnson’s "okie-doke" style of route running seems to have rubbed off on Texans' 2013 first round pick DeAndre Hopkins. Take a look at Hopkins’ route at the bottom of the image during Andre Johnson’s battle with Sherman.
Notice any similarities? Go route – stutter – go route – break – come back. This is not just one move or one route, this is an all-out assault on Brandon Browner’s feet and hips. Hopkins, like Johnson, does not just want Browner to bite on one move; he wants Browner to bite on every move. By the time Hopkins makes his final break into the comeback route, he wants Browner to be so twisted around that the gigantic corner has no shot at making a play on the ball. There are a lot of longtime veterans who do not run routes like this, let alone rookies in the fourth game of their career. Hopkins’ awareness during his routes to know when he is winning, when he is losing, and when to change his approach in the middle of a loss to turn it into a win is rare. Browner found that out that hard way in the final minute of the fourth quarter when the young rookie beat his press for a nice 17 yard gain.
Again, let’s break this down frame by frame. This is the route that Hopkins intended to run--a quick jab to the sideline to get Browner to leave the inside release open, followed by a shoulder ride and snap to a flattened post route under the high safety.
Hopkins jabs left and tries to cut back to the right. Like any press corner worth his salt, however, Browner smartly walls off the inside release and tries to force Hopkins outside towards the sideline.
Hopkins, knowing he does not have time to find a way to run through a guy as big as Brandon Browner, concedes the inside and prepares a second attack deeper down field.
After being denied the inside, Hopkins widens his stem outside to get separation from Browner and force his hips to get vertical down the field.
Browner is baited into flipping vertically to try to squeeze the route into the sideline, and that is when Hopkins springs the trap. "Nuk" decelerates and cuts back inside with suddenness that a lanky corner like Browner simply cannot match. The actual reception is almost a formality after his final cut. Just like in the shoulder ride, this route is all about manipulating the defender into going where you want him to go and then breaking in the opposite direction.
Hopkins, as he intended to from the beginning, gets to his spot on time. The original route may not have worked, but the intelligence, effort, and technical precision demonstrated here to make Plan B a success is what makes this play so impressive. The nifty diving grab did not hurt, either.
That was not the last stop for the DeAndre Hopkins Express, however. A few short minutes later in overtime, Hopkins would use his previous victory over Browner to make a clutch first down reception. Just like a veteran pass rusher will set up an offensive lineman for an entire game to bite on one move at an opportune time, veteran receivers often try to set up defensive backs into putting themselves in compromising positions at the end of games. Hopkins might not be a veteran, but he sets up Browner like a seasoned pro.
Hopkins is given a few yards of cushion by Browner and takes advantage by selling a go route on an outside stem. Take notice to how Hopkins widens away from Browner and bends low to really sell himself trying to win with his speed. It’s the little things that matter when running a route in the NFL, and Hopkins is somehow already a master of those minute details.
Selling a go route is only phase one in Hopkins’ master plan - now the fun begins. Hopkins starts to motor down and lean into Browner right when he flips his hips to run with the apparent deep route. This is the exact same move that Hopkins used at the end of the fourth quarter to spring himself back inside for a big gain, and Hopkins knows that Browner will be extra cautious against such a move being used again.
Once the rookie flashes inside, Browner immediately bites. Hopkins then throws down yet another move and breaks back outside to convert the first down.
Hopkins could have just run a simple out route towards the sticks and hoped Browner missed him, but he didn’t. Instead, Hopkins decided to do his best Andre Johnson impersonation and undress a veteran corner with a triple route combination in overtime of a deadlocked game. Rookies do not do this. They just don’t. Make no mistake about it, this is a rare football player. Dreadful pass protection, injured running backs, playing second fiddle to Johnson, and poor quarterback play may have kept 'Nuk Hopkins’ numbers to human standards in his inaugural season, but the tape hints that Texans fans could be in for something special.
The rest of the NFL is officially on notice – DeAndre Hopkins is nasty, and he's just getting started.Ryen Russillo and Bruce Bowen examine if Kevin Durant has a point when he says the NBA's rest issue is only targeted for five players. (1:59)
SAN ANTONIO -- While Kevin Durant empathizes with fans over the controversy about NBA teams resting star players, he doesn't see why commissioner Adam Silver is seeking to get team owners involved.
"The truth about it is, it's only for a couple of players in the league," Durant told ESPN. "They don't care if the 13th man on the bench rests. It's only for like LeBron [James], Steph [Curry], [James] Harden, Russell [Westbrook]. It's only for like five players. So you want a rule just for those five players?"
Silver sent out a memo last week to the league's owners, stating that resting marquee players has become "an extremely significant issue for our league," and he urged them to be more hands-on in that decision-making process.
Durant, an All-Star forward for the Golden State Warriors who is recovering from an MCL sprain and tibial bone bruise, said he empathizes with both fans and players.
"Players, if anything, need a mental break sometimes. And sorry, they're human," Durant told ESPN. "They go through so much every single day. There are so many obligations off the court that you don't know about.... It might not be a physical break, it might just be a reset mentally, and I get that.
"And I also get if I was a fan and could afford to get tickets, and I'm circling LeBron James, Stephen Curry and Russell Westbrook on my calendar, I would want to see them play live. I would be disappointed as well. I see it from the fans' perspective and the players' perspective. I'm caught right in the middle."
The Cavs have given Kyrie Irving and LeBron James games off to rest, and Kevin Durant understands why. "Players, if anything, need a mental break sometimes," he said. "And sorry, they're human." Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports
Curry sat out one game to rest, on March 11, when the Warriors also rested Klay Thompson, Draymond Green and Andre Iguodala. James has missed five games to rest and Cleveland Cavaliers teammate Kyrie Irving has missed four. They both sat out games recently, on March 4 and March 18.
The San Antonio Spurs have rested Kawhi Leonard twice. Harden and Westbrook haven't missed a game this season.
Durant also questioned why there was an absence of outrage when teams at the bottom of the standings have implemented a similar "resting" tactic for longer periods of time.
"It's hard for you to just craft a rule out for the top players," he said. "I've seen guys that's not even in the playoffs resting, sitting out for the rest of the season. And it's nothing against those guys. I'm not trying to bash them or anything. [Phoenix Suns center] Tyson Chandler is out. They got him sitting out for the rest of the year. I'm sure he wants to play, but they're not saying anything about Tyson Chandler, so it's hard for me to really talk about this. It's not a league-wide rule. It's not a league-wide concern.
Editor's Picks Harden: Playing 82 should matter in MVP race James Harden has played in all of the Rockets' games this season and thinks that should |
.
Stubbs admits the uncertainty is affecting Everton, describing the speculation as a "cloud", but is positive of the Toffees' hopes of progressing without their star striker.
"We are now waiting to see if Romelu stays or goes. The sooner that cloud is removed, whether he is staying or going, it is better for the club so they can move forward.
"Irrespective of Romelu's transfer Everton have shown they are going to be as serious as they possibly can to get into the top four - that is the aim for Everton at the moment."The New Zealand Jewish Council wants University of Auckland to publicly distance itself from Professor Scott Poynting's remark.
A University of Auckland professor is to leave his job after an anti-Semitism row sparked by a letter to the Waikato Times.
Acclaimed hate crimes expert Professor Scott Poynting compared an Israeli company employing Palestinians to a German company employing Jews. The commentary rankled various groups, including the New Zealand Jewish Council and a fellow academic, who complained to the university, branding the professor's letter to the editor as anti-Semitic.
University Vice-Chancellor Stuart McCutcheon addressed the complainants in a letter, which he detailed investigations had been undertaken.
The institution had found Poynting not guilty of professional misconduct and it had been suggested to Poynting he should write a second letter to the editor of the Waikato Times clarifying he was not intending to make anti-Semitic remarks, McCutcheon said.
Poynting had refused to write a clarification, so McCutcheon apologised on behalf of the educational institution.
"... I do acknowledge that the way in which Scott Poynting expressed himself caused considerable distress to many members of the community. On behalf of the University of Auckland, I offer my own sincere apologies for that distress," McCutcheon wrote.
However, the final line of McCutcheon's letter saw the New Zealand Tertiary Education Union (TEU) wade into the debate.
"Professor Poynting's employment with the University of Auckland concludes on 30 June 2016."
It was important to note Poynting was retiring in June, as had always been the case, TEU organiser Enzo Giordani said.
The university, however, would not confirm the manner of his departure.
The union believes the final line made it seem as though Poynting had been pressured to leave the university as a result of the fracas, he said.
"The letter is misleadingly written. No action was taken against Scott Poynting," Giordani said.
Although Giordani would not expand what action could be taken, a response to the university had been drafted.
When questioned whether Poynting was retiring, the university said it had no further comment on this matter, other than what was in the letter was accurate.
The New Zealand Jewish Council was not satisfied with McCutcheon's letter, either.
In a joint statement, New Zealand Jewish Council chairman Geoff Levy and president Stephen Goodman said they were still seeking an apology from Poynting, and wanted the University of Auckland to publicly distance itself from the remarks.
"The hateful views expressed by Professor Poynting in his letter to the Waikato Times have no place in New Zealand, let alone within our academic institutions. While it is reassuring to know that Poynting will not be working at the University of Auckland much longer, the private nature of the apology from Professor McCutcheon does not promote transparency or proper accountability.
"The New Zealand Jewish Council would have expected the University of Auckland to publicly distance itself from the views of Professor Poynting, as other universities have done in similar situations, rather than privately apologise for any distress caused."
Poynting had written, "Thank you for explaining in your article how SodaStream generously provided work for Palestinians (Waikato Times, November 26). I understand that IG Farben provided work for large numbers of Jews. Not that I have anything against Germans, mind you."
He signed it Scott Poynting and did not make any mention of his professional capacity.
The letter was written as a private citizen and should not be considered as a work-related matter, nor should it come under the guise of academic freedom, Academic Freedom Aotearoa co-founder and TEU president Sandra Grey said.
Academic freedom is the belief that scholars should be able to criticise or comment on ideas or facts that may be controversial to political groups or authorities without being targeted for repression, job loss, or imprisonment.
"He wasn't speaking as an academic... There was no misconduct, so the matter ends there. Just because people were made uncomfortable doesn't mean it is misconduct," Grey said.
She also believed more was being made of it than needed to be.
"Letters to the editor cause distress quite often. This is not, by any stretch of the imagination, new that someone has been upset by a letter to the editor."
Poynting could not be contacted. An out-of-office email stated he was on study and research leave from January 1 to June 30.Today Miami FC made significant movement towards getting a team ready for the 2016 NASL Season as they released their club badge and seal. Co-owners Riccardo Silva and Paolo Maldini hope to have Miami FC up and running in time to kick off next season as one of several named expansion clubs.
The club branding carries the colors orange, blue and aqua with a soccer ball placed in the middle. The ball features the silhouette of both North and South America. The colors are somewhat similar to the teal and orange that were initially used on the club’s countdown website and are still present on the team’s Twitter header. Teal and orange are the colors used by the Miami Dolphins, the city’s popular NFL franchise.
“Our mission with Miami FC is to connect with Miami’s communities through the global language of soccer,” said Antonio Barreto, from Miami FC told NASL.com. “We wanted to make sure the badge and seal drew inspiration from the distinctive character that makes the city great, and we also wanted to create something that was truly representative of Miami’s dynamic spirit.”
Although it has not been confirmed by the league or the club, a reliable source has informed Midfield Press that Miami FC are all but ready to name Alessandro Nesta as the club’s first head coach. Nesta played alongside Maldini for both the Italian national team and for Italian club side AC Milan. More recently Nesta spent two seasons with MLS’ Montreal Impact. If confirmed as Miami FC’s coach, he will make his managerial debut with the new NASL club.
Miami FC will be the fourth NASL club based in Florida, joining the Tampa Bay Rowdies, Fort Lauderdale Strikers and the 2015 NASL expansion side Jacksonville Armada. With David Beckham looking to launch an MLS club in the same city by 2017, Miami FC will look to get the most out of the footballing community as they can before the rival side begins playing.
Stay tuned to Midfield Press for more news and updates on Miami FC and all other NASL clubs.The great Chinese investment wave is gaining power.
Direct investment by China in the U.S. is on track to hit a record $30 billion in 2016, according to research firm Rhodium Group and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, which works to promote closer ties between the countries.
That's double last year's record $15 billion investment.
There are few signs that investment will slow as China works to increase its exposure to higher-income countries and counteract an economic slowdown at home. Fears over the stability of the yuan have also increased foreign investment.
"The ongoing overhaul of China's growth model, lower political barriers for outbound investment, and greater confidence by Chinese businesses to invest overseas will propel an outflow of hundreds of billions of dollars from China in the coming decade," the groups predict.
The report estimates that more than 1,900 Chinese-affiliated firms are now established in the U.S., employing roughly 90,000 full-time workers. Tens of thousands more workers are indirectly employed through Chinese firms.
A Chicago skyscraper building project led by Dalian Wanda -- owned by China's richest man, Wang Jianlin -- is expected to create around 2,000 construction jobs, for example.
New York City remains one of the most popular places for Chinese to invest, mostly in the real estate or finance sectors. Prominent commercial property investments include Fosun's purchase of the Chase Manhattan building, and insurer Anbang's acquisition of the iconic Waldorf Astoria hotel.
California's tech and entertainment industries are also a big draw, while energy investments tend to be clustered in Texas.
Related: This Chinese dealmaker wants to buy some of the world's top hotels
While the overall investment atmosphere is rosy, the report notes increased scrutiny of Chinese deals in the U.S., which have become an election year issue.
"Regulators and members of Congress have a responsibility to guarantee that legitimate concerns about Chinese [investment] are addressed," the report states. "At the same time, they also need to ensure that political rhetoric and politicization do not needlessly impede job creating investment inflows, particularly in an election year."
The report also warns that distortions in China's economic system -- such as privileges for state-owned firms -- could have an adverse effect on foreign investment, and even harm countries with close economic ties to China.Wired: The Untold Story of ILM
Posted on May 20, 2015
From the Wired article: The Untold Story of ILM, a Titan That Forever Changed Film
In the early 1980s, a teenager named Michael Bay had a summer job at Lucasfilm, filing artwork. Two decades later he would become ILM’s most … hands-on collaborator.
SPIELBERG: Michael Bay is the most demanding special effects director ever. When we do the Transformers movies, Michael lives at ILM with them. He just goes up and camps out there.
MICHAEL BAY (DIRECTOR, PRODUCER): They’re always thinking about story, that’s what I like about ’em. It’s not just paint-by-numbers there. It’s a very involved shop.
JAEGER: I’ve worked on seven of his films now. It’s come to the point where he asks for me, like, “Make sure Alex takes a look before you guys send it out.” But on Pearl Harbor I was just “the guy.” I didn’t have a name.
BAY: Pearl Harbor was the first time I worked with ILM.
From left to right: Rian Johnson, Michael Bay, Ron Howard and Guillermo Del Toro
JAEGER: At the beginning of the process he came at us like, “I want to see real explosions, real planes, real ships.” We built a 35-foot-long battleship with teak decking, but as the model was getting prepped, we developed a computer-generated version.
BAY: We filmed 20 real planes, but we would’ve never been able to do the shots without making those digital planes.
JAEGER: In one scene where we fly over the USS Hornet, there’s supposed to be a whole deck full of B-25 bombers. We only had two on the real aircraft carrier. We sat down with Michael and said, “Pick out which one is the real plane and which ones are the CG planes.” And he’s like, “I was there, I shot this.” He probably looked at it 10 times, and he’s like, “Well, the first one’s gotta be real because you wouldn’t put a fake one first.” “Nope, it’s CG.”
BAY: After Pearl Harbor, George Lucas wrote me a note saying we’d raised the bar at ILM.
BAY: A lot of artists worked on Optimus’ face. Getting it right was very important. But it’s like a bad face-lift. And I’m there meeting with the artists and we can’t figure out why it doesn’t look right.
PHILLIPS: One of our technical directors—the artist who designs how parts move relative to each other—is a guy named Keiji.
BAY: Keiji wasn’t even on Optimus’ face, but he had a meltdown.
KEIJI YAMAGUCHI (TECHNICAL ANIMATOR): I wanted Optimus Prime to look like a hero, but he didn’t, and I exploded. It was very gentle; I wanted the transformation to be huge, like a wrestler in a sumo ceremony. I said, “You’re insulting the Japanese idea of animation.”
PHILLIPS: Nobody talks to Michael Bay like that.
BAY: I just smiled and I’m like, “Oh my God, I want you to do Optimus Prime.” So he took it and fixed the face. And he also was the genius who helped us figure out how to take these 10,000 parts and make them transform.
JEFF WHITE (VFX SUPERVISOR): It’s equal parts technology and artistry.
WAYNE BILLHEIMER (VFX EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): The second Transformers was my first real working relationship with Bay. I went into a couple of early preproduction meetings with him where I began to get what was going on: “I’m going to shoot it, I’m going to give it to you guys, and you guys are going to have to come up with some stuff. It’s going to be brutal.”
BAY: It has gotten heated a few times. Directors like me love our crew and we love the people we work with, but we push ’em and push ’em and push ’em.
BILLHEIMER: There was a point toward the very end of production when he lost it. He had just come from a screening with Jerry Bruckheimer and didn’t have a complete third act. He called me, screaming: “I just saw a movie that I can’t fucking release!” It was nuclear-level Bay screaming. All I could do was scream back at him. There was a good five minutes of screaming along those lines. The next day he goes, “That was a fun little yell yesterday.”
BAY: They never let you down.
BILLHEIMER: He gets very hot very fast, and very sweary, which is always entertaining.
PHILLIPS: He’s a tyrant. He’s a nonstop string of obscenities. He’ll berate you and tell you you’re an idiot. But he always makes your shot better.
BILLHEIMER: And the movie makes a billion dollars.Recently, one of my millions of critics left a message on social media about my writings on the topic of climate science. I pasted the critic’s comment below, as well as a response from a third party who explains to her that she is watching the wrong movie.
I present the exchange here as an example of how two people can look at the same screen and see completely different movies.
Your first reaction might be along the lines of thinking my critic is nuts, or has low reading comprehension. But neither is likely to be the case. The critic is (I assume) totally normal. This sort of hallucination happens to all of us on a regular basis. But we can only see it clearly when it happens to others.
Don’t be smug that you can clearly see how deluded the critic is. The point is not about this one person. The point is that sometimes this one person is you. And me. No one is exempt. It’s just easier to see the phenomenon in others.
Here is the exchange.
Critic:
“First of all, anyone who writes an article on climate science that starts it with “I don’t know much about science and even less about climate science” should not be taken seriously.
But then it is very much in vogue these days to flaunt your ignorance while railing against anyone who takes facts, science, and education seriously. They are just a bunch of elitists. His flippant, thinly reasoned but cutesy questions is one way to flaunt it I guess. But that does not a scientist make. He is the trump of scientists to use your analogy.”
Response from Chris Fusco:
“His article is about persuasion, not climate science. His blog is all about the science of persuasion and observations of persuasive technique.
“He is the trump of scientists to use your analogy.” He’s not a scientist, and doesn’t say he is. He says at the start “I don’t know much about science, and even less about climate science.” He clearly states “As a public service, and to save the planet, obviously, I will tell you what it would take to convince skeptics that climate science is a problem that we must fix.”
He says “climate scientists are the Hillary Clinton of scientists. They think facts and reason will persuade the public. Even though science knows that doesn’t generally work.” The science of persuasion demonstrates that people are most persuaded not by facts, but by emotions. He has argued in the past based on the science of persuasion that Trump didn’t win because of his command of facts or reason, but rather because of his ability to appeal to emotion to persuade people to vote for him while Hillary mainly tried to appeal to people using facts and reason.
The substance of your comment supports the premise. You were persuaded to comment based on emotion, making only emotional arguments, validating the point. You didn’t address his “thinly reasoned” arguments and refute them on their merits by disproving them using the “facts, science and education” you believe he is missing. Instead you said things like “But then it is very much in vogue these days to flaunt your ignorance while railing against anyone who takes facts, science, and education seriously. ” This is a emotionally persuasive straw man argument. The implication is that he is ignorant and rails against anyone who takes facts, science, and education seriously and you don’t. He never made that argument. His arguments were all about persuasion.
Saying “They are just a bunch of elitists. His flippant, thinly reasoned but cutesy questions is one way to flaunt it I guess,” instead of addressing his actual arguments, ironically, is a flippant, elitist emotional argument used for the purpose of persuasion. Berating someone, like shaming, is an emotionally coercive persuasion technique. It says “You are socially unacceptable to a class of people that are better than you.” The implication is “I’m better than you. You’re not good enough.” It tells the audience, “If you don’t agree with me you’re not good enough.” It’s not imbued with any grace, accountability or responsibility though. The accuser makes no actual effort to improve others. At best they’re just blowing off steam. At worst they are being emotionally coercive, which is a form of violence.
If you sincerely take facts, science and education seriously, you use them to inform and educate others, especially those who may have it wrong. You approach every argument as a dialogue – an opportunity to both teach and learn, testing the limits of your own knowledge and experience and measuring that of others. That’s what a scientist does. That’s what Scott did in his article. Hence, the “cutesy” questions. He doesn’t presume to understand or know it all.
Persuasion is not about informing and educating, it’s about influencing someone else to change THEIR behavior to accomplish YOUR goal. This is an important point. The evidence of one’s goal is in the substance of their technique. If you read the article, he uses logic and reasoning to support his arguments and statements. He was not trying to persuade his audience using emotional arguments, he was trying to educate them on persuasion. He wasn’t attacking scientists, science, climate science, or Hillary. He was critiquing, commenting and informing their ability to persuade.”
—
Do you think this explanation changed the critic’s mind?
I doubt it. The usual response to this situation is to change the topic.
Again, don’t be smug. You would change the topic too if someone shined a light on your cognitive dissonance. That’s just how it works.
—
Are you going to a major event sometime soon? You might want to bring the free WhenHub app with you so you can easily find your friends or family.The DMV is one of life's great ironies. There was a time, not that long ago, when trekking from one city to another meant surrendering an entire day, maybe more, to travel. You passed the time telling tales of knights and millers and wives of bath.
But now, thanks to the automobile, the same trip takes, like, an hour.
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There's a catch, however: in order to maintain the privilege of saving literally entire days on a journey, once a year or so you have to wait in line at the DMV for as long as 30 minutes! Ain't nobody got time for that! It's a fresh, first-world Hell, and the only comfort is that everyone around you has to suffer this low point of human existence too.
That is, unless you're Sidney Crosby.
On Friday morning, Crosby made a surprise -- and surprisingly brief -- appearance at the Duncan Manor DMV office in McCandless (Allegheny County, Pa.) and, thanks to a special rule that celebrities get to bypass the line -- so as to get them out of there before their presence jams up said line further -- Crosby was allowed to skip right to the front.
And while Crosby dashed in to renew his license like he was on a breakaway, the rest of the scum -- calm down, folks, I only consider you scum compared to Crosby -- toiled away in the bureaucratic version of the dead puck era.
Some of said scum are furious.
From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, who gave this story the full treatment because it's August:
Story continues
"I disapprove," said 46-year-old Susan Campbell of Cranberry, who later in the day spent an hour and half at the center off McKnight Road and waited in line twice to help her 20-year-old daughter, Jessica, renew her license before heading off to college. "He should have to sit and wait with everyone else." But that would be so disruptive, said her other daughter, Stephanie. After all, people waiting with Mr. Crosby would text pictures to their friends and his fans would overrun the DMV in no time, she said.
Look at that. Crosby's mere presence caused the Campbell family to disagree. This is why you hurry him through. 30 minutes in that line and the DMV staff would be processing divorces and will changes too.
Meanwhile, others blamed Crosby for taking advantage of the rule. You wear the "C", dammit! Show some leadership!
"He probably should have waited," said one lady, who probably wouldn't have waited if she was a celebrity.
I'll bet Wayne Gretzky would have waited. As Ms. Campbell pointed out, this one time, The Great One took a few minutes out of his day to talk to her daughter and that's the exact same thing:
It was the kind of gentlemanly behavior that won their family's admiration. "Those are the people fans learn to love and encourage their children to follow -- the ones that take the time to talk and be themselves," Ms. Campbell said. "It depends on what kind of character you want to show, and it depends on how you want people to talk about you."
If I'm Ms. Campbell's daughter, I'm upset that my mom just compared having a conversation with a young me to waiting in line at the DMV. But maybe she's boring.
Anyway, Sidney Crosby is the worst, and the Allegheny County DMV is an enabler.Penn State football coach Bill O'Brien and his Lions will travel to TCF Bank Stadium Saturday for a Noon kick with Minnesota, but first, the head coach spent 40 minutes Thursday night on the Penn State Football Radio Show.
O'Brien heaped praise on Minnesota head coach Jerry Kill and his staff for the job its done in the midst of Kill taking a leave of absence due to ongoing health issues, and made clear that one focus Saturday will be keeping the ball out of the Golden Gophers hands. Minnesota has only had the ball less than its opponent three times this season, and has had more than a 10-minute edge in each of its last three contests.
The head coach also talked about linebacker Ben Kline, offered some thoughts on recruiting, and spoke about hazing. But five bits in particular stood out.
1. Cautious with Kline: Kline has played in just five games this fall, making 14 stops in total. His best game to date came last Saturday, where he made eight tackles.
The redshirt sophomore missed all of the spring after having off-season shoulder surgery, and has been sporadically in-and-out of the line-up and practice sessions. Now, O'Brien said the Dallastown High product will again have surgery this off-season.
" Ben Kline is such an important part of our team. His shoulder has popped out three or four times this year, and he's gone in and they popped it back in," O'Brien said. "Sometimes, he's back to practice the next day.
"He'll have surgery on it after the season, but he'll play through it the next four games."
2. Blocking Movement: O'Brien has often been asked, both by the media and on the radio show, about his tight ends, a unit that was arguably Penn State's best a year ago but through eights games has just two touchdowns and 425 yards in statistical production.
It's a question without a good answer, but host Steve Jones took a different route, asking how the position grouping has done blocking, something O'Brien has been pleased by with just four games to go.
"Jesse [James] had a nice day blocking against Illinois. I think Adam Breneman is a much improved blocker. It's not easy to come from high school, where he was used on the perimeter of the defense a lot, and block more," O'Brien said. "He's gotten a lot better at it. He's a tough kid. Kyle Carter is more of a receiver, but he's a tough guy and does a nice job." 3. Recruiting, Part One: When Penn State received scholarships back from the NCAA in September, it not only gave the Lions a boon from a competitive standpoint, but also opened up the door for all sorts of new recruiting ideas. It also opened up more slots in what was nearly a full class of 2013, and going forward, one position that could see multiple players joining every year is running back. The head coach was asked whether he prefers a'scat back' or'more of a power guy.' Three months ago, he may have had to pick. Now, his answer is simply both. To date, Penn State has three running backs committed, as it has secured verbal pledges from Maryland running back Mark Allen, Virginia tailback Nick Scott, and Massachusetts back Johnathan Thomas. "We'll look for both. With the scholarship numbers being modified, we'll look for both," O'Brien said. "We'll look for more of a guy that's more of a third down back, and a big back like a [Zach] Zwinak type of back. "So, we'll always look for both as long as I'm here." He later noted that current starting running back Bill Belton, who some may label a scat back, is not in his mind. 4. Recruiting, Part Two: There's a difference between a college staff building a recruiting class and an NFL staff building a draft board. Actually, there's a lot of them. No one is more aware of this than O'Brien, who assembled draft classes with the New England Patriots after filling up rosters with scholarships players at numerous college stops and before he inked his first class at Penn State in 2012. Asked whether he prefers one over the other, he didn't say. But there is a certain aspect of college recruiting that he certainly enjoys, and that opportunity doesn't present itself at the professional level. "Here's what I love about recruiting: I enjoy narrowing the list down and getting to know the guys and their families. I try to recruit these guys personally," O'Brien said. "What I don't like is how many stars or who's recruiting this guy. I don't think that matters at all. I think what happens is; recruiting is about a fit. We have to be very upfront about what Penn State is. "We tell kids: only 23,000 guys have played in NFL since it came into existence. That's not a lot of guys. We want everybody to have that dream, but the No. 1 thing is to come here and receive a well-rounded education. Then right up there with it is football. It's totally different than drafting. There are a lot of different factors that go into drafting. I enjoy recruiting and getting to know kids." 5. A Hazy Moment: No one seems to know exactly what is going on in the on-going saga plaguing the Miami Dolphins. And O'Brien certainly isn't one of the ones that knows. If you haven't been following, Dolphins' offensive linemen Jonathan Martin abruptly left the team last week, and later details emerged that fellow linemen and perhaps others were harassing the former Stanford lineman. O'Brien was asked Tuesday about his thoughts on the matter, and reiterated them again Thursday while adding some context to how coaches handle locker room interactions. "We do a good job of [monitoring the locker room]. It's something you have to do. I know Joe Philbin; he's a great guy and excellent football coach. We have a leadership council here, great coaches on our team, and our coaches spend a lot of time in the locker room. "I believe we try to promote a team atmosphere. It's football. Football's a tough sport. Skirmishes happen on the practice field, but it has to stay there and not get into the locker room, and it does here. There is no hazing in the Penn State football program."Councilwoman Greyson says she’s “infuriated” the city wasn’t able to steamroll a landowner in the same way they do “ordinary people.”
Dallas city officials are furious that a wealthy Texas landowner has stopped them from abusing eminent domain to force a pipeline directly through his ranch.
Shockingly, officials say they’re “infuriated” because they weren’t able to run over landowner Monty Bennett like they do “ordinary people.”
Councilwoman Sandy Greyson said she’s “infuriated” the city has been prevented from “taking his land” like “ordinary people” who come and beg before council. Greyson suggests it would be more equitable if everyone was equally mistreated. Watch Greyson’s full, unedited statement below:
Even more shocking, Greyson admits she now feels compelled, albeit reluctantly, to support a settlement because the city would likely “lose in court” anyways.
Dallas officials arrogantly blame the landowner for the “millions” in taxpayer money they’ve wasted on a prolonged and frivolous court battle. But officials were not forced to fight Bennett. The city’s refusal to negotiate was clearly their choice, as the landowner offered alternative solutions from the onset.
Governments have no incentive to negotiate with landowners because citizens can simply be steamrolled into submission, as Greyson readily admits. After all, governments have unlimited tax-funded war chests to hire high-priced law firms, which most Texans cannot afford. As a result, officials are accustomed to people simply giving up even in cases where the government skirts the law or abuses its authority.
It’s fitting that – for once – government officials are experiencing the “infuriating frustration” that’s commonly felt by “ordinary” Texans who are subjected to the unjust whims of unaccountable politicians.
Critics unsympathetic to Bennett’s plight will claim the pipeline is a “necessary public good.” But even necessary projects don’t give government the authority to abuse the rights of landowners.
What the critics fail (or refuse) to recognize is that the landowner had worked from the outset to negotiate an alternative route with Dallas officials and their partner, the Tarrant Regional Water District (TRWD). But Bennett wasn’t the only one.
The Texas Scorecard previously reported on a group of 43 landowners near Mansfield, Texas who also fought reckless eminent domain proceedings by the TRWD, related to the same water pipeline. Not only did the TRWD fail to listen to landowners’ concerns, they turned a blind eye to alternative routes that were less costly, less intrusive, and more efficient. They also refused to deliver on promises to hold public hearings in the community and lied to landowners about who would face condemnation proceedings. Charles Crook, an engineer and affected property owner, thoroughly documented the TRWD’s reckless behavior.
Ultimately, the TRWD opted to threaten Crook with hasty condemnation to intimidate others from speaking out and perpetuating a public relations nightmare. Crook and other landowners were ultimately told to pound sand.
Fortunately, one landowner with both the will and resources pounded the reckless agencies in court, and won.Schmorp's POD Blog a.k.a. THE RANT a.k.a. the blog that cannot decide on a name
A Stable Perl
Here it finally is, stableperl, an attempt to restore perl stability and compatibility to the level mentioned in the official perl policy.
I will write about the sadder sides of this at some future time, but now it's time to write about the good sides.
What it is
First of all, stableperl is a branch (or a fork, depending on how you want to view it) of standard perl, designed to be drop-in compatible with standard perl, and/or maintained beyond it's normal end-of-life date.
The fact that it is a drop-in replacement is very important - this way, you can install stableperl instead of perl, and still use all of CPAN in the same way as before, in addition to modules written for stableperl.
It is also an attempt to fix some of the more obvious bugs that affect many programs and which the perl 5 porters refuse to fix, foremost hash performance and data corruption during global destruction.
Lastly, and most theoretically, it is a safeguard against perl 5 porters breaking perl 5 to the point where it is no longer usable - when or if that happens, stableperl can be use to achieve independence.
What it isn't
It is also something that for a long time didn't want to do, but reality left me without an alternative, so that means activity will be fairly low, mostly limited to the most important fixes.
That means it will not have any exciting new features - the emphasis is purely on being compatible to standard perl, and some extra.
That also means that I will not apply any exciting patches that will make stableperl incompatible with standard perl.
Stableperl and my modules
I have written more about the relationship of my modules in the FAQ.
Releases
You can find all releases on http://stableperl.schmorp.de/dist/, including the README, which lists any minor changes not mentioned here.
stableperl-5.22.0-1.001
This is the first ever release of stableperl. It has only a few changes, but these already allowed me to get Coro and some other modules working, something that would have been doubtful with standard perl.
So what are the major differences to perl 5.22.0?
Some troubling patches have been reverted. Two changes in Perl that prohibit modifying some public perl structures (EXT_MGVTBL and PadlistNAMES). Coro needs to access a lot of the more arcane details of perl, and is very difficult to get working without access to these structures. These changes are trivial to undo in perl, and very hard to work around from within Coro. The result should still be 100% compatible to existing (and future) XS code. The hashing function has been replaced by FNV-1A. This was an attempt to restore hash performance which was gradually lost mostly due to security patches that turned out to be snake oil without any In preliminary benchmarking, this gave a 40% performance increase in hash-access-heavy code, which sounds enormous (and certainly is), but sadly is hardly better than perl 5.008 levels. FNV-1A isn't the best hashing algorithm (and not suited well the way it is used in perl), but it beats the existing one and was very simple to implement. But hey, PHP also uses FNV-1A somewhere, so expect further improvements in the future. Unconditional addition of -fstack-protect flag(s) was undone. Configure unconditionally added these flag to the compiler invocation, ignoring the flags specified by the user, with no way of overriding it. While this flag might be nice to have in theory, it does create probably problems on some less common platforms, where GCC might accept the switch but it might not work.
And that's it for 1.001.MOUNT VERNON — Operation Brotherhood seeks donations of hygiene and nonperishable food items to create care packages for distribution at the VA Maine Homeless Veteran Stand Down in October.
Items needed include razors, shaving cream, bar soap, lip balm, baby wipes, deodorant, female hygiene items, protein bars, snack items, canned good and other food items.
Donated items can be dropped off between 4 and 8 p.m. Thursdays, 4 to 9 p.m. Fridays and 2 to 6 p.m. Saturdays at the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1603, 588 Minot Ave. They also can be dropped off at The Hair Gallery, Water Street, in Augusta; the VFW Service Officer office on the Togus campus, area VFW posts and American Legion Post 153, in New Auburn.
The nonprofit organization is dedicated to intervening in veteran and first responder suicide was created through the vision of Jason Wyman, president of the organization. A Maine native, Army medic and serving in deployments in Iraq, Wyman decided he wanted to do more for all the first responders, regardless of the critical aspects of their jobs. He feels that so many groups are left out because they might fit into the status of the recent published numbers of suicide rates, according to a news release from the organization.
For more information, to make a donation, and/or learn about volunteer opportunities, call 514-4190 or 293-8044.
ShareU.S. Rep. Bobby Rush has filed a complaint saying he was racially profiled by Chicago police after two officers pulled him over while driving on the South Side in August, according to police sources and city records.
According to the sources, the Wentworth District officers were running plates while on patrol on Aug. 4 because of a rash of vehicle thefts in the Bronzeville neighborhood.
The officers ran the plate on Rush's Lexus and were told it was registered to a Cadillac, the sources said. The officers then stopped Rush shortly before 3 p.m. in the 4700 block of South King Drive, according to the sources and city records obtained by the Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Rush, 69, was let go without a ticket being issued.
About an hour later, Rush filed a complaint about the alleged racial profiling with the Independent Police Review Authority, the city agency that investigates more serious allegations of police misconduct, according to the records. An IPRA supervisor |
lineup exists. But the Pixel C is so much better than its software that it's almost infuriating.
Right now, in a weird way, what the Pixel C really does is make the case for Chrome OS. The multi-window, multi-tab Web browser is just astonishingly better when you're switching between lots of apps, or trying to do many things at once. File support is better on Chrome OS, and you're actually using a system and setup you know. If Google ever actually makes good on its promise to bring Android apps to Chrome OS, that becomes the best of both worlds—an interface that works for work, and all the apps you need. If you're ready to pony up $650 or more for a Pixel C, you're almost better off spending a grand on the Chromebook Pixel.
An Android tablet can't be great until Google fixes Android.
More likely, you're better off buying a Surface Pro 4 or an iPad Pro. Those are the Work Tablets worth owning, the ones that take a touchscreen and turn it into something more powerful and more productive. They have great accessories (with full-size keyboards), and software that understands what people want when they want to work.
A Work Tablet isn't just a tablet with a keyboard. And right now, even the best Android tablet isn't a great tablet—not until Google fixes Android. So here's hoping Google forces every Android engineer to use a Pixel C full-time, starting right now. Maybe then they'll see the potential, and build an Android worthy of this lovely tablet.The UK and France are the hosting countries for the first two rounds of the 2017 24H TOURING CAR ENDURANCE SERIES (TCE SERIES) powered by Hankook. Like for the inaugural season last year, action starts with the Hankook 24H SILVERSTONE (31 March-2 April), followed by the first running of the Hankook 12H MAGNY-COURS (21-22 April). Participation in the 24H TCE SERIES powered by Hankook is open for SP3-GT4 machinery and touring cars from the TCR, A3, A2, D2, D1 and CUP1 classes. This year’s series includes five rounds in as many European countries, all with live streaming in HD quality.
“From the very beginning, touring cars have been playing a major role in our events,” CREVENTIC’s Natasha Mark says. The Dutch agency is the promoter and organiser of the 24H TCE SERIES powered by Hankook, in co-operation with the DNRT (Dutch National Racing Team). “Held for the first time last year, the separate 24H TCE SERIES powered by Hankook allows touring car teams to compete for outright honours and this proved to be a successful concept. With over 20 full-season entries already received, we are looking forward to a second season with great competition.”
SP3-GT4 class can compete with TCR at the same level
The addition of the SP3-GT4 class to the 24H TCE SERIES is a new element for 2017. The SP3-GT4 class caters for a wide variety of cars, including the numerous cars to GT4 regulations currently available on the market, as well as touring cars with a similar performance. Thus, the TCR cars as the top touring car category will be facing serious competition in the battle for outright honours while still maintaining their own chances. Compared to TCR cars, SP3-GT4 cars are slightly faster over one lap, but the better fuel efficiency and the subsequent lower number of pit stops for TCR cars ensures that both classes can compete at the same level in 12- or 24-hour endurance races. If required, slight BoP-tweeks can be added to guarantee the competitiveness and equal chances for both classes.
A great variety of cars for Hankook 24H SILVERSTONE
Also known as ‘the home of British motor racing’, the circuit of Silverstone in the UK hosted the inaugural Hankook 24H SILVERSTONE last year. From last place on the grid, British team ABBA with Rollcentre Racing made excellent progress with its BMW M3 V8 and emerged as the winners, three laps ahead of the Red Camel-Jordans.nl SEAT Leon Cup Racer. The winners of the six different classes all ended up in the top ten of the overall classification. A total of 41 cars took the start in last year’s race and a grid of similar size is expected for this year’s event at the Grand Prix circuit in Northamptonshire. The provisional entry list already shows a great variety of cars in all categories. Like last year, the Super 7 Inter Series is present as a support category with a pair of races on the Saturday (1 April) prior to the start of the 24-hour race.
Inaugural Hankook 12H MAGNY-COURS
Like Silverstone in the UK, the French circuit of Magny-Cours is a centre for the domestic motorsport industry with its ‘Technopole’. The circuit near the city of Nevers in the French Nièvre department was opened in 1961, the current lay-out of the track has been in use since 1992, with slight modifications having been added over the years. From 1991 till 2008, Magny-Cours hosted rounds of the FIA Formula 1 World Championship, with Michael Schumacher as the record winner with eight victories. At Magny-Cours, the 24H TCE SERIES powered by Hankook will stage a joint event with the 24H PROTO SERIES powered by Hankook. The prototypes will have their twelve-hour race on Saturday (22 April), the touring cars will race on Sunday (23 April). Currently, the provisional entry list for the TCE SERIES round at Magny-Cours includes 25 cars, but entries are still being accepted. Further information can be found on the series’ website, http://www.24htceseries.com.
Source. Creventin/Photo. John PattersonThis is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The Canadian government has ordered the deportation of a former US Army soldier who fled to Canada four years ago seeking refugee status. In 2004, Jeremy Hinzman became the first war resister to seek asylum in Canada instead of going to fight in Iraq.
On Wednesday, Canada’s Border Services Agency ordered the twenty-nine-year-old Hinzman, his wife, son and baby daughter to leave the country by September 23rd. His attorneys say they plan to appeal the deportation order. In 2005, Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Board rejected his claim for refugee status.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Hinzman faces up to five years in prison in the United States. Last month, the Canadian government deported another war resister, Robin Long, who is now serving a jail term in Colorado. Jeremy Hinzman joins us from Toronto, where we got to interview him four years ago, as well, when we broadcast in a simulcast with the CBC.
Jeremy, welcome to Democracy Now!
JEREMY HINZMAN: Thank you for having me. Good morning.
AMY GOODMAN: Good to talk to you. Talk about the significance of this ruling. What does it mean for you and your family?
JEREMY HINZMAN: Well, essentially, it turns our lives upside down. We, as you said, just had a baby. Our son knows nothing else aside from Canada. And if we do go back, which it’s looking like, I will undoubtedly be court-martialed and serve some time in jail.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Is there any appeal process left to you yet that might delay the September 23rd deadline?
JEREMY HINZMAN: There is. It’s not guaranteed that we’ll be granted leave to appeal, but if my lawyer can find errors in the compassionate and humanitarian decision that the Canadian Border Services rendered, then we can — we can appeal. But there’s no guarantee that the court will grant us leave.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what were the arguments the court used in rejecting your appeal?
JEREMY HINZMAN: Well, in a compassionate and humanitarian case, you need to show that there would be undue hardship if you returned to your country of origin, and we — and you also need to show that you’ve been established in Canada and can live independently. And we did that. In the decision, the officer said we’ve established ourselves well in Canada. We haven’t been a hindrance to the social assistance programs. But he said that wasn’t enough for us to stay. He said the US has a fair justice system. My First Amendment right to free speech is protected. And they also mentioned that — for whatever reason, I don’t know — they mentioned George Bush’s No School Left Behind program to say that our son would be able to get a good education. I found that kind of humorous.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Hinzman, talk about how you arrived at this point. Talk about your decision to join the military and what happened next.
JEREMY HINZMAN: Well, from the beginning, I joined the military for the reasons that most people do. There was probably a tinge of patriotism, a sense of adventure, and also, being from the lower middle class, I wanted to get some help with college.
When I went to basic training, I, you know, started chanting, “Trained to kill! Kill we will!” and realized over the three years that I was in the Army that I just couldn’t become a killer, because the Army screens out people with psychological problems, and it has normal, humane human beings come in, and in order to be a killer, you have to be able to desensitize yourself and dehumanize those who you’re going to kill. And I, for whatever reason, wasn’t able to do that, and so I applied for conscientious objector status. And when I did that, my command threw my application away. And I was made to reapply, and my application was subsequently turned down.
AMY GOODMAN: And so, then what happened?
JEREMY HINZMAN: So, after serving in Afghanistan, I came back to my unit, and it became apparent that we were going to come to Iraq. And I felt that since I had already acted within the provisions of the Army to try to remedy the situation, we had no other option but to refuse service and take a court-martial or go to Canada. And I felt that since, again, we had tried to work within the Army, it really wasn’t fair to take a court-martial at first.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Have you maintained ties with other US war resisters who are in Canada, who have gone there in recent years?
JEREMY HINZMAN: There are a number of us in Toronto, and I am acquainted with them. There’s a movement called the War Resisters Support Campaign that’s been active pretty much since we got here, and we have meetings, and there’s been a lot of lobbying in support of us. And on June 3rd, the Canadian parliament passed a nonbinding motion by a vote of 137-to-110 saying that US war resisters should be able to remain in Canada. However, the conservative government is refusing to enact the legislation.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Now, Canada, of course, has a long history of giving refugee status to resisters from American wars. Obviously, during the Vietnam War, there were many who went there. How would you characterize the difference between this government’s treatment of war resisters and what you know of past times?
JEREMY HINZMAN: Well, during the Vietnam era, of course, Pierre Trudeau, who was a liberal, was in power, and he famously stated — at least up here — that Canada should be a haven from militarism, and that kind of opened the floodgates for American soldiers to come to Canada. I think 50,000 eventually settled here.
Right now, there’s a conservative minority government. Canada has a parliamentary system, and they hold the balance of power. And I wouldn’t say they’re lapdogs to the US, but they share many of the same values of the Bush administration and aren’t really sympathetic to what we’re doing.
AMY GOODMAN: Jeremy Hinzman, right around Independence Day here in the United States, we got news from Canada about a victory for US war resisters. I thought, perhaps, for people like you, Canada’s federal court ruling that the Immigration and Refugee Board should reconsider the asylum claim of conscientious objector and Iraq war veteran Joshua Key — the court ruled he had been forced to systematically violate the Geneva Conventions as part of his military service in Iraq and that such misconduct amounts to a legitimate refugee claim. Why the difference in how Joshua was treated and you?
JEREMY HINZMAN: It could simply be luck of the draw, or they could be differentiating because he served in Iraq and I didn’t. Josh wrote a book called The Deserter’s Tale that elaborates all the atrocities that he was forced to commit and be a part of while he was in Iraq. And I think that probably helped, as well. Each case is handled individually by the Refugee Board, so any decision rendered in his case isn’t necessarily going to affect other resisters.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What’s been the reaction of your fellow resisters to this latest decision? And are there others that are coming up for hearings soon?
JEREMY HINZMAN: Well, there are still new resisters coming here; on a monthly basis, we get one or two. Of course, being the first, I think my case is looked at a little closely, and there’s probably a bit of trepidation about what lies in store for all of us.
AMY GOODMAN: Your experience in Afghanistan, Jeremy?
JEREMY HINZMAN: When I was in Afghanistan, my conscientious objector application was being processed, so I just served in a noncombatant role working with Halliburton workers in the kitchen, breaking down rations and doing dishes and chopping potatoes and stuff like that.
AMY GOODMAN: What are you going to do? Are you leaving?
JEREMY HINZMAN: It looks that way. We’re going to, I guess, use whatever avenues we can to appeal, but I honestly don’t think it’s going to do much good, despite the fact that opinion polls have showed that two-thirds of Canadians think we should be allowed to stay. Again, the motion in parliament said we should be allowed to stay. But the conservative government’s really against this, and I think they’re trying to do everything in their power to fix what they don’t like about Canada before a coming federal election here, because their hold on power is endangered.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, Jeremy Hinzman, I want to thank you very much for being with us, US war resister who fled to Canada in 2004.Taro Yamasaki / Time Life Pictures / Getty Images Former Notre Dame football player Daniel 'Rudy' Ruettiger Jr., standing with open arms in the empty stands at Notre Dame stadium, was charged with stock fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday, December 16, 2011.
This time, Rudy got sacked.
Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger, best known as the indomitable underdog who realized his dream of playing football at Notre Dame, was charged with deceiving investors Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission for his role in a pump-and-dump stock scheme.
The SEC alleged that Ruettiger used his inspiring story and heroic reputation to trick investors into buying stock in his sports-drink company, a scheme that ultimately produced $11 million in ill-gotten gains for Ruettiger and a dozen other defendants. Ruettiger agreed to pay $382,866 to settle the charges without admitting or denying guilt in the case.
(MORE: Financial Scams Target Boomers)
Ruettiger became famous after his inspiring saga was dramatized in a 1993 movie starring Sean Astin. Despite his small size, (“five foot nothin’, 100 and nothin'”), Ruettiger became a walk-on player at Notre Dame, and eventually realized his dream of playing in an official game. In the film’s penultimate scene, Ruettiger was carried off the field by his teammates after sacking the opposing quarterback to secure the victory.
After Notre Dame, Ruettiger went on to become a motivational speaker, offering lessons from his inspiring biography to audiences around the country. According to officials, Ruettiger used his story and reputation as a way to convince people to invest in his sports-drink company, Rudy Nutrition, which had one product: a sports drink called “Rudy” with the tagline “Dream Big! Never Quit!”
(MORE: Consumers Already Returning Holiday Purchases)
However, according to the SEC’s complaint, “the company primarily served as a vehicle for a pump-and-dump scheme that occurred in 2008 and generated more than $11 million in illicit profits.”
“Investors were lured into the scheme by Mr. Ruettiger’s well-known, feel-good story but found themselves in a situation that did not have a happy ending,” Scott W. Friestad, an associate director in the S.E.C.’s enforcement unit, said in a statement. “The tall tales in this elaborate scheme included phony taste tests and other false information that was used to convince investors they were investing in something special.”Various lanterns are displayed during last year's Lotus Lantern Festival at Jogye Temple.
/ Courtesy of Yeondeunghoe Preservation Committee
By Park Jin-hai
The Lotus Lantern Festival, held in celebration of Buddha's birthday on May 21, will begin on Friday and run for three days.
The annual event, which draws 300,000 participants each year, will see more than 100,000 colorful lanterns light up central Seoul on May 6-8.
The Yeondeunghoe Preservation Committee held a lighting ceremony on April 20 with a giant lantern shaped like the Four Lion Three-story Stone Pagoda of Hwaeomsa Temple in Gwanghwamun Plaza ahead of the festival. The pagoda (national treasure No.35) is one of the two most uniquely-shaped stone pagodas in Korea along with Dabotap Pagoda of Bulguksa Temple.
The festival dates back to the Silla Kingdom (B.C. 57-935 A.D.) and was conducted as the Lotus Lantern Assembly in Goryeo Kingdom (918-1392). It continued as the Lantern Celebration (Gwandeung-nori) during the Joseon Kingdom (1392-1910).
The theme for this year's festival is youth. "This year's event has been organized to encourage the young people, who are increasingly losing hopes and dreams faced rising unemployment rate," said Hong Min-seok, a spokesman for the Yeondeunghoe Preservation Committee. "We included more activities for young visitors this year."
Counseling sessions from specialists and art therapy will be provided during the festival.
Last year, the festival was held under the theme of "Peaceful Mind, Harmonious World," marking the 70th anniversary of the nation's liberation from the Japanese colonial era (1910-45), and participants prayed for peace.
This year's Lantern Parade, the highlight of the festival, will extend its course from Dongdaemun, Jongno and finally to Gwanghwamun Plaza from 7 p.m. until 9:30 p.m., Saturday.
A large number of traditional North Korean lanterns, made by referring to North Korean documents, will join the street parade for the first time. As an increasing number of foreigners are interested in the festival every year, the committee will provide "Yeondeunghoe Global Supporters" or a youth volunteer group to assist festivalgoers. Some 2,000 foreigners who booked for the parade will also join the parade, holding lanterns they have made.
The parade will close up with Hoehyang Hanmadang, a post-parade celebration, which begins from 9:30 p.m., at Jonggak Intersection. All the participants will enjoy performances of Buddhist entertainers and dance together under the falling paper flower rain.
During the festival, a lantern exhibition will be held in Jogye Temple, Bongeun Temple in Samseong-dong, southern Seoul, and Cheonggye Stream, central Seoul. Traditional lanterns of various shapes, such as dragons, elephants, phoenixes, drums, turtles and lotuses, crafted by monks at nationwide temples will be on display until May 15.
On May 8, various traditional cultural events will be held in front of Jogye Temple, with booths providing Buddhist art, temple food and folk games to visitors.
The festival is designed to pray for the welfare of the community and achievement of personal wishes among Buddhists, and to reflect Buddha's teachings of compassion and wisdom every year. The lanterns mean the light, compassion and wisdom, and sharing them with others suffering in the world.
For more information, visit the festival's official website at www.llf.or.kr. Reservations are recommended via email at ipogyo@buddhism.or.kr and call to 02-722-2206 to watch the May 7 parade and participate in the May 8 lotus lantern-making competition for foreigners.Controversy brews over Vestavia High mascot Copyright by WIAT - All rights reserved Video
VESTAVIA HILLS, Ala. (WIAT) -- UPDATE: The Vestavia Hills BOE amended their agenda for Wednesday, July 15 to include the mascot.
ORIGINAL: Controversy over confederate symbols has made its way down the flag pole and into schools.
Some parents are rallying against school mascots, including the Vestavia Hills High School's "rebel."
"The events in Charleston -- the murder -- gave the whole country and opportunity to pause and say, 'What do we represent?'" said Clinton Colmenares, whose daughter attends a Vestavia City School, referring to the shooting that claimed nine lives in a South Carolina church, and subsequent calls to remove Confederate flags from the state capitol.
Colmenares is one of several parents in Vestavia who say the Rebel represents the wrong idea.
"I think a high school mascot is one that represents athletics, and our aggressiveness, and our excellence and our competitiveness as athletes," Colmenares said. "But it's also one that's inclusive, not divisive. Simple as that."
Those parents are asking the Vestavia Hills Board of Education to get rid of the Rebel and come up with a new mascot.
"As our culture becomes more diverse here in the south, we want our mascot to reflect that diversity and cohesion," said a mother named Wendy, who asked that WIAT not reveal her last name because she's received threats on social media from people on the other side of the issue.
WIAT obtained images from a Facebook thread, which has since been made private, containing comments both for and against the Rebel mascot. We reached out to commenters who supported the mascot, but none responded.
"I'm concerned that all this is going to put a wedge between those students that wasn't there before," one supporter wrote on the Facebook thread, pointing out that students of all races get along at Vestavia High, and that several African American students have worn the Rebel costume at games.
The Vestavia Hills Board of Education will allow public comment on the issue at a work sesson on Wednesday, July 8 at 6 p.m. at the Vestavia City Schools building.
The school system said it will not comment until that work session.
Copyright 2015 WIAT 42 NewsCrucial session postponed for a month as bickering politicians risk pushing a solution for country's crisis into the distance
A solution to the Isis-led insurgency in Iraq appeared to slip away after a parliament session aimed at kickstarting the formation of a government was postponed when MPs failed to agree on a new speaker.
Politicians in Baghdad were reportedly bickering despite calls for unity to see off the jihadist offensive that has overrun swaths of the country. The Iraqi security forces have struggled to repel the swift advance of fighters for the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which has forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes.
The developments have also alarmed the international community and heaped pressure on Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, as he tries to form a government and a third term in office.
But the government formation process – which international leaders and top clerics have urged should be completed as quickly as possible – suffered a setback when the session set for Tuesday was postponed to 12 August because political leaders could not reach an agreement.
More than two months after Maliki's camp won the most seats in the elections, though not a majority, parliament has yet to begin the process of choosing the country's top three positions, which according to an unofficial deal are split between the Shia, Sunni and Kurdish communities.
A session last week ended in chaos, with MPs trading heckles and threats before some of them walked out, with the UN's special envoy warning that further delays risked plunging the country into a "Syria-like chaos".
Iraqi forces have largely regrouped after soldiers abandoned their positions and, in some cases, even weapons and uniforms as militants conquered the city of Mosul and advanced to within 50 miles of Baghdad.
Thousands of Iraqis flee violence and bloodshed in Mosul, Tal Afar, and surrounding communities. Photograph: David Honl/ David Honl/ZUMA Press/Corbis
But while Iraq has received equipment, intelligence and help on the ground from the US, Russia, Iran and even Shia militias it once shunned, government efforts to push back were dealt a blow by the killing of a senior general on Monday.
Major General Najm Abdullah al-Sudani, the commander of the army's 6th division, "was killed by hostile shelling in Ibrahim bin Ali", a military spokesman told AFP.
Ibrahim bin Ali is within 16 miles of Baghdad and is near where Iraqi security forces have been locked in a months-long standoff with militants who seized control of the city of Falluja.
Security forces have also tried to wrest back the Sunni stronghold of Tikrit from a loose alliance of Isis fighters, other jihadist groups and former Saddam Hussein loyalists. Iraqi forces have been hamstrung by a lack of combat experience and dearth of intelligence in Sunni areas, owing largely to distrust of the Shia-led authorities among minority Sunni Arabs, analysts say.
"The army and the police are seen as sectarian … and therefore the Sunni community doesn't provide support or, crucially, intelligence to the security forces," said John Drake, of the security firm AKE Group. "If you don't have good intelligence on the ground, your strikes are not precise, they involve collateral damage and casualties … making everything worse."
While most observers have argued Baghdad was not about to fall, violence and suicide bombings have continued.
The latest was said to have struck a cafe in a predominantly Shia area in western Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least four people and wounding a further 12.
An Isis-linked Twitter account posted a picture purported to be of the suicide bomber, apparently a Lebanese national, posing in front of the black Islamic flag, holding a sword and surrounded by assault rifles and rocket launchers.
The authenticity of the image could not immediately be verified.
And while government forces were still looking for a major victory, Isis jihadists appeared to be brimming with confidence.
A few days after declaring the establishment of a caliphate, the group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi delivered a Friday sermon in Mosul's largest mosque.
Analysts have described the sudden public appearance by the self-proclaimed "caliph" – second on the US most wanted list – as a daring stunt, reinforcing Baghdadi's status as the new strongman in the world of global jihad.An apology.
OK.
First off – I am not an anti-Semite. I’m not racist, or phobic about anyone, for that matter.
However, there have been tweets in the past from me that have been disparaging to Jewish people, and anti-Semitic. I apologised last year and I want to apologise, again, now – as these have been brought to light once more, recently.
I’m not going to claim illness, personal problems, drinking or anything else – as these would be lame, and I’m the first to criticise when people do, and this is not a defence – just an explanation.
What I will say is that for a while, I was reading a lot of material and engaging with ideas that I came to realise last year were really, really bad ones. If you want to use internet language, the type that “9/11 Truthers” espouse, stuff about the “New World Order” and that the Rothschild family are somehow responsible for everything that’s wrong in the world – I guess what David Icke and Alex Jones do, to sum it up.
It’s very easy when you’re sat on your own with no external communication apart from the internet, to get a very misguided view of things – or maybe it’s just me. But I did, without appreciating just what the real nature of those views actually meant. I was brought up in an extremely left-wing household, but didn’t involve myself in politics until 2013, so I had a lot to learn – and I learnt some things which I now appreciate are vile.
I didn’t see at the time what was wrong with what I was tweeting – I’m not going to claim absolute naivety, just that I thought being anti-Semitic was, say, people who wished harm on Jewish people or denied the Holocaust – I didn’t “get” that what I was saying, was.
So, I was ignorant in the extreme – and it took several people intervening to make me understand just exactly what I was doing, and make me realise what awful bullshit the stuff I was buying into is. I do not hold those views – some people may still consider my views extreme, but they are not of the nature that I mention above.
Those kind of opinions are extremely harmful, and I now understand why – and I also understand what bullshit they all are. There are some people on Twitter who I’ve had conversations with, not realising just some of the views they had, as well. I can’t know everything about everyone, but certain people I have subsequently blocked, as I was pointed to certain aspects of what they say that is bordering on Nazism.
So, to reiterate – I’m not anti-Semitic, nor racist. I got sucked into an extremely unpleasant part of the internet which I renounced as soon as I understood what was so wrong with it.
What you do with this statement is up to you. You can view a blog that was written about me here, and then make up your own mind. I have nothing to hide, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this and I would have deleted my tweet history last year.
Once again, I unreservedly apologise for my historically disgraceful views – and people can make up their own minds.
AdvertisementsJTA – First there was “Tinder for bras.” Now there’s a Yelp for sheitels, the wigs worn by many married Orthodox Jewish women.
ShayTell may be the first-ever online customer review site for wigs. It’s certainly the most cleverly named.
And if you’ve never considered the demand for such a site, consider this: When was the last time you bought, say, a computer, without knowing a thing about its quality, components and warranty?
That’s a predicament facing many observant Jewish women, says ShayTell’s founder, Myriam Schottenstein. After all, some wear sheitels every day, and the wigs typically cost from $1,000 to $4,500, she says (that’s not a typo).
“There are so few resources available on this huge purchase,” she says. “It’s really discouraging.”
So Schottenstein, a self-described “review junkie” who purchased her first sheitel when she married two years ago, set about to change that. Backed by her brother, “serial entrepreneur” David Schottenstein, ShayTell launched in the spring.
“My aim is to provide more transparency, accountability and really bring more clarity to this,” she says.
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Traditionally, sheitels are a word-of-mouth purchase: Women rely on the advice and experiences of their friends and family before seeking the services of a local vendor.
“There’s no centralized information,” says the 28-year-old Brooklyn resident, noting that most manufacturers don’t have functional websites. “I think people mean well, but there’s a lot of secrecy in the industry.”
Some of these mysteries include: Where does the hair come from? Was it processed? Was it dyed, or can it be dyed in the future? What kind of warranty does the sheitel have, and what services are included?
This lack of reliable information about quality wigs comes at a stressful time: Engagements in many traditional communities tend to be short, and suddenly, amid all the planning and upheaval, women go from knowing nothing about sheitels to finding themselves “thinking about baby hairs,” Schottenstein quips — small, wispy bits sewn around the forehead and temples to make the wig appear more natural.
“The process is unnecessarily difficult,” she says of sheitel shopping. “I want to make it as easy as possible.”
On the ShayTell site, users can specify a price range and see an array of wigs by various manufacturers, and read reviews by other users. “I Love my Barbara” wig, according to one review. “Color is gorgeous hair feels great and looks natural.”
Another reviewer was less enthusiastic.
“Within a few months I had split ends everywhere and the wig just feels dry and straw like,” she writes.
The practice of women covering their hair varies widely from Orthodox community to community, ranging from full wigs to headscarves to hats and fascinators. In general, however, observant Jewish women cover their hair for modesty reasons, creating a zone of privacy that can only be shared by married partners.
That doesn’t mean the intent is to make married women unattractive. As one Chabad website for women explains, “even if her wig looks so real as to be mistaken for natural hair, she knows that no one is looking at the real her. She has created a private space, and only she decides who to let into that space.”
A woman’s hair can be “protected” with a beautiful, natural-looking wig — and hence the serious shekels many Jewish women spend to purchase a wig that looks just so.
“You want to get the best quality hair — that’s not a commodity that’s so available,” Schottenstein says, explaining the high prices. “What other product do you get that comes from a human body part?”
Since ShayTell’s soft launch at the end of March, the site has drawn more than 5,000 visitors over the past two months, and more than 65 companies are reviewed.
And Schottenstein plans to expand. She hopes to make ShayTell “a central place for all your sheitel needs” by creating a comprehensive directory for those in the sheitel business — everyone from vendors to stylists — as well as photo galleries for manufacturers. In addition, there will be a resale section for women to sell sheitels that didn’t work for them.
Ultimately, ShayTell’s goal isn’t making money — it’s about creating community.
“Women should help other women with this leap in their life,” Schottenstein says.Toronto families are scrambling to secure after-school care in a city that already offers few options as the Ontario government enforces new rules that require recreation programs to limit the number of days they accept students.
Close to 100 families with children attending an after-school program at Sprouts Growing Bodies and Minds, a facility in the city's east-end, were told over the weekend that the government would only allow their children to be there three times a week, not five. They were given a week's notice to find child care to fill the remaining two days.
The Liberal government initially defended its actions, with a spokeswoman for Indira Naidoo-Harris, the minister responsible for child care, saying in a statement that recreation programs are "typically episodic and short in duration." If a program provides after-school care everyday for children as young as four, it would need to be a licensed daycare. But on Tuesday evening, after receiving a letter signed by more than 70 parents, the Ministry of Education said it would extend the compliance deadline and work with Sprouts to find a solution that avoids disrupting families.
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The problem, however, is not limited to Sprouts. Several after-school-care providers say the new rules, which have been phased in over the past two years and took effect this fall, are confusing and could cause upheaval for hundreds of parents and children already more than two months into the school year. One Toronto dance studio said it stopped offering after-school care this fall, unsure what impact the new rules would have on its program. The Ministry of Education has so far this fall issued 10 compliance orders to facilities, saying they were in contravention of legislation.
"It feels really wrong to have the government come in and tell you what you are able to choose for your child for an after-school program. They just came in with no warning … and it feels like a government that doesn't really understand or support a working family," said Myriam Tawadros, who has a five-year-old daughter in the after-school program at Sprouts.
New provincial rules this fall expanded the duty of school boards to provide before- and after-school programs for children in kindergarten up to Grade 6 – changes that came with a strict deadline and no financial supports. The Toronto District School Board turned to licensed child-care operators, many of whom were already at capacity with infants, toddlers and kindergartners.
The government also limited authorized recreation providers, which included Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada, to care for children 6 and older. Recreation providers that take all children including those younger than 6, as Sprouts does, believed they were exempt because they teach specific classes, but are now being told by the government to limit their programs to three days a week for two hours a day per child.
The Liberals began rolling out changes to the rules around child care after two-year-old Eva Ravikovich died in a hot car in 2013 outside of her unlicensed daycare in Vaughan, Ont. The daycare owner pleaded guilty to criminal negligence causing death. Eva's death brought heightened scrutiny to Ontario's child-care system.
"We know that parents often rely on before- and after-school care to accommodate their work schedules and we are committed to ensuring that children in care are in a safe and healthy environment," a spokeswoman for Ms. Naidoo-Harris said.
Emily Pengelly, co-owner at Sprouts, said she understands the government wants to keep children safe. But, "they |
object.)
Sheppard said that he had pegged the odds of a big planet lying undiscovered beyond Neptune at 50-50, but the new study by Batygin and Brown boosts his confidence in the existence of Planet Nine to about 75 percent.
Brown seems even more confident.
"I find this really compelling," Brown said. "I think it's there. But, like everybody else, I want to see it."
Copyright 2016 SPACE.com, a Purch company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Video caption London Zoo 'devastated' by aardvark fire death
Staff have been injured and an aardvark and possibly four meerkats killed in a fire at London Zoo.
About 70 firefighters tackled the blaze at its height in the Animal Adventure section that spread to a shop.
One person was taken to hospital and eight were treated at the scene.
The zoo said an aardvark called Misha died in the fire and four meerkats were still unaccounted for, presumed dead. The zoo was shut on Saturday but said it would reopen on Sunday.
The cause of the fire is not yet known.
Image copyright Brendan Cooney/Reuters Image caption Photographs posted on social media showed orange flames rising from the building
Ten fire engines went to the zoo, which sits in the capital's Regent's Park, shortly after 06:00 GMT and the fire was brought under control about three hours later.
Six people were given help at the scene for the effects of smoke inhalation and two for minor injuries, London Ambulance Service said.
One person was taken to a north-west London hospital, the service said.
Image copyright London Fire Brigade
Image copyright Charlie Bard
Duty staff who live on site were on the scene "immediately" and started moving animals to safety, the zoo said.
In a statement the zoo said it was "devastated" about what had happened.
It said: "Sadly our vets have confirmed the death of our nine-year-old aardvark, Misha. There are also four meerkats still unaccounted for, but we are now presuming these have also died.
"All other animals in the vicinity are being monitored closely by our vets, but early signs suggest they have not been affected. We will continue to monitor them over the coming days.
"We are all naturally devastated by this, but are immensely grateful to the fire brigade, who reacted quickly to the situation to bring the fire under control. "
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Adnan Abdul Husein said he saw the blaze from a nearby park when he was out walking his dog, and alerted zoo security.
"It didn't look like smoke just coming out of a chimney - it was quite heavy", he said.
"As I got closer to the zoo I could see that it was actually inside the zoo so I went over to the security and told them, 'there's flames or there's smoke coming from inside there, do you know anything about it?'. And they obviously didn't have a clue."
Image copyright Getty Images
London Fire Brigade (LFB) station manager Clive Robinson, who was at the scene, said three-quarters of the cafe and shop had been affected by the fire and half of the roof.
He said: "Firefighters worked hard to bring the fire under control as quickly as possible and to stop it from spreading to neighbouring animal enclosures."
Image copyright @PaulWood1961
Image copyright London Fire Brigade Image caption The cause of the fire is not yet known, London Fire Brigade saidIf you were just a casual observer of security theater you may think that TSA’s adoption of technology — especially to expedite passenger movement through the airports — is a great thing, a step in the right direction after a decade-plus of building up a wall around Fortress America.
But if you go beyond the surface, a different picture emerges: that the TSA is creating a higher Berlin Wall just to help jump over the wall it previously built, instead of trying to whittle the original one down to a more manageable level.
Instead of working on making simple things better — such as clear and readable signage, understandable and obvious lanes, better load balancing at multiple checkpoints — what travelers have to deal with are steps upon steps added to climb over the previous set of inefficiencies.
At all stages in its lifecycle, the TSA has chosen not to de-escalate or tear down any of the original web of procedures, but instead added additional layer of new procedures to help create side doors to the system, in effect building a parallel machinery.
Why does the TSA need to roll out a whole new parallel screening system with PreCheck and the qualification hoops passengers have to jump through to be part of it, when it could just as well lower the screening requirements built into the original system in the first place?
Imagine the costs involved in first coming up with PreCheck and then building, administering, marketing and maintaining it, when it could save a lot more by a rational de-escalation of the security requirement post 9-11 decade? And on top of that, PreCheck does not guarantee expedited screening, as its own rules say! The knots TSA has tied itself up in.
Why does the TSA need to order $6.8 million worth of liquid scanners for airports, when even the former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley says all that’s needed on liquids is updating software on current baggage scanners?
Why spend $900 million and 2,800 workers on a big behavior detection program when it was objectively shown that it was being misused? And don’t make matters worse by spending even more money to hire a consultant to try and find the system’s faults.
Instead of bringing in more tech to scan passports for some passengers — and spend millions to get these machines — why not ease up the questioning and requirements of entry into the country and speed up immigration lines and reduce hours and hours spent in lines at airports like JFK?
Beyond the knee jerk reactions like Republican lawmakers talking about abolition of TSA altogether, few grasp the nuances of the maze that has been built by TSA as both a solution to its political challenges and a justification for its own existence. There is no end solution, just more means created to foster other means.
So even if saner minds would suggest a paring down of TSA’s activities and streamlining, that would likely involve hiring another expensive consulting firm, and it will create additional systems to “simplify” the already existing systems.
Even when TSA tries to bring down some of the original restrictions like allowing small knives, the non-sensical public brouhaha that follows doesn’t give TSA any incentive to actually do anything smart about the bloat. It just becomes easier for it to build new moats around it, it seems.
Maybe defunding isn’t such a bad idea after all…Paul Beeston denies that the Toronto Blue Jays are being held back by financial restraints from ownership.
During a guest appearance Friday on Brady & Walker on Sportsnet 590 The Fan, the Blue Jays president and CEO said Rogers Communications has been more than accommodating when they’ve needed to add salary, adding that the club’s payroll is going to increase for 2015.
“I’ll set the record straight. We’ve never gotten to Rogers and asked them for money for anything we haven’t got,” Beeston said. “They’ve been very, very generous with us when we took our salaries up from $90-million to $125-million. I think we’ll be up next year. There’s no question about that. They’ve been very supportive.”
Beeston also took issue with recent criticism directed at the Blue Jays’ inactivity at the trade deadline. Many, including right fielder Jose Bautista, expressed their disappointment that the Blue Jays didn’t add a player while the division rival New York Yankees added Brandon McCarthy, Chase Headley and Martin Prado.
But Beeston said the club’s lack of movement had nothing to do with money.
“When I hear last week that we didn’t make decisions because we didn’t have the money or there was a hockey contract, it’s just flat out wrong,” he explained. “It’s patently false. We’ve got what we need to do. If there wasn’t a trade that was made, it was because Alex (Anthopoulos) and the baseball people didn’t think they wanted to part with the players for what they’d get back.”
It has been a tough week for the Blue Jays, who have lost five of their past six games and saw third base Brett Lawrie return to the disabled list after just three innings of play Tuesday with an oblique injury.
“When we lose, all of a sudden it’s because of finances. It’s because we don’t have the money. That’s really not fair to Rogers,” said Beeston. “That’s because of decisions we made or because of injuries or the way we play. It’s nothing to do with the financial part of it.”
The Blue Jays enter play Friday with a 61-55 record. They are 5.0 games behind the Baltimore Orioles in the AL East and 0.5 games behind the Kansas City Royals in the wild card standings.Beginning May 14, fuel outlets in eight states will be shut every Sunday following Prime Minister Modi's call to conserve oil, a fuel pump owners' body said in Chennai on Tuesday.
"We had planned to shut our outlets on Sundays a few years back. But marketing companies (OMCs) had then requested us to reconsider our decision. Now we have decided to shut the outlets on Sundays," said Suresh Kumar, an executive committee member of the consortium of Indian
He said the association's decision was made in view of the Prime Minister's call during his recent 'Mann ki baat' programme to to save the environment.
Kumar, also the vice-president of Association, said nearly 20,000 outlets in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, Puducherry, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and would be shut for 24 hours on Sundays, starting May 14.
"In Tamil Nadu, we expect a business loss of Rs 150 crore if we do not operate on a Sunday. But we have been seeing a decline in sales on Sundays by upto 40 per cent," he said.
Asked if the association's decision was supported by the OMCs, he said, "We will communicate our decision to them shortly."
Kumar said the fuel outlets which normally have about 15 staff each would have one staff member on the holidays to provide fuel if there was an emergency situation.
On the issue of hiking the margins to petroleum outlets, he said the association was discussing it and would soon make an announcement in this regard.
"That struggle is going on. We are meeting our association members shortly. We will announce our decision soon," he said.Copyright 2019 Nexstar Broadcasting, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Image from Texas Tech
LUBBOCK, TX (NEWS RELEASE) - In 1984, Sankar Chatterjee – curator of paleontology for the Museum of Texas Tech University – and his student, Bryan Small, made an astounding discovery.
Working on Seymour Island in Antarctica, they uncovered the fossilized skull of an animal they’d never seen before. While it was obviously a plesiosaur – a Cretaceous-period marine reptile scientists first discovered in the early 1600s – this plesiosaur was unlike any previously found. They named the new species Morturneria and brought its skeleton back to the Museum of Texas Tech.
Now, 33 years later, Chatterjee and his team have made a new discovery about Morturneria, one that adds a whole new dimension to science’s understanding of plesiosaurs – and larger than that, to the understanding of evolution itself.
More than 65 million years ago, the Earth’s oceans were populated with many animals still found there today, like fish, krill and sharks. But one of the oceans’ biggest predators, the plesiosaurs, went extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs on land.
“Often, plesiosaurs are called sea monsters,” said Chatterjee, a Horn Professor in the Department of Geosciences. “They were large – 50 feet long, superb swimmers and occupied the top of the marine food chain. Although dinosaurs are very familiar to everyone, during their days, the sea was ruled by these monster-like plesiosaurs. Like dinosaurs on land, they dominated the sea from Arctic to Antarctic waters. ”
Plesiosaurs had a broad, flat body and short tail, four long flippers they used to “fly” through the water, long necks and very sharp teeth.
“The teeth of most plesiosaurs are conical, stout, sharp, robust and ideal for stabbing and killing large animals,” Chatterjee said.
But as he wrote in his 1984 paper announcing Morturneria’s discovery, “the long, slender and delicate teeth may have formed a ‘trapping’ device that enabled (the animals) to feed on small fish and crustaceans that abound in the same deposits.”
This notation led an international team of Chilean, Argentinian and American paleontologists to take a closer look at Morturneria’s teeth.
“In our 1984 paper, we described the unusual teeth of Morturneria and their probable function,” he said. “However, our new international team, who had worked on plesiosaurs from many continents, found them fascinating and unique.”
Chatterjee and the team reconstructed Morturneria with a large, round head, a huge mouth and tiny teeth that point the wrong way. The teeth did not meet tip to tip as in all other plesiosaurs, but lay together in a battery that strained food particles from the water.
“When the jaw was closed, teeth from the upper and lower jaws formed a nice trap,” Chatterjee said. “Basically, the animal would swallow a school of krill, close the jaws to let the water out, but keep the krill inside for chewing and swallowing. With these kind of interdigitating delicate teeth, the animal could not tackle the large fish or shelled animals (called ammonites) that were the favorite foods of most plesiosaurs.”
The team’s finding, published in the new issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, is that Morturneria used a filter-feeding method. This feeding style is unknown in other marine reptiles but is found in today’s baleen whales. F. Robin O’Keefe of Marshall University was the article’s lead author.
The identification of Morturneria’s whale-like filter feeding is a startling case of convergent evolution between reptiles and mammals. Plesiosaurs and whales shared many of the intervening steps in the evolution of this feeding style and their extreme morphologies are similar despite arising from different ancestors.
Chatterjee stresses convergent evolution does not imply Morturneria was in any way related to today’s baleen whales; it just means they both evolved the same way.
“They had adopted similar lifestyle and feeding,” he said. “For example, birds and bats fly, but birds are now considered dinosaurs and bats are mammals. These superficial similarities of lifestyles and behavior are called ‘convergent evolution.’”
(News release from Texas Tech)I plan to report only "bright" Supernova (above mag 17.5) on this page. Note that you are going to need a big telescope to find most of these things, for instance, a "Mag 14" SN probably won't be visible to the eye in anything less than a 10" telescope. A CCD, however, can often detect a Mag 14 object with a much smaller objective. Those SN which are easily findable by amateurs (above mag 14.0) will be in red.
The format is as follows:
Name of SN, Discovery reference (link if possible), Date which the supernova first appeared (Year/Month/Date format), Name of discoverers separated by a ";" (link to discovery site(s) if possible)
Name of galaxy (linked to a page describing this galaxy), RA and DEC of SN in J2000.0 coordinates (link to sky map of that area of the sky)
Directions to the SN from core of host galaxy, galaxy name (linked to a Photometry Reference image of that galaxy)
Magnitude of SN when LAST reported (link to the source of the last report) : date of report ("maximum brightness:date of maximum" or "rising" if that information is available), Type of SN if reported. [Spectrum if possible] (Any data which reference this SN (IAUCs; VSNET; past SNe))
Any special pages dedicated to observing this SN, or a link to a sub page if enough data warrants it.
If possible I will create an icon for every bright supernova. This icon will be black on a white background and mirror imaged left to right so that North is up and East is left. The exception being a color image, which will have he same orientation. All icons will be less than 100x100 pixels in size so that they load quickly.Check out this cute school poster from Japan that teaches kids about lesbian, gay, bisexual and asexual people. The "Who Will You Come To Like?" poster is part of a health series of educational materials.
According to ROYGBIV, the two blurbs at the top right say:
When young people reach puberty they often like other people this is called sexual attraction. Depending on who a person likes, this is their sexual orientation. Most are heterosexual, but people who are homosexual and bisexual are not altogether a small group. Sexual orientation is innate and it cannot be changed by intervention, so there is no need to change your preferences.
and
However, adolescence is a time when one generally discovers their sexual orientation. When it comes to understanding one's sexual orientation, one should take as much time as is needed.
This version of the poster was put outside of the nurse's office at Saitama Prefecture's Sayama Keizai School of Economics.Dolphin + Whale Project
The Problem
Whales and dolphins continue to be killed around the world and need our help. Japan, Iceland, and Norway kill more than 1,000 minke, fin, and other great whale species every year, all for meager sales of whale meat. Thousands of dolphins are still killed every year in Japan for meat, and in Indonesia and Peru for shark bait. Whales and dolphins continue to be captured in Russia, Cuba, and Japan for export to captivity facilities. Despite a ban on captures and export, dolphins around the Solomon Islands still face threats of capture, slaughter and export, as is illustrated in the adjacent video, "Pillaging the Solomons".
Our Action Campaign
We have a long history of working within the International Whaling Commission (IWC) to end commercial whaling. In 1982, we helped pass a moratorium on commercial whaling. We publish a daily newsletter, ECO, at IWC meetings, which is the voice for whales and the environmental community. We work with grassroots groups to educate local fishermen about the need to stop the killing of dolphins and sharks. And we support the growing efforts for watching wild dolphins and whales rather than killing them. We support community efforts to replace dolphin killing with dolphin tourism in places like the Solomon Islands, and fight to block the import and export to captivity of wild dolphins, belugas, and orca whales.
Current Challenges
Commercial whaling, undertaken under the guise of “scientific” whaling, must be stopped. Japan is planning more illegal whaling in Antarctica, in defiance of the legal ruling against the country in the International Court of Justice at the Hague. Iceland and Norway are also defiant. We work to protect cetacean habitat from oil and gas threats as well as the Trump administration's plans to reduce the size of marine protected areas. We successfully worked to block the import of wild belugas captured in Russia for U.S. captivity facilities, and to blow the whistle on live dolphin exports from the cruel “cove” drive hunts to places such as Dubai and China. We continue to monitor the situation in the Solomon Islands to ensure that the current ban on the capture and export of dolphins is upheld.
Iceland Kills 11 Pregnant Whales, Says It's A Good Thing Mark Palmer, October 2018 Iceland is one of the few countries that continues to kill whales for profit. Over this summer’s hunting season, eleven pregnant whales were killed, their fetuses strewn across the flensing decks of the whaling ships. In an astonishing twist of logic, Kristján Loftsson, who runs Iceland’s one and only whaling company, said that killing pregnant females is a good thing, showing that whale populations will continue to grow. Read More >
The Truth About Whaling Audrey Lee, October 2018 Whaling is the practice of hunting and killing whales by humans for multiple purposes and has been going on for more than a thousand years. Throughout the centuries, whaling became increasingly intense and widespread, especially with the development of the exploding harpoon and better boat engines to chase down the whales. In the 1960s, due to over-hunting, most large whale populations collapsed. Read More >
CAMPAIGN HIGHLIGHTS Stop the Slaughter of Dolphins and Whales! Sign the Petition Demand that the IWC to include small cetaceans in their purview and advocate for increased cetacean protection. Sign Here > Faroe Island's Annual Pilot Whale Slaughter As Horrific As Taiji's Cove Pilot whales are killed each year in ways that are not humane. Watch the video and sign the petition! Read More > Watch Whales In Iceland, But Don't Eat Them! Tourism is among the biggest supporters of the Icelandic whaling. Learn what you can do to avoid supporting this inhumane practice. Read More >
Connect with Us f tThe only reason I am still here, quite frankly, is all of you. I made this blog right as I began to get so much sicker, and was completely alone. The support I received through all of you gave me the courage to seek out further treatment that undoubtedly prolonged my life. Prior to this, nobody listened to me. Nobody heard me when I was sick, nobody believed that what I said was happening actually was. I had nearly given up on myself, since all of my doctors and families tried to convince me that I was lying about my failing health.
It was the absolute life changing experience of having an audience that gave me the strength to keep fighting. I actively thought about my followers, many of them by name, as I went to doctor after doctor and treatment after treatment. This is no exaggeration. My followers were the only people who wanted to be in my life and wanted to listen to what I had to say. That was everything to me.
A lot of my early followers have become lifelong friends. I am sitting next to one of them right now, and have seen countless others these past few years, and anticipate meeting many more. Because of everyone, these have probably been the happiest years of my life.
If not for all of you, I would probably be dead already, no joke. My body was completely shutting down, and it took a lot more strength than I could ever have alone to pursue extremely painful and effective treatments. Even though there still is no cure, and my life will likely end sooner than the time since this blog began, it has been made so much longer and so much better because of all of you.
Even if whoever is reading this is a new follower, even if you are an old one, if you ever doubt yourself, remember that your mere presence can be life changing to someone else. I still have a lot more fighting to do, but I never would have made it this far in the first place alone.
This birthday is because of all of you.
Thank you.At 3:00 p.m., [presiding] judge R. notified me that I had been appointed to assist with the execution. I feel repulsed, but I can't get out of it. I thought about it all afternoon. My role will consist of taking note of the prisoner's statements.
The execution scene from "La vie, la mort, l'amour" (Life, Love, Death), by Claude Lelouch (1969). "Life, Love, Death" was made before the abolition of capital punishment in France. The movie's central message is the inhumanity of the death penalty. (NB: The video's English subtitles are at times erroneous and misleading.)
Plot: François Toledo, a married businessman and father, falls head-over-heels in love with Janine, a work colleague. However, after three dates, he feels dishonored when he suffers from impotence. In frustration, he strangles three prostitutes before being arrested. He is tried and convicted, and sentenced to death...
The execution scene from "" (Life, Love, Death), by Claude Lelouch (1969). "" was made before the abolition of capital punishment in France. The movie's central message is the inhumanity of the death penalty. (NB:: François Toledo, a married businessman and father, falls head-over-heels in love with Janine, a work colleague. However, after three dates, he feels dishonored when he suffers from impotence. In frustration, he strangles three prostitutes before being arrested. He is tried and convicted, and sentenced to death...
At 7:00 p.m., I went to the cinema with B. and B. B., then we had something to eat at her place and watched a late-night movie until 1:00 a.m. I went home, I did some chores, then laid down on my bed. Mr. B. L. telephoned me at 3:15 a.m., as I requested. I got ready. A police car came to pick me up at 4:15 a.m. During the journey, no one said a word.We arrived at Marseilles' Baumettes prison. Everyone was there. The District Attorney (DA) [avocat général] arrived last. A large group formed. Twenty or thirty guards, the 'officials.' All along the path, brown blankets were spread on the ground to cover the sound of our footsteps. On the path, in three places, tables holding basins of water and towelsThe cell door was opened. I heard someone say that the prisoner was dozing, but not sleeping. He was made to 'get ready.' It took a long time, since he had an artificial leg and it had to be put on. We waited. No one spoke. I think this silence, and the apparent calmness of the prisoner, relieved those present. No one would have wanted to hear crying or protests. The group reformed itself, and we took the path back. The blankets on the ground had been pushed to the side slightly, and we were no longer trying to avoid making too much noise with our steps.The group stopped beside one of the tables. The prisoner was seated on a chair. His hands were locked behind his back with handcuffs. A guard gave him a filter cigarette. He started smoking without saying a word. He was young. Very dark hair, neatly styled. His face was rather handsome, with even features, but he was pallid and had dark circles under his eyes. He looked neither stupid nor brutish. Simply a handsome young man. He smoked, and complained immediately that his handcuffs were too tight. A guard approached and tried to loosen them. He complained again. At this moment, I noticed the executioner standing behind him, accompanied by two assistants. He was holding a cord.Originally, it was intended to replace the handcuffs with the cord, but in the end it was decided to just remove them, and the executioner said something horrible and tragic: 'See, you're free!' It sent a shiver down the spine... The prisoner continued to smoke his cigarette, which was nearly finished, and he was given another. His hands were free and he smoked slowly. I understood then that he was beginning to realize that it was all over - that he could not escape now - that his life would end here, and that the moments that he still had would last as long as that cigarette did.He requested his lawyers. Mr. P. and Mr. G. approached. He spoke to them as quietly as possible, because the executioner's two assistants were standing right by him, and it was as if they wanted to steal his last moments as a living man. He gave a piece of paper to Mr. P. who tore it at his request, and he gave an envelope to Mr. G. He spoke to them very little. There was one on either side of him and they did not speak to each other either. The wait continued. He requested the prison director and asked him a question about what would happen to his possessions.The second cigarette was finished. Quarter of an hour had already passed. A young and friendly guard approached with a bottle of rum and a glass. He asked the prisoner if he wanted a drink and poured him half a glass. The prisoner began to drink slowly. He understood then that his life would end when he had finished drinking. He spoke a little more with his lawyers. He called back the guard who gave him the rum and asked him to gather up the pieces of paper that Mr. P. had torn up and thrown to the ground. The guard bent down, picked up the pieces and gave them back to Mr. P., who put them in his pocket.It was at that moment that everything became confused. This man is going to die, he knows it; he knows that he can do nothing but delay the end by a few minutes. And he became almost like a child that will do anything to delay bedtime! A child who knows that he will be treated indulgently, and who makes use of it. The prisoner continued to drink his rum, slowly, in little sips. He called the Imam who came over and spoke to him in Arabic. He responded with a few words, also in Arabic.The glass was nearly empty and, in a last attempt, he requested another cigarette: aor a[unfiltered cigarettes made with strong, dark tobacco], because he didn't like the brand that he had been given. The request was made calmly, almost with dignity. But the executioner, who was becoming impatient, interrupted: "We've already been nice with him - very humane - we have to get this over and done with." In turn, the DA intervened to deny the cigarette, despite the prisoner repeating the request and adding very opportunely: "It will be the last." A sort of embarrassment came over the assistants. About twenty minutes had passed since the prisoner sat down on his chair. Twenty minutes, so long and yet so short.The request for this last cigarette brought back the reality, the 'identity' of the time which had just passed. We had been patient, we had stood waiting for twenty minutes while the prisoner, seated, expressed wishes which we immediately granted. We had allowed him to be the master of that time. It was his possession. Now, another reality was appearing. That time was being taken back from him. The last cigarette was denied, and to get it over and done with, he was hurried to finish his glass. He drank the last sip. Passed the glass to the guard. Immediately, one of the executioner's assistants took a pair of scissors from his shirt pocket and began to cut off the collar of the prisoner's blue shirt. The executioner signaled that the cut was not large enough. So, to simplify things, the assistant made two big cuts to the shoulders of the shirt and removed the entire shoulder section.Quickly (before the shirt collar was cut), his hands were tied behind his back with the cord. He was helped up. The guards opened a door in the corridor. The guillotine appeared, opposite the door. Almost without hesitating, I followed the guards who were pushing the prisoner and I entered the room (or, rather, a courtyard?) where the the'machine' stood. Beside it was an open brown wicker basket. Everything went very quickly. His body was practically thrown down but, at that moment, I turned away. Not out of fear, but by a sort of instinctive and deep-rooted modesty (I can't find another word).I heard a dull sound. I turned round - blood, lots of blood, very red blood - the body had toppled into the basket. In a second, a life had been cut. The man who had spoken less than a minute earlier was nothing more than blue pyjamas in a basket. A guard took out a hose. The evidence of a crime needs to be erased quickly... I felt nauseous but I controlled myself. I had a feeling of cold indignation.We went into the office where the DA was childishly fussing around to prepare the official report. D. carefully verified every part. It's very important, the official report of an execution! At 5:10 a.m. I went home.I am writing these lines. It is 6:10 a.m.-- Monique Mabelly (Juge d'instruction)Replacing articles of clothing every time they get holes can become an expensive proposition. Instead, use the darning technique to repair small holes in socks, shirts and other apparel. With a darning needle and yarn, you'll form a network of stitches across the gap. It’s easy to do and can be a big cost-saver.
Find thread or yarn that matches the sock in color and texture; you can use embroidery floss to repair a crew sock, while wool yarn is appropriate for a wool sock. Choose a darning needle as well.
Place a lightbulb in the sock and position the hole over the lightbulb. Your needle will glide smoothly over the bulb's surface, making your stitching go faster.
Thread the darning needle with the yarn or thread and leave the end unknotted. The darning process should create a tight weave that makes knots unnecessary.
Start your work on either side of the hole. Take several small vertical running stitches in the intact fabric of the sock, about 1/2 inch to the left or right of the hole. Turn the sock upside down and make another row of stitches next to the first.
Increase the number of running stitches you make as you come closer to the hole. When you reach the point at which the hole begins, your stitching line should extend from 1/2 inch above the hole to 1/2 inch below it.
Continue making vertical running stitches. When your stitching reaches the hole, take your thread or yarn over the hole and into the fabric on the other side, forming what resembles a vertical bridge over the hole. Stitching should extend 1/2 inch beyond the hole at both the top and bottom edges.
Cut the thread end once you have covered the hole with vertical threads and extended the stitching 1/2 inch past it so that both sides of the hole look identical.
Thread your darning needle and begin your work 1/2 inch from either side of the hole at either the top or bottom. Take the threaded needle and weave it under and over the vertical threads that cover the hole as well as the vertical threads that lie within 1/2 inch of the hole.
Turn the sock upside down once you reach the opposite end of the hole, and weave another yarn strand next to the first. Continue stitching back and forth until you've completely filled the hole. Trim excess thread.TORONTO — Bullets claimed two more lives early Sunday during a violent month in which the number of people killed by shootings in Toronto doubled compared to last January.
Two men are dead and three others suffered injuries in a Chinatown shooting at Spadina Avenue and Nassau Street around 3:15 a.m.
“Some sort of altercation occurred that prompted the shooting but we’re still early in the investigation,” said Toronto Police Det. Mike Carbone, who wouldn’t rule out the possibility that the killings were the result of gang-related violence.
“It’s difficult to say at this point, but that’s something we will explore,” he said.
I was lying in bed and heard six to eight gunshots and soon I heard a lot of sirens
In the 37 shooting incidents in Toronto in January, eight people were killed. Four died in shootings in January 2014.
In Sunday’s multiple shooting, one man was pronounced dead at the scene, while another died in hospital around 8:45 a.m. Their identities have not been released by police.
The stretch of Spadina between Dundas Street and College Street, home to many ethnic restaurants and small businesses, was closed most of the day for the investigation as police officers canvassed the area.
Officers did not release any information about suspects.
Mitchell Kingsley, who lives near the spot where the shooting took place, recalled hearing a series of shots.
“I was lying in bed and heard six to eight gunshots and soon I heard a lot of sirens,” Kingsley said. “It’s crazy. I don’t know if an altercation went wrong, but I don’t think I have to worry. I’m not the type of person to provoke someone.”
Toronto’s eight gunfire victims in January: Jan 4: Joseph Petit, 17, is shot in front of his home in Danforth Village. He dies in hospital. No arrests. Jan. 19: Tevin James, 22, is shot in an Etobicoke apartment and dies three days later. Frederick Leon, 20, is charged with second-degree murder. Jan. 20: Alfredo Patriarca, 42, is found shot to death in a garage in Etobicoke. No arrests. Jan. 20: A gunman kills Alva Dixon, 70, and wounds a man in his 40s as they sit in a parked van in East Toronto. No arrests. Jan. 24: Adedotun Agunbiade, 28, is shot to death during a private party at a hair salon in a strip mall in Scarborough. No arrests. Jan. 29: Former Mafia boss Rocco Zito, 87, is gunned down in his home near Yorkdale Shopping Centre. His son-in-law, Domenico Scopelliti, 51, is charged with first-degree murder. Jan. 31: Two people are killed and three wounded outside a restaurant in Chinatown.Italian side Napoli have confirmed their interest in signing Gonzalo Higuain from Real Madrid.
Arsenal have been linked with the Argentine striker for most of the summer, with reports last week, now obviously premature, that a deal was imminent.
However, with the Gunners sights now apparently trained on Liverpool’s bitey racist, Luis Suarez, the Serie A outfit are looking to spend some of the near €70m they received from PSG for star striker Edinson Cavani.
In a Twitter Q&A, Napoli’s President, Aurelio De Laurentiis, was asked if it were true that there were talks regarding Higuain. His reply, “It’s true.”
Quite where this leaves Arsenal pursuit of the player remains to be seen. There’s something of a tradition of Argentine strikers in Naples, and from looking the most likely of summer signings, Arsene Wenger could miss out on a player still favoured by many fans.
The only signing of the summer thus far has been Yaya Sanogo on a free from Auxerre, so hopefully Napoli’s interest will force our hand a bit and we can get this deal done |
and that Wales will become the customs border between the island of Ireland and the UK mainland.
Wales will be damaged economically if this occurs, as there is no way that Holyhead could be ready to shoulder such a burden.
The port is ill-prepared for the intense customs checks that would be necessary to ensure regulatory compliance between goods produced on the island of Ireland and mainland Britain.
The National Assembly’s External Affairs Committee found that should such a change as this occur lengthy delays and tailbacks on roads in north Wales would become the norm.
Goods could be waiting for days at the port as presumably, it would operate as the gateway for goods both leaving and entering the UK.
Irish ferries predict a ‘Hard Border’ in Wales would drastically cut the number of sailings per day between Holyhead and Ireland. 1000 people work at the Holyhead port.
This would be disastrous for them and their families. The economic shock of such a move could be catastrophic. If Dover couldn’t cope with such a move, how can Holyhead?
Already, ships are using Liverpool docks instead of Welsh ports. What happens when more complex regulatory regimes are in place?
Even if the port could be prepared, the time is running out to ensure the customs infrastructure is in place for exit day.
When David Davis said that Holyhead may have ‘an extra layer of complexity’ post-Brexit this is what he meant.
This third-way position provides no clarity and is destined to fail and hurt people in the process.
The rest of the UK will struggle to survive the economic shock, let alone Wales, let alone the port community of Holyhead.
Single market
Also, if Northern Ireland remains part of the EU’s customs union, what happens to the sanctity of the UK’s internal single market?
Whilst regulatory divergence is not necessarily an immediate consequence of the UK leaving the EU, it is inevitable.
This is the reason that the UK Government refuses to devolve large swathes of powers back to the devolved administrations in areas that would otherwise be devolved, such as agriculture, fisheries, etc.
There is a desire on behalf of the UK Government to ensure there is a common regulatory framework between the constituent parts of the UK to ensure that the UK Single Market remains whole.
So that there is not a different regulatory arrangement for goods in Wales as there is in England, Scotland or Northern Ireland and that future trade deals can be negotiated on that basis.
Whether these frameworks are created by Westminster or by the devolved administrations is important, but it does appear that they will exist.
There will be a common regulatory arrangement between UK Nations.
How can this be reconciled with the proposed situation in Northern Ireland? What happens to the Single Market of the UK when there is a regulatory divergence between Northern Ireland and mainland Britain?
Northern Irish goods could be outside of our regulatory arrangements and vice-versa. If this were to occur the UK Single Market would collapse, potentially the UK with it.
Or, in order to preserve the sanctity of the UK Single Market, the UK would be forced to legislate in-line with the EU and then you rightly question, what would have been the point of leaving in the first place?
It’s unclear if this will even be possible once trade deals are signed and different regulatory regimes embarked upon.
Staying in
So, what is the answer? The only acceptable way forward should be that the UK remains part of the EU customs union.
It ensures that there is no regulatory divergence between Ireland and Northern Ireland and as such ends the need for a border between the North and South if the common travel arrangement remains in place.
Fortunately, there is already much agreement on that being the case.
Unfortunately, as it is the obvious answer, in the eyes of the UK Government, it is wrong.
Remaining in the EU’s customs union would prevent us from creating trade deals with our other ‘Global Partners’.
Meaning that we wouldn’t be able to enjoy all that chlorinated chicken the Americans keep raving about. As such, we’re out. Any dissent on that matter will not be countenanced.
It’s difficult to come to any conclusion based on the above other than that the UK Government must eventually change its mind and remain part of the EU Customs Union.
Northern Ireland saying in the EU single market is a middle of the road idea at a time we must be decisive.
We know what happens to people who stay in the middle of the road. They get run down.We might have seen the last of Dwayne Bowe this season.
NFL.com's Ian Rapoport and Albert Breer reported Monday that the Kansas City Chiefs' star wide receiver has broken ribs and likely will be moved to season-ending injured reserve, according to a source who has spoken to the player.
Bowe exited Sunday's loss to the Cleveland Browns after accidentally being kicked at the conclusion of a pass play. Bowe had 59 receptions for 801 yards and three touchdowns in 13 games this season.
The next question becomes if Bowe's days with the Chiefs are over. He played under the franchise tag this season -- after holding out through the preseason -- and it's unclear if either side is interested in a contract that keeps Bowe in Kansas City.
Relive every game this season online and on-demand with enhanced viewing features, including the "All-22" coaches film. Relive every game this season online and on-demand with enhanced viewing features, including the "All-22" coaches film. Get NFL Game Rewind
Bowe has shown in the past that he can be a top playmaker in a good situation. He's sure to attract interest on the free-agent market for a team that's hungry for a No. 1-type receiver, but we'd be surprised if his relationship with the Chiefs hasn't run its course.
Follow Dan Hanzus on Twitter @DanHanzus.The National Republican Party had the nerve to call me for money today. (For full disclosure: I am an officer in the local Party and work hard for conservatives in Georgia).
I took the young fundraiser very politely over my dismay with the national Party, from one end to the other: From Boehner refusing to use his constitutional power, while crying for courts to do his job; To throwing Cantor out over being an amnesty touting RINO and getting another RINO in his place; McCain, Romney, and everything in between; on to the filthy work in Mississippi that Reince Priebus has done nothing about.
Thad Cochran and everyone that helped with that disgusting debacle should be out of the Party on their ears. They want me to fund a national party that rubber stamps racist ads in black Democrat districts to get out the Democrat primary vote for the Republican incumbent? Do they think everyone's character is for sale?
She said they have done great things, like backing Tea Party candidates. Remaining calm, I explained to her that I watched the senate minority leader promise to "crush" the Tea Party, and watched Boehner himself call me an extremist wacko. Since when is the Constitution extreme? Since when is limited government and less debt extreme? Since when is following the law extreme?
She said they helped Ted Cruz, and my restraint nearly cracked. Is that honestly their talking point? Do they think they had a thing to do with Cruz' election or Boehner getting the speakership? Those things were handed to the Party in spite of the Party, not because of them. Ted Cruz made a last stand against ObamaCare and it was Republicans that stabbed him in the back. With friends like that, who needs Democrats?
I helped her out, by showing her that elections are not won in Rove's Blessed Middle, or by chasing Balkanized groups of voters. Elections are won by selling Opportunity and the Liberty it requires to exist and flourish, by exciting the base and bringing everyone else along for the ride. Check the last Republican presidential landslide and see if I am wrong.
We sell ideals and honesty... bold colored lines between right and wrong. We sell prosperity for every human being in America by ensuring a free market is available that rewards production and enterprise. We maintain the security of the nation in order that every American has the opportunity to use their talents to earn a nice life or to earn greatness if they so choose. We love capitalism and we love entrepreneurs. We do not see business as some kind of healthcare agency or workfare program, but as human beings chasing their dreams in a free market that has the ability to take them wherever they want to go! We believe the individual is the single greatest entity in this great nation, and that the individual has clear unalienable rights that shall not be infringed.
They sell mediocrity, poverty, weakness, handouts, lawlessness, authoritarianism, fear, racism, global decay, debt, servitude, and conformity. They believe the only thing great about America is its great big government. They raise up our enemies with the blood, sweat, and tears of the American people while stabbing our old friends and allies in the back.
Have I left the Republican Party? What Republican Party? Except for a few good men, all I see is a bunch of monkeys running around begging for a football and they don't even know which way to run with it. You want a donation? Go read the Republican principles, watch some Goldwater and Reagan speeches, then sit by the window and wait for a pair to grow.
The answer is no. I will not send money to the national Party to work against my principles. I will choose solid candidates across the country and i will fund them directly. I will put in my sweat equity and my time and I will choose who deserves my money.
You want it?
Earn it.Proposed sale of Sebastopol’s Barlow center called off, at least for now
The proposed sale of the 12½-acre Barlow marketplace in Sebastopol has been called off, at least for the moment, after the would-be buyers failed to close the deal by the appointed Friday deadline, according to founder Barney Aldridge.
Napa-based Zapolski Real Estate had been under contract to buy the artisanal food, beverage and retail center on Highway 12 but, after securing a one-week extension July 1, was unable to meet its new deadline, Aldridge said.
Aldridge, The Barlow’s managing partner, was not in favor of selling but said he entertained the offer in deference to his principal partner — his former wife.
Now that the sale contract has been terminated, “I’m very glad it’s over,” he said.
However, a spokesman for Zapolski Real Estate, acquisitions director Andrew Mazotti, said his firm was “still working hard” to put together a sale, though unresolved issues prevented them from finalizing a purchase Friday.
“We’re still committed to the deal,” Mazotti said. “We are still trying to salvage something here. So I think it would be premature to say it’s all done.”
The 3-year-old market, built on the site of a landmark apple canning factory run by the Barlow family, is now home to more than 50 boutiques, eateries, tasting rooms and art vendors that have transformed a former industrial zone into a tourist destination with echoes of its agricultural past.
Aldridge, who said he and his partner have sunk about $42 million into the property, also has aired proposals for a hotel and had solicited investors when Zapolski and its principle, Todd Zapolski, first expressed interest in buying the project about eight months ago.
Mazotti said the firm never entered into agreement but was seriously evaluating the property, finally entering into a contract to buy The Barlow this year.
He said The Barlow’s unique collection of local retail, art and production spaces would complement the upscale, “Napa-esque” retail properties it has or is developing in Napa, where Zapolski controls a large section of retail sites and is widely hailed for a vision that is helping to reshape downtown.
But the prospect of a Napa firm buying The Barlow had some in Sebastopol concerned about the area’s “Napafication,” in addition to creating uncertainty for those who do business in The Barlow, Aldridge said.
“I’m happy this distraction is over,” he said Friday. “I have a renewed appreciation for The Barlow project, and I’m looking forward to getting back to work on it.”Animated adventures of female warrior designed to influence attitudes to women in combat, says Donald Trump’s running mate in US presidential election
Mulan, Disney’s 1998 animation about a Han Dynasty-era woman who disguises herself as a man in order to battling an invading army, was “mischievous liberal” propaganda designed to influence “the next generation’s attitudes about women in combat,” according to an op-ed written by Donald Trump’s running mate Mike Pence.
Pence’s piece, written in 1999 and re-discovered by Buzzfeed, attacked the cartoon for suggesting that a woman could fight alongside men, before saying the animation’s romantic subplot proved that straight men and women were unable to serve beside each other without sex becoming an issue.
He wrote: “It is instructive that even in the Disney film, young Ms Mulan falls in love with her superior officer! Me thinks the politically correct Disney types completely missed the irony of this part of the story. They likely added it because it added realism with which the viewer could identify with the characters.
“You see, now stay with me on this, many young men find many young women to be attractive sexually. Many young women find many young men to be attractive sexually. Put them together, in close quarters, for long periods of time, and things will get interesting. Just like they eventually did for young Mulan. Moral of story: women in military, bad idea.”
Pence’s piece, which questioned the plausibility of the film, didn’t make reference to Hua Mulan, the female warrior on which the Mulan story is based. That legend, about a women skilled in martial arts, is said to be based on the Shang dynasty military strategist Fu Hao.
Women are already on the front lines. Now they get official recognition for it | Jessica Valenti Read more
“Despite her delicate features and voice,” wrote Pence, “Disney expects us to believe that Mulan’s ingenuity and courage were enough to carry her to military success on an equal basis with her cloddish cohorts.”
Women were barred from serving in frontline combat roles in the US military until 2013. In December 2015, the US defence secretary Ash Carter announced that combat roles would be open to all genders.
Trump’s views on women serving on the frontline have flip-flopped. In August 2015, he said that women should be allowed to enter combat “because they’re really into it”, citing mixed martial artist Rhonda Rousey as someone who would be as capable a fighter as her male colleagues. Previously Trump had tweeted that an integrated military was a politically correct idea suggested by “dumb politicians”.
He wrote: “26,000 unreported sexual assults [sic] in the military – only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?”After 16 years, Lena and Ola Påhlsson, who reside near Mora, Dalarna, in central Sweden, had given up hope of ever finding Lena's lost wedding ring.
The ring, which Lena had designed herself, went missing after she had put it on the kitchen counter in midst of a holiday baking session back in 1995.
The couple engaged in a frantic search for the ring, even checked behind the appliances and beneath the floor boards when renovating the kitchen a few years later, but to no avail.
But as Lena was about to gather the last of the carrots from the family vegetable patch last October, she pulled out a carrot that had something attached to it.
As the carrot was so small, she was about to throw it away when she realized what it was that appeared to be “growing” around the finger-sized vegetable.
“Our daughter Anna was at home at the time and she heard an almighty scream from the garden,” Ola Påhlsson told The Local, recalling the day of the miraculous find.
Anna thought Lena had hurt herself and went running to her mother.
She instead found Lena sitting on a chair looking rather shocked.
“It was Lena's wedding ring that had been missing since 1995 after Lenas annual Christmas baking. It had surfaced, wrapped around a carrot. Quite amazing,” said Ola.
Ola had several theories as to how Lena's ring could have made its way from the kitchen to the vegetable patch.
“We thought maybe it had fallen in to the compostable food bin. Perhaps it ended up in compost that was spread over the vegetable patch later, he said.
He also theorized that the family's sheep, which is often fed kitchen scraps, may have had a hand in the mysterious migration of the ring.
“Maybe it had been eaten by the sheep and then ended up in the manure that we then spread over the vegetable patch,” said Ola.
The soil in the vegetable patch has been turned over several times without revealing the ring.
Last year, however, Lena didn't plant the carrots in a row but spread the seeds randomly.
“That could also be the reason as to how the carrot grew through the ring. A seed could have landed in the middle of it after turning the patch, just by chance,” said Ola.
They were both pleased to find that the ring - made of white gold with seven small diamonds - was as good as new after all those years in the soil.
While overjoyed at the find, Lena hasn't yet started wearing the ring again yet, as it still needs to be re-sized to fit her now somewhat-larger fingers.
"We're keeping it in a safe place," she told the local Dalarnas Tidningar newspaper.A new poll reveals that 60% of Britons long to be an author. It can be a good life, for sure – but could they handle the insecurity, loneliness and paranoia?
A YouGov poll that has just been released rates being an author the most desirable job in Britain – with 60% of people saying they’d like to do it for a living. This is a 24% higher than those who want to be a TV presenter and a remarkable 29% higher than those who want to be a movie star.
The mind boggles – or it would if authors didn’t spend a good majority of their time assiduously, and at tedious length, trying to avoid cliches. The fact that people fantasise about being an author only proves how little they know about the reality of the job – or how under-read they are in one of the greatest of that profession, George Orwell.
Brit large: UK picks ‘author’ as its dream job Read more
It was Orwell who wrote this description of the novelist: “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon which one can neither resist nor understand.“
This is not a view of writing that occupies a great deal of space in the popular imagination. On the contrary, authors are seen as rather serene, noble characters, licking their pencils, perpetually looking out the window for inspiration – which always comes – and floating in a bubble, enjoying an Olympian perspective on the world, not bound to the nine to five like the rest, but picking beautiful sentences out of the air like passing butterflies, which they trap and affix decoratively to the page.
If only it were like that. Some writers do, I admit, talk up the delights of creating fiction. All I can say is, I have been writing books for nigh on 20 years now – and it has not been out of choice but for exactly the reason that Orwell describes – “driven by some demon which one can neither resist nor understand”.
I have on more than one occasion longed for a different way of making a living, a hope that I understand now is entirely in vain, as it is my only marketable ability.
I have enjoyed modest success, winning a few prizes, being shortlisted for a few others, and at times – now long gone, along with the book industry that existed then – pocketing generous advances from publishers. And it cannot be denied that being a writer has a lot of compensations.
Writers get to lay out their vision of the world, which, for some reason, feels important to them – although, as Orwell also observed, this may be indistinguishable from the baby’s cry for attention. At the best moments, their work flies above craft into art. They are held in popular esteem, it is true. And they control their own time to a far greater extent than most wage slaves. Staring out the window also certainly come into it – a lot.
However, as I emphasise to the fledgling writers who come and attend my Guardian Masterclass courses, writing novels for a living is hard – unimaginably hard, for those who have not tried it. I cannot imagine that it is less complex than brain surgery, or, indeed, the proverbial rocket science. To master dialogue, description, subtext, plot, structure, character, time, point of view, beginnings, endings, theme and much besides is a Herculean labour, not made more appealing by the fact that you always – always – fail.
Any author will agree with the statement that a work of art is never completed, only abandoned. And, as perfectionists, we always fall well short of our goals. We live with failures, even when we are successes – because we have the whole weight of literature standing behind us, mocking us with greatness and shadowing us into insignificance.
Being a writer also involves a tremendous amount of rejections – all the prizes you felt certain to be shortlisted for and weren’t, all the ones you were shortlisted for and didn’t win, all the TV and films rights that were bought for your books and never made, all the copies that you didn’t sell.
Meanwhile, you have to deal with the envy of watching your rivals – and authors see rivals everywhere, however much they deny it – being apparently more successful than you (naturally, you don’t pay any heed to the invisibly large majority who are less successful). Writing is not a convivial, supportive business – as John Dos Passos observed: “Writers are like fleas, they get very little nourishment from one another”.
It is frequently lonely. It is insecure – and not just financially insecure, but because the fact that you have written one good book is no guarantee that you will be able to write another. It plays havoc on relationships – because most writers are extreme introverts, who, when in the middle of a work, barely notice the rest of the world exists. When you are successful, you can quickly become vain and narcissistic. When you are not, depressed and despairing.
If people think I am lucky to be an author, I understand why. I do feel I will leave some kind of small legacy behind me when I go – a body of work that amounted to something. I know it counted for something, because I still get letters about my books thanking me for them, and appreciating, in some way or other, the light the reader felt I helped shed on their world. It is, I still believe, a noble profession, and there is nothing – given my limited range of talents – I would rather do.
But if I were honest, if I were offered the possibility of swapping with George Clooney, I don’t think I would hesitate for long. In fact, even a taxi driver – standing towards the bottom of the YouGov poll at 13% – often seems more appealing.
Writing is not a choice, it is a calling – and for me, one that extracts a price that people who imagine the glamour of the job never quite grasp. It’s just as well – if they did they might never start.The hackers who breached the US Office of Personnel Management accessed a second set of even more highly sensitive data, it was widely reported Friday, in revelations that make the breach one of the biggest thefts of data on federal workers.
Investigators probing the compromise have "a high degree of confidence that OPM systems containing information related to the background investigations of current, former, and prospective federal government employees, and those for whom a federal background investigation was conducted, may have been exfiltrated," Samuel Schumach, a spokesman for the personnel agency, said in a statement to Bloomberg News Friday. The second set of data files likely included highly sensitive information from forms filled out by people applying for jobs that require security clearances.
The 127-page questionnaires ask about criminal and arrest records, mental illnesses, drug and alcohol problems, and financial data for the applicant and often family members, friends and acquaintances. Previously, Bloomberg and other news organizations said such records had been breached, but White House officials declined to confirm the theft.
Bloomberg wrote:
The announcement of a second suspected breach follows revelations that the hack could involve as many as 14 million current and former government workers. The higher total, more than triple the 4 million originally cited by the personnel office, comes from a lawmaker briefed on the investigation who asked not to be identified discussing classified information. Government background investigations can include sensitive information about individuals’ arrest records and personal lives. People seeking security clearances must provide information such as bankruptcy filings and substance-abuse history. The possibility of a second breach was shared by U.S. investigators with relevant federal agencies on June 8, according to the White House. The intrusion into the personnel agency data was first revealed publicly on June 4. White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said on Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to work to determine the scope of the intrusion and the identify of the hackers. He declined to confirm reports that the Chinese government initiated the attacks.
Readers who believe they may be one of the 14 million people potentially affected should strongly consider placing a security freeze on their credit files. KrebsOnSecurity reporter Brian Krebs explains here how to go about doing that. The Federal Trade Commission has also compiled this list of suggestions for current or former federal employee whose personal information may have been exposed.
While the threat facing affected individuals can't be over emphasized, the risk extends well beyond that to include just about any organization employing affected individuals. Given the amount of extremely personal and sensitive details in the hands of the unknown attackers, they are armed with the ability to wage spear phishing campaigns and other types of highly personalized scams on an almost unprecedented level. People who receive e-mails or phone calls seeking passwords or asking files be opened or Web links clicked on should be extra wary, even if the inquiries appear to come from people or organizations they know or regularly communicate with.Sacramento City Councilman Steve Hansen, not even two years into his first term at City Hall, is about to take on a popular mayor and many of the city’s most powerful interest groups in a closely watched political battle over how the city will be governed.
Hansen said Monday he is launching a political committee that will seek to defeat a November ballot measure pushed by Mayor Kevin Johnson that would vastly increase the authority of the mayor’s office. In doing so, Hansen instantly became the new face of an opposition campaign that until now had been led largely by labor unions and Democratic Party activists.
Sitting outside a midtown coffee shop, Hansen said “concentrating so much power in one office is not what we need in Sacramento.” He said he would call his campaign “Stop the Power Grab.”
“I don’t think (Johnson’s plan is) necessary, and it’s clear the voters don’t think it’s necessary either,” Hansen said. “They see it as a power grab, especially given that the current system is working.”
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Hansen, 34, was elected to office in 2012 to represent the central city, Land Park and a slice of South Natomas. Since then, he has voted with the mayor on the most controversial issues to face the City Council.
Hansen voted in favor of a $255 million city contribution to a new downtown arena, supported easing restrictions on “big box” superstores in the city and voted to approve the McKinley Village housing development in East Sacramento. Johnson supported all three proposals.
“We largely share the same vision,” Hansen said.
But Hansen has been consistent in his opposition to a strong-mayor plan.
A spokesman for Sacramento Tomorrow, the campaign supporting Johnson’s measure, said he wasn’t surprised Hansen planned to campaign against it. Hansen was one of four council members to vote unsuccessfully against placing the measure on the ballot.
“There are always people who want to maintain the status quo and stop efforts to change business as usual,” campaign spokesman Josh Wood said.
The plan is dubbed the Checks and Balances Act of 2014 and will appear on the November ballot as Measure L.
If it’s approved, the mayor would obtain the power to appoint and remove the city manager, who in turn would oversee the hiring and firing of key city officials. The mayor’s choice of a city manager would still require City Council approval. However, the mayor could unilaterally remove the city manager.
The mayor also would have the ability to propose the city budget, a power currently held by the city manager.
Some limited City Council actions would be susceptible to mayoral vetoes under the plan, including budget decisions. The City Council could override those vetoes, but only with a supermajority vote of six of eight council members.
An ethics committee and neighborhood advisory committee would also be formed.
The form of government is similar to those in many large cities. Supporters argue it makes the mayor more accountable to voters.
Hansen said he has begun recruiting neighborhood and civic leaders to join his campaign. He said he has raised roughly $39,000 so far to launch the effort from the International City Managers Association.
The League of Women Voters and the Democratic Party of Sacramento County have also expressed opposition to the plan. Kerri Asbury, chair of the Democratic Party, said her organization would work with Hansen. “We’re all on the same page,” she said.
Hansen said a poll he commissioned this summer showed nearly two-thirds of voters oppose Johnson’s proposal. While the exact text of the poll and the questions asked were not released, a memo that accompanied the survey showed that 62 percent of likely November voters do not want to grant the mayor the powers he is seeking.
David Binder, whose firm conducted the survey of 500 city voters, said the poll showed that while voters largely approve of the job Johnson is doing in office, they disagree with his strong-mayor proposal. He said 42 percent of those polled said they were certain to vote against the plan and will not consider changing their minds.
“That’s a pretty high number,” he said. “That will make it very, very difficult for the other side to prevail.”
Johnson’s camp is expected to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on its campaign. Sacramento Tomorrow reported raising $90,000 through the first six months of this year, including a $45,000 check from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
Some local building trades unions and business groups have already voiced support for the plan. “There will be a broad coalition of people from all different political perspectives who believe it’s time for us to reform our government and improve the system we have into a system that is proven to work,” Wood said.
Doug Elmets, a Sacramento political consultant, said the campaign will serve as a litmus test on how efficiently the city is being run.
“The mayor has to make the case that the current system is clearly an impediment to running a successful, world-class city,” Elmets said. “And Steve Hansen needs to convince the electorate that the way the government is operating today is sufficient with the existing checks and balances.”Hamas Activities Understood on the Basis of Law
To paraphrase the line in a Richard Rodgers ballad, I do not know a day when I did not behold Hamas rockets attacking Israeli civilians. Calculations suggest that more than 13,000 missiles have been fired by Hamas in Gaza against those civilians. During July 2014, Hamas fired more than 800 rockets before Israel responded by Operation Protective Edge seeking to eliminate or reduce the aggression. According to international law, the concept of military necessity justifies Israeli attacks on legitimate military targets. Regrettably, those attacks may have adverse consequences for civilians. Well-meaning people like the President of the European Council and President of the European Commission in a joint official statement of August 3, 2014 on the Gaza situation spoke of the need to move beyond “these cycles of violence.” But there is no “cycle of violence.” Hamas’ position is unequivocal: it denies the legitimacy of Israel; it demonizes Israel; it wants to eliminate the State of Israel.
Unexpected parties have made clear who is responsible for the conflict in Gaza. On August 1, 2014, Abdullah, the King of Saudi Arabia, called the Gaza War “a collective massacre” caused by Hamas. He denounced the Hamas violence that had led to various forms of terrorism. He omitted to say that the war has led to a virtual alliance, for differing reasons, between Israel and Arabs including Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and the Palestinian Authority, weak though the latter is. Even those living in the fantasy world where Hamas is blameless for the current conflict, such as the Spanish celebrity actors, Penelope Cruz and Javier Barden, have qualified their partisanship. In a public letter of July 27, 2014 they, together with other show business celebrities, unilaterally condemned Israel for “its attacks in the Gaza Strip,” and spoke of Israeli genocide, a war of occupation and extermination against a whole people. No one had thought of Cruz as having a perfect, or even an imperfect, understanding of Middle East politics. However, two days after the letter, Cruz and Barden, or their publicists, “clarified” their position. Cruz explained with undue modesty, “I do not want to be misunderstood on this important subject. I’m not an expert on the situation.” Her husband Barden similarly explained, “My signature (on the letter) was solely meant as a plea for peace… I have great respect for the people of Israel and deep compassion for their losses.” Cruz and Barden, and various critics of Israel, such as other celebrities, the mainstream media and churches, and all those who have been concerned about the loss of life, especially of children, in the fighting might now examine in the context of international law the extent of the responsibility of Hamas in committing war crimes and violations of international law. Hamas leaders, Muhammad Deif, Chief of Staff, and Ismail Haniyeh, the leader, have taunted Israelis, “We desire death like you desire life.” The best way to examine Hamas’ accountability is by analyzing a number of the Protocols Additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949. Article 51 (2) of the Conventions states that “The civilian population as such, as well as individual citizens, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.” The thousand rocket attacks against innocent civilians by Hamas have to be considered in this context. Article 58 (a) states. “ The parties to the conflict shall to maximum extent feasible endeavor to remove the civilian population, individual citizens and civilian objects under their control from the vicinity of military objects.” 58 (b) says, the parties shall “avoid locating military objectives within or near densely populated areas.” The evidence is overwhelming from a number of videos, from journalist reports, and from public statements, that Hamas has been guilty of using the civilian population for military purposes. One unexpected source is Mosab Hassan Youssef, son of Sheikh Hasssan Youssef, founder of Hamas. Mosab defected from the terrorist group because of its use of human shields. He also held that the aim of Hamas is not only to destroy Israel, but also to build an Islamic Caliphate. His statement is a reminder that Hamas is the Islamic Resistance Movement. The egregious misuse of civilians and property as protective shields to prevent Israeli firing has been amply displayed. It includes the use of homes, residential rooftops, mosques, hospitals, particularly the parking lot of the Al Shifa hospital, which Hamas has used as a headquarters, and schools and schoolyards, as places, or close to places, from where Hamas launches rockets. Most diabolical in all this warfare is the use made, often successfully, by Hamas to promote Palestinian civilian casualties as propaganda weapons. Most egregious has been the use of schools for the location of rockets and ammunition. On this point international organizations, specifically UNRWA, are at fault, if not altogether guilty. The full name of UNRWA is rarely mentioned. It is the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East, a unique body that was created in 1950 to deal with only one single group of people in the world, the Palestinians, and to do that on a temporary basis. Unlike the major refugee organization, UNHCR (Office of UN High Commissioner for Refugees) also set up in December 1950 that resolves problems worldwide, UNRWA has regional not global concerns. However, UNRWA has gone far beyond its initial mission. It is now important in social and economic affairs in the Gaza Strip, involved with activities usually preformed by governmental authorities.. Among those activities is the running of 245 schools and caring for the welfare of 1.2 million “registered refugees,” about two-thirds of the population of the Gaza Strip. It has an absurd definition of the word “refugee,” one that guarantees perpetuity of refugee status. For its various functions UNRWA employs about 11,000 people. With this large number of employees and its considerable role in the governance of the area, it is logical to expect that UNRWA officials would be aware of the use of the schools they run. This however is not the case. UNRWA officials, incredibly declared it was as much a shock for them, as it was for UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to find on three occasions that schools had been used by Hamas to launch rockets. It is proper to ask three questions: how was it possible for those officials to be unaware of this crime committed by Hamas in locating rockets in schools? Did those officials participate in selecting those locations? And how many other UNRWA schools still contain weapons to be used against Israel? It is indeed difficult to interpret events as they are unfolding, but the incompetence, or the political manipulation of UNRWA by Hamas is not subject to misinterpretation. Nor is that evaluation based on false rumors or deliberate misinformation. UNRWA can claim some humanitarian achievements, but it has always been an organization critical of Israeli activities and the locus for anti-Israeli propaganda. At its best it lacks neutrality and impartiality. The U.S. and other democratic countries should now consider whether UNRWA should be ended, and its supposed functions given to the UNHCR. Article 77 of the Convention deals with the protection of children. The most pertinent clause is 77 (2): “The Parties to the conflict shall take all feasible measures in order that children… do not take a direct part in hostilities and, in particular, they shall refrain from recruiting them into their armed forces.” A major war crime of Hamas is its inhumane treatment of children. In school texts provided by Hamas they have been indoctrinated on the need for holy jihad. They have been given military |
Neal Brown's Food
As owner of The Libertine Liquor Bar and Pizzology Pizzeria and Pub, and co-founder of Dig IN, a summer festival that celebrates Indiana food and agriculture with tastings and educational panels in White River State Park, Neal Brown is a leader of the Indianapolis food scene. At The Libertine, the long narrow bar manages to feel both sleek and rustic: Golden orbs of light hang over each table, while white tree branches adorned with lanterns break through the back wall. Order a Screw & Bolt cocktail, made with gin, orange blossom water, and tonka, then try Brown's iconic dishes, such as hamachi carpaccio dressed with wasabi tobiko, horseradish, pea tendrils, and sriracha oil, or beet-pickled deviled eggs topped with whitefish and caviar. At Pizzology, you'll find classics as well as new creations such as pizza topped with housemade fennel sausage, porchetta, fresh mozzarella, and wood-roasted Brussels sprouts.
The Libertine Liquor Bar
38 E. Washington Street
Indianapolis, IN 46204
Tel: 317/631-3333
Pizzology
13190 Hazel Dell Parkway
Carmel, IN 46033
Tel: 317/844-2550
Milkshakes at The Loft at Trader's Point Creamery
Located right outside Indy in Zionsville is Trader's Point Creamery, an organic dairy farm with 150 acres of land for Brown Swiss cows roam. Those grass-fed cows provide milk for the yogurts and ice cream served in The Loft restaurant. Farm tours highlight the milking parlor, grazing pastures, and a store that sells milk and yogurt in glass bottles. But the main attraction is the Dairy Bar, which sells vanilla, chocolate, coffee, and mango ice cream, among other flavors, and serves rich, thick milkshakes.
Trader's Point Creamery
9101 Moore Road
Zionsville, IN 46077
Tel: 888/935-5558Tips and ideas for designing your garden:
Every garden is different. Each one has a set of variables that are determined by the terrain, geographic location, and the gardener’s goals. As such, what works for one gardener, won’t necessarily work for all. Proper planning is essential for having a successful harvest.
My first attempt at gardening was a tremendous disaster. I organized my garden for what was most convenient for me rather than what was best for my garden. I decided that the most convenient place to grow my garden was inbetween the house and a large tree, which also happened to be the one place that got the least amount of sunshine. It just so happens my favorite vegetable are tomatoes. Unsurprisingly, my tomato plants failed to mature, but I learned a valuable lesson.
Keep the sun in mind: I put a lot of thought into how to optimize sunlight when I organize my garden. For example, the southern part of a structure will get the most amount of sunshine. Keeping this in mind, if you grow your tomatoes on the southern side of your garden they will get the most amount of sunshine. However, tomato and pea plants grow big and grow high. This means that they will shade the plants behind them. As such, I grow my tomato and peas on the north side of the garden. They get a lot of sunlight, but don’t shade any of the other vegetables. I also make sure that my vegetable rows face north to south so they get the best distribution of light.
Use your terrain to your advantage: Gardening can be as easy or as complicated at you want to make it. Part of making gardening easier is using the layout of your property to your advantage. For example, the eastern part of my yard is boarded by a public road that gets a decent amount of traffic. It is also boarded by a metal fence. A few years ago I bought a some pea plants and decided to plant them along the fence. The pea plants used the fence to grow higher and also created a hedge that provided more privacy.
Spread out: There are advantages and disadvantaged to growing everything in one spot. The major advantage is that a garden is easier to manage if everything is planted in designated area. However, there may be other great places on your property that you can utilize. For example, plants such as blueberries that don’t need a lot of attention can be planted throughout your property and will come back year after year. I love to plant corn along the edge of the property line. Corn grows tall so you have to be mindful that it doesn’t shade your garden. With that said, it acts as a great buffer and helps give you privacy.
Start small: A lot of people make the mistake of making their garden too big. They inevitably fall farther and farther behind until their garden looks like a jungle and they are completely demoralized and turned off from gardening all together.
Companion planting: Some plants grow well together, while others don’t. One of the most important things to consider is that some pants grow faster than others. Plants such as spinach and lettuce can grow quickly and shade smaller slower growing vegetables such as carrots. As such, it’s important to keep in mind that some plants will need more room than others. Some plants grow high, while others grow wide.
Don’t plant all at once: Some plants take longer to grow than others. For example, tomatoes take much longer to grow and mature than something such as lettuce. As such, you need to start them sooner by growing them indoors and transplanting them outside when the weather is warmer and more favorable. You can also buy them from a nursery and plant them at home.
Growing season: Every area has a different growing season depending on the climate. I live at a high elevation in Washington State. Because of this my growing season is significantly shorter than Southern states or even areas that are a few miles away, but at a lower elevation. I have to start many of my plants indoors. If I don’t, they won’t fully mature by the time our first frost rolls through.
Keep a garden journal: Keeping a garden journal is on of the most important things you can do. Write down what time of year you planting certain vegetables, what vegetables you planted and which ones you wish you planted more/less of. Write down your thoughts and mistakes. It’s not easy to try and think back a year ago and remember everything you wished you had done differently. Keeping a garden journal insures that you improve on your successes and learn from your mistakes.NSA spooks risk alienating yet another US ally after new documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden apparently revealed extensive surveillance of Indian domestic politics as well as the country’s nuclear and space programs.
The top secret document, obtained by The Hindu, suggests American spying activity in the sub-continent has gone far beyond that claimed by US and Indian officials.
Washington has said in the past that any snooping programs were only done as a counter terrorism measure, and that the content of emails and telephone conversations was never accessed.
India’s IT minister Kapil Sibal reiterated these statements in August, claiming US agencies only tap the origin and destination of comms data because to access content would require a local court order.
However, the document seen by The Hindu apparently proves that India was a target of the NSA’s infamous PRISM program, with US spooks tapping internet service providers including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook for politically and commercially sensitive content.
Dubbed A Week in the Life of PRISM reporting, the “Special Source Operations” document apparently shows 589 “end product reports” distilled from raw intelligence across the globe, with a specific section on India.
“As politics, space and nuclear are mentioned as ‘end products’ in this document, it means that emails, texts and phones of important people related to these fields were constantly monitored and intelligence was taken from them, and then the NSA prepared official reports on the basis of raw intelligence,” an anonymous Indian intelligence agency official told the paper.
“It means, they are listening in real time to what our political leaders, bureaucrats and scientists are communicating with each other.”
It would appear that the NSA is using the controversial FISA Amendment Act, which allows for the acquisition of foreign intelligence, to circumvent any requirement for court order approval in order to tap internet content connected with targets abroad.
If accurate, these latest revelations will no doubt undermine yet another important geopolitical alliance the US had.
Internet users in the sub-continent are no strangers to this kind of revelation, of course, although its usually their own government in the dock.
Earlier this month media reports claimed New Delhi was guilty of carrying out wide-ranging and indiscriminate internet surveillance of its citizens. ®If you are like me, you try to take advantage of already available methods of displaying output that displays information about a running function or script or some other internal information by using Write-Verbose/Debug. The best thing about this is that it is simple to decide when to use it by specifying the various Write* commands anywhere in the code and as long as you have [cmdletbinding()] with Param() in the beginning of your code, all you have to do is use the appropriate switch (-Verbose or –Debug) and you can have that information out there to review.
The only problem that I would run into is the use of –Debug and those annoying confirmation prompts that always occur. You never see this with –Verbose and for that reason, I typically use that so I do not get bombarded with a confirmation prompt each and every time I use it (that’s changed for me now and I will show you how it works later on). Take this example:
Function Foo { [cmdletbinding()] Param ( [int]$Value ) $iteration = 0 1..5 | ForEach { $iteration++ Write-Debug "Iteration: $iteration" $return = Get-Random -InputObject (1..$Value) Write-Debug "Return: $Return" } }
This is a very simple function meant only to highlight the issue that I have been talking about. As soon as I run this function with the –Debug statement, I will see a confirmation prompt for each and every Write-Debug that exists.
Ok, once was enough, but this is out of hand. Even specifying “A” to continue with All operations seems not to work (there may be a logical explanation for this). Can you imagine having to do this for each and every Write-Debug call as well as accounting for each iteration that occurs? So why is this happening? Lets take a look and see what happens here.
Function Foo { [cmdletbinding()] Param ( [int]$Value ) $PSBoundParameters.GetEnumerator() | ForEach { Write-Verbose $_ } Write-Verbose "DebugPreference: $DebugPreference" $iteration = 0 1..5 | ForEach { $iteration++ Write-Debug "Iteration: $iteration" $return = Get-Random -InputObject (1..$Value) Write-Debug "Return: $Return" } }
I’ve added a couple of extra lines of code here to help see what happens when I run the function with the –Debug parameter. Viewing the $PSBoundParameters and $DebugPreference automatic variable will show us what is happening here.
I ran it first without the –Debug parameter and you can see that $DebugPreference is set to SilentlyContinue. The second run with the –Debug parameter shows a different story. We can tell in the $PSBoundParameters that it the parameter is being used, not a big thing, but looking at $DebugPreference now shows it has been set to ‘Inquire’, not the ‘Continue’ that I would have expected. Because of this, we will always receive a prompt for confirmation whenever –Debug is used.
Knowing this, I can now use a bit of code to make sure that when –Debug is used, I will not get a prompt each time it is used.
If ($PSBoundParameters['Debug']) { $DebugPreference = 'Continue' }
I have the above code used at the beginning of my function so it will set the script scope of $DebugPreference to ‘Continue’ which in turn will make sure that I will not have a confirmation prompt. Let’s give it a spin and see what happens.
As you can see, I had 0 confirmation prompts and the script continued on showing my Debug stream. So with that, you now have an alternative to dealing with the Debug confirmation prompt the next time you decide to use Write-Debug in your code!AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks to supporters and bikers at a Rolling Thunder rally at the National Mall in Washington, Sunday, May 29, 2016.
Despite what you may be hearing from some very smart liberals, Donald J. Trump could win the presidency.
But no, you say; haven’t you looked at the electoral map, Addie Stan? And how can he possibly win without the votes of blacks and Latinos? The math does not add up!
Math, schmath. You know what else does not add up? The denial of the ways in which the system can be gamed or hacked, a rack of new voting laws, and the possibility that pollsters are not able to account for all of the people who actually intend to vote for Trump (because some voters are said to be loath to admit their intention).
Bottom line? While the polls and the maps and the data points that predict trends, and all the speculation about the composition of the 2016 electorate, may still augur in Hillary Clinton’s favor, that doesn’t mean she can’t lose. You don’t have to be a bedwetter to arrive at that conclusion; you simply have to be a realist.
A realist is not a person who simply assumes that the most likely scenario—especially one based on lessons learned from the last presidential contest, which had little in common with the current race—is the only one that could unfold, especially in an election year in which old coalitions seem to be disaggregating, and party structures are strained from floor to rafters. As Trump himself said of his nominee status during his speech on Sunday to the Rolling Thunder biker gathering on the National Mall: “[W]ho in the hell would have thought this was going to happen, right?”
A realist is a person who knows that shit happens. And we’re wading through a river of it now.
In his latest New York Times column, Paul Krugman puts forward something of a complacency narrative regarding Clinton’s chances. While he notes that unexpected stuff can happen, he argues for accepting her narrow lead in averages of national polls as evidence that the electoral map will assemble itself to her advantage, and cautions against cherry-picking individual polls to make the case that it won’t. Yet in his selection of The Huffington Post’s outstanding Poll Chart, one could argue that Krugman himself is cherry-picking. Take a look at the well-regarded RCP Average at Real Clear Politics, and you find Clinton up against Trump by a mere point, as opposed to the 4.3 points at which The Huffington Post average arrives. Which to believe?
The electoral-vote map from Benchmark Politics to which Krugman refers is based on such an average of polls, but just which polls and how many remain mysterious, seeing as this map posted on Twitter offers little context. (Other tweets from Benchmark advise against relying on the RCP Average because of RCP’s omission of certain polling outfits, which may well be a legitimate concern. But just who’s behind Benchmark is unclear from its website, so I find the whole thing a bit obscure.)
Then harken back, if you will, to a post by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver written a year ago, and you learn that the “Blue Wall” ascribed to Democrats by certain pundits eyeing electoral-vote maps is something of a fiction, devoid of a variable for swings in the make-up of the electorate or the possible movement of slivers of the components of the Democratic coalition over to the Republican side. Wrote Silver in May 2015:
If you see analysts talking about the “blue wall,” all they’re really saying is that Democrats have won a bunch of presidential elections lately—an obvious fact that probably doesn’t have much predictive power for what will happen this time around.
More recently, FiveThirtyEight’s David Wasserman warned, in December:
A small shift in the national vote is all it would take for Republicans to break through Democrats’ supposed “Blue Wall.” If all five of our groups [whites with college degrees, whites without college degrees, African Americans, Latinos and Asians/others] were to shift just 3 percentage points toward the GOP in 2016, Republicans would “flip” Colorado, Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin and win 315 electoral votes—almost a mirror image of the 2012 outcome.
Is that likely to happen? No. Could it happen? Sure.
My point is not that the political and social science of electoral polling is irrelevant—just that the sorts of extrapolations traditionally deduced from the most recent past election have their limits in this very peculiar election year. The folks at FiveThirtyEight clearly get that.
On the finer points of data analysis, I’m probably not smart enough to be arguing with Krugman, the Nobel laureate. Make that almost certainly not smart enough.
But I’m smart enough to know this: Liberals and progressives have too often failed themselves and the everyday people we claim to champion by virtue of, when assessing political dynamics, an elitist reliance on reason, and a smug dismissal of the often more determinative currents of resentment and fear that course through U.S. politics. The initial progressive response to the rise of the Tea Party was to point and laugh. Those who actually went out and reported on the phenomenon in its early days were painted as alarmists. Look at how well that worked out for us: The House of Representatives firmly in the hands of the most reactionary politicians in modern memory.
Add to that the fact that 31 of the nation’s 50 governors’ mansions are not occupied by Democrats, and jog your memory to recall the epic shenanigans of Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, and you’ve got another variable not factored into the data geeks’ models. And remember that Osama bin Laden video in 2004?
The truth of this election is that nobody really knows much of anything about how it’s going to go. Which means that Donald Trump could win the White House. To suggest anything else is irresponsible. If Democrats run their presidential campaign according to their own conventional wisdom, they’re betting the fate of the republic on shopworn strategies.
This article has been updated.On Sunday, Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief Ben Shapiro debated Cenk Uygur in front of a packed audience at Politicon in Los Angeles. The primetime debate sparked such anticipation, the hosts of Politicon changed the venue from a 1,000-person capacity room to a 3,000-person capacity room to meet the attendance demand.
As the tension was building, Politicon released a poll to see who most thought would win the debate. After 23,202 votes were cast, Shapiro was voted as the projected winner by 89% of respondents. And as the debate got underway, it was obvious Shapiro came to play. If you missed it, here are some of the highlights of the pummeling Ben delivered to Cenk on health care, taxes, campaign contributions, and party principles. Over the course of the debate, Cenk's frustration built; at one point, he imploded and called the audience uneducated, saying, "like, read a book … google it."
When the dust settled, 95% of the voters in a Twitter poll posted by Daily Wire chose Shapiro as the clear winner. This is the result of Shapiro’s philosophy of debating a leftist. When the Left uses "intersectionality" as validation of their arguments, it is the conservative's duty to disregard their character-based arguments. Ben pins them down, forces them to answer direct questions, and bombards them with facts and logic until they do. And his mantra holds true: "Facts don't care about your feelings."
I took some time to talk to college students from both sides of the political spectrum who attended Politicon’s Ben v. Cenk debate, and the feedback was hilarious, revealing, and ultimately encouraging for conservatives.
"It was a bloodbath. Cenk was a stuttering mess, like Jeb during the primary debates," remarked one amused student.
Another said, "It looked like an animal playing with its food. You could see it in Shapiro's face. When I asked him at his book signing 'You know you won that debate right?' He replied, 'I know' and we shared a laugh."
One of my liberal friends texted me: "Dude, Ben Shapiro is actually pretty smart. I love how everything is centered in logic. I disagree with some of the things he says, but I find myself agreeing with him on other stuff."
"We will make a conservative of you yet," I replied.
Another attendee said, "I forced my liberal friend to come to this debate. We both go to Berkeley, and I wanted to show him the intellectual prowess of the conservative movement that is underrepresented and even blocked at my university. He was instantly converted and we're now trying to reserve tickets for Ben at Berkeley in September."
Not only is Ben arming conservative students with the facts they need to defend their beliefs, in the midst of an incredibly polarized political time, he is still capable of converting liberals into conservatives. The conservative movement has a new hope thanks to the work of conservative pundits and personalities like Ben. Even in the hyper-liberal bubbles of America, they make conservatism appealing to college-age students, and this is good news for the conservative movement.
Bradley Devlin is a student at the University of California Berkeley studying Political Economy and serves as the secretary of the Berkeley College Republicans.Clive Thompson has an engaging piece in The New York Times Magazine called "The Minecraft Generation." Minecraft is a video game, but Thompson writes that
Thompson points out that Minecraft has been getting a reputation among parents as "the 'good' computer game in a world full of anxiety about too much'screen time.'" (Aside: If you're able to make distinctions like that, maybe it's time to stop lumping all sorts of different activities together under the "screen time" label?) So it's worth noting, as Thompson does, that this celebrated educational toy was not designed by educators, or even designed for kids. It was originally created for grown-ups, and it still has plenty of adult users, many of whom provide advice to younger players.
All the same, Minecraft does fit into an educational tradition that encourages boys and girls to learn by playing with their environment. "The Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sorensen urged that areas in cities ruined by World War II be turned into 'junk playgrounds,' where children would be given pickaxes, hammers and saws and allowed to shape the detritus into a new civilization, at child scale," Thompson writes. "Several were in fact created in Europe and were quite popular." The British anarchist Colin Ward once wrote a celebration of such playgrounds, seeing in them not just a place where kids could be creative and have fun, but a lesson in self-organized cooperation. At one point Ward quotes an account of The Yard, a Minneapolis playground where kids were given "their own spot of earth and plenty of tools and materials for digging, building and creating as they see fit." At first, Ward's source notes,
Then came the bust. There wasn't a stick of lumber left. Hi-jacking raids were staged on half-finished shacks. Grumbling and bickering broke out. A few children packed up and left.
But on the second day of the great depression most of the youngsters banded together spontaneously for a salvage drive. Tools and nails came out of hiding. For over a week the youngsters made do with what they had. Rugged individualists who had insisted on building alone invited others to join in—and bring their supplies along. New ideas popped up for joint projects. By the time a fresh supply of lumber arrived a community had been born.
With Minecraft, similarly, Thompson argues that
kids are constantly negotiating what are, at heart, questions of governance. Will their world be a free-for-all, in which everyone can create and destroy everything? What happens if someone breaks the rules? Should they...employ plug-ins to prevent damage, in effect using software to enforce property rights? There are now hundreds of such governance plug-ins.
Seth Frey, a postdoctoral fellow in computational social science at Dartmouth College, has studied the behavior of thousands of youths on Minecraft servers, and he argues that their interactions are, essentially, teaching civic literacy. "You've got these kids, and they're creating these worlds, and they think they're just playing a game, but they have to solve some of the hardest problems facing humanity," Frey says. "They have to solve the tragedy of the commons." What's more, they're often anonymous teenagers who, studies suggest, are almost 90 percent male (online play attracts far fewer girls and women than single-player mode). That makes them "what I like to think of as possibly the worst human beings around," Frey adds, only half-jokingly. "So this shouldn't work. And the fact that this works is astonishing."
Frey is an admirer of Elinor Ostrom, the Nobel Prize-winning political economist who analyzed the often-unexpected ways that everyday people govern themselves and manage resources. He sees a reflection of her work in Minecraft: Running a server becomes a crash course in how to compromise, balance one another's demands and resolve conflict.
In a Connecticut library that hosts a Minecraft server, Thompson reports, administrators sometimes "will step in to adjudicate the dispute. But this is increasingly rare." One librarian tells Thompson: "Generally, the self-governing takes over. I'll log in, and there'll be 10 or 15 messages, and it'll start with, 'So-and-so stole this,' and each message is more of this. And at the end, it'll be: 'It's O.K., we worked it out! Disregard this message!'"
Bonus links: For more on Ostrom, go here. For Reason's special issue on video games, go here. For the tale of a gaming community where self-organization took a rather different turn, go here.How to Create an Execution Plan for Oracle Database
Chris Saxon Blocked Unblock Follow Following Mar 22, 2016
When you’re trying to get SQL to run faster there’s one thing that’s vital: an execution plan. In this post we’ll investigate four ways to create these:
But before we begin let’s answer the question:
What is an Execution Plan?
The plan for a SQL statement is a set of instructions. This tells the database how to access the data and join it together.
Plans come in two varieties:
These sound similar. But they’re different. To understand why consider this example.
You’re making a car journey. You plan it beforehand. This is the route you expect to take.
But just as you’re going to leave, you hear on the news that there’s been an accident on your chosen route. This will make it much slower. So you go a different way.
There are two routes here. The one you expected to take and the one you actually took.
After you arrive you wonder whether you could have completed the journey faster. To figure this out, you need to look at where you went. Not where you planned to go.
An explain plan predicts how Oracle will process your query.
An execution plan describes the steps it actually took.
Just as in the driving example above, Oracle may use a different route than the one it predicted. As Tom Kyte discusses, there are several reasons this could happen. So to diagnose your queries, you need to know what Oracle did. Not what it guessed it might do!
Side note
“Explain plan” sounds a lot like “execution plan”. This can lead to confusion. Many times when I ask people to supply an execution plan they provide one of the explain variety instead.
I think it would be better if we gave these very different names. For example, calling execution plans “described paths” or similar. This would help alert people to the fact these are different things (though they look similar) and reduce the chance of confusion.
Top tip: If someone asks you for “the plan” they’re usually looking for one of the execution variety. I.e. what really happened.
So with that cleared up, how do you go about gathering them?
Autotrace
First up, autotrace. This is a freely available tool. You can enable it in SQL*Plus using the “set autotrace” command.
With this on, after each query Oracle displays its output. Below this is the plan along with its performance stats:
If your query returns hundreds or thousands of rows you have to wait for Oracle to display them all. This can be a pain.
Luckily you can suppress the results with the trace[only] option. You can also choose to show just the plan or the stats. For example, to hide the query output and show just the stats, use:
set autotrace trace stat
To include the output and the plan, enter
set autotrace on exp
Once you’re finished you can switch it off with:
set autotrace off
While using SQL*Plus is better than nothing, it has several limitations:
It doesn’t show the stats (ouput rows, buffer gets, etc.) for each step in the plan
It uses explain plans, so what you see may not be what Oracle did!
So while it’s useful for a quick finger in the air, there are better versions available.
Such as:
Autotrace in SQL Developer
This is a step up over the SQL*Plus version. It displays the stats for every step of the plan. So for each operation you can see metrics such as:
How many buffer gets it used
How long it took to run
How many disk reads and writes it did
This makes it much easier to which points are consuming the most resources.
To see how to configure and run it, check out this video:
Besides the step-by-step breakdown, autotrace in SQL Developer has more advantages over SQL*Plus. These include:
You can expand and collapse parts of the plan. This makes it much easier to see what’s going on
You can compare execution plans. A fantastic tool when you’re trying to find the difference between two large plans.
This is a big step up over the SQL*Plus version. So from now on when I refer to autotrace I mean the SQL Developer version.
A quick word of warning. By default SQL Developer only fetches the number of rows according to the “SQL array fetch size” parameter. For queries that return a large number of rows this could miss a big chunk of the work. Ensure you set it to “Fetch all rows”.
Often when you’re tuning queries you want to save the plan for later reference or to share with others. To do this, right click the plan and you’ll get an option to “Export HTML”:
Save this to get the plan in HTML.
This all sounds great.
But there is one big drawback to autotrace: you have to wait for the query to finish!
If your SQL takes minutes or hours to complete waiting for this is a pain. It would be awesome if you could see query progress in real time.
Which brings us to the next method:
SQL Monitor
The SQL Monitor levels up autotrace. It provides similar operation-level stats. But with an added bonus. You can view the progress of execution plans in real time!
Got a troublesome full tablescan? You can watch while Oracle churns away at it. Instead of having to wait for the query to finish, you can see the plan immediately. This makes identifying bottlenecks easy.
Even better, unlike autotrace which you need to run manually, Oracle will capture the plan for you automatically.
So how do you view the plans?
They’re available in SQL Developer by going to Tools -> Monitor SQL…
Or you can view them in the Performance tab of Enterprise Manager:
Clicking on the SQL ID for your statement brings up the full details:
As with SQL Developer, you can expand and collapse the sections of your plan. For more details on reading these reports see this post on monitoring parallel execution.
For those of you who prefer text, you can output the plans using SQL. To do so, use the following query:
select dbms_sqltune.report_sql_monitor(
sql_id => '4htx5uyx0gxxx', type => 'TEXT', report_level => 'ALL'
) as report
from dual;
You’ll need to replace SQL ID parameter with the ID of your query. You can find this with the following statement:
select sql_id, sql_text
from v$sql
where sql_text like '%some text from your query%'
and sql_text not like '%not this%';
If there are many matches, check the SQL text to see which one is your statement.
Note SQL_text is limited to 1,000 characters. So for really large statements, you may need to include the SQL_fulltext column too!
If it’s so great, why isn’t this my favourite approach?
Well, there are a couple of caveats:
Not all queries appear by default. Oracle only captures those lasting longer than five seconds or those running in parallel.
You need to have Diagnostics and Tuning packs licenses to use it
The first limitation is easy to get around. One way to do this is by adding the monitor hint:
select /*+ monitor */… from …
For licensing you’ll need to speak to you local sales rep ;)
Assuming you are licensed, the SQL Monitor is a fantastic way to do early troubleshooting on those hour-long queries. Often you can spot which parts of the plan are doing the most damage within a few minutes. This enables early diagnosis. You can plan new approaches without waiting for the statement to finish!
Both of these methods are great. But they work on a single statement at a time. What if you want to analyze the performance of several pieces of SQL in a transaction?
Enter:
TKPROF
TKPROF is a command line utility that analyzes trace files and turns them into readable form. It gives you the execution stats for all the SQL in the file. Which begs the question:
How do I generate a trace file?
There are several methods. The easiest is to set SQL tracing on. The command to do this is:
alter session set sql_trace = true;
Oracle will capture all statements you execute after this in the trace file. To stop this, either disconnect or turn tracing off with:
alter session set sql_trace = false;
This method is easy but limited. For example, it only traces your session.
A more powerful method is to call DBMS_monitor.session_trace_enable. This has five parameters:
Session_id
Serial_num
Waits
Binds
Plan_stat
Pass in the relevant session_id and serial_num to trace another session. If you leave these null, Oracle will trace your current session. Setting waits and binds to true includes information about these in the file.
To stop tracing, call DBMS_monitor.session_trace_disable. As with the enable procedure, pass the relevant session_id and serial_num. Or leave blank if tracing your current session.
So to generate a trace file for your current session, including waits and bind details, do the following:
exec DBMS_monitor.session_trace_enable ( null, null, true, true );
***your code here***
exec DBMS_monitor.session_trace_disable;
DBMS_monitor also includes procedures to trace all statements:
Note that tracing adds overhead. So avoid enabling it for the whole database. And remember to disable it when you’ve finished!
Once you’ve traced your code you need to get the file so you can analyze it.
How to get the trace file
“But where can I find the trace file?” I hear you ask.
It lives on the database server. This means you need access to it (or help from someone who does!). You also need to know where it is and what it’s called!
Connor explains how to find them in this video:
Getting the files can be fiddly, especially if you don’t have access to the server. You can get around this by configuring a file reader enabling you to query their contents (and thus save to your local machine).
With the trace file in hand you can parse it with TKPROF. The basic syntax for this is:
tkprof <trace_file_name> <output_file_name>
For example:
tkprof ORCL_ora_27883.trc trace.log
This parses the contents of ORCL_ora_27883.trc into trace.log. You’re now ready to start analyzing the queries!
Quick note: TKPROF also includes an explain option. This will show you explain, not execution plans. Use this with caution.
Compared to autotrace and the SQL Monitor this is a lot of work.
So you may be wondering: is this extra hassle worth it?
Well TKPROF has some of advantages over these:
It includes all the SQL statements run between you starting and stopping tracing. This includes recursive SQL i.e. statements inside triggers, functions, etc.
It breaks down the execution time into parse, execution and fetch times
The first benefit is great if you have a slow transaction that includes several statements. You can sort them in the output file from slowest to fastest. This helps you spot which is takes the longest. To do this, use the sort option:
tkprof <trace_file_name> <output_file_name> sort=prsela,exeela,fchela
This is particularly useful for spotting fast queries that you execute many times. This could be because you’re doing row-by-row processing. Or you have a SQL statement with many calls PL/SQL which itself calls SQL (something you should generally avoid). Or trigger logic you weren’t aware of. Though, as Jonathan Lewis notes in the comments, be aware that a SQL statement could have a different plan for each exection. TKPROF will only report one of these.
The parse, execution and fetch breakdown helps you spot issues unrelated to the plan itself. For example, in an overloaded system parse times can be higher. If a significant fraction of a statement’s runtime is parsing then you should start looking for issues other than the plan itself.
So TKPROF enables you to see information not visible in the previous two tools. Sometimes the extra hassle is worth it!
DBMS_XPlan
The final method we’ll look at uses the package DBMS_XPlan. This includes several display functions. These are pipelined, so you can query these like normal tables using the table() operator.
Using these, you can get the performance stats for each step of the plan: actual rows, time taken, etc.
To see this information, you need to increase Oracle’s stats level. You can do this by:
Setting statistics_level to all in the session (or database!) using:
alter session set statistics_level = all;
Adding the /*+ gather_plan_statistics */ hint to your query
Once you’ve done one of these and run the statement to completion you can get your plan!
Call display_cursor to get the plan immediately after executing your SQL (taking care to ensure you’ve set serveroutput off):
select * from table(dbms_xplan.display_cursor);
This fetches the plan for the last statement in your session. This |
is finished, but on the other hand, a bit like TNG, it was running a little bit thin on ideas at times towards the end. Voyager seems (end of season 5) to be really on a roll. Great characters, lots of variety of stories, etc. The big question is, what next? Will they fill the gap left by the departure from our screens of our pals on DS9? We'll just have to wait and see I guess!
I liked the movies (1-6) also but was never really an avid fan of Star Trek: The Original Series. Star Trek: Generations was a real disappointment. It was weak all around except for in effects (mind you, they weren't astoundingly better than on TV, really) and that there were a couple of good funny moments, mainly involving Data. His "Life forms" song ranks as about the best bit of the movie! Now that we've been given another Star Trek movie, Star Trek: First Contact (my review), I get to comment on that. I think it was great! After the disappointment of Generations, First Contact was a wonderful change. It was a real TNG film, without trying to drag the TOS crew into it. I felt that Star Trek: Insurrection (my review) was an improvement even on First Contact, but with slight reservations.
Anyway, you don't want to hear about what I think of Star Trek... You want to find information, get sounds, images, and so on. I have created links from this page to other Star Trek related pages and ftp sites so you can use this page as a starting point to explore the vast amount of information available through the World Wide Web.
Ode To Spot is a poem that Leiutenant Commander Data wrote and recited in the episode Schisms. It is often asked for in the various Star Trek UseNet newsgroups, so here it is, in hypertext form! Here is the answer for all of you who are getting frankly miffed about people constantly asking for this. Just point 'em in the direction of this web page in future. I've certainly decided I just couldn't be bothered answering a few times when this question comes up for the nth time. If you have any suggestions for simple things like this to hypertextualise and toss up here on the web, tell me. If it's small and isn't going to take up too much valuable hard disk space, I'll certainly consider it!
This is one of the long-standing parts of this trek site; another one of those things that people ask for a lot. The Ferengi Rules Of Acquisition. Just point 'em here! It has most of the known rules listed. It has all the rules listed in Pocket Books' Ferengi Rules of Acquisition book, and some others from the assorted TV series.Even though many people understand the importance of self confidence and self esteem, unfortunately many of us do not realize that our confidence is low and that we need to find ways for building our confidence and self esteem. Even those who understand it, they do not know how to improve it!
In today’s world with such increased obligations to our personal and professional live, the security that confidence and self esteem gives us is more than essential. If you have confidence you will win the respect of other people around you. Confidence and self esteem is not something that can be hidden when it exists.
A pre-requisite in building confidence and self esteem is to first understand what causes the reduction of self esteem and what signs in our behaviour indicate that we have a low self-esteem problem.
Low self-esteem, more often stems from the way we see ourselves and not by the way others treat us. Experiences from childhood or teenage may have affected and may have distorted the image we have for ourselves.
Also other frequent causes of low self-esteem is the abuse of all kinds (physical, verbal, psychological) the sharp criticism we may have received as children by our parents. Some experiences that made us feel shy or even humiliated during childhood or as adults and finally the requirement set by ourselves or our parents to be «perfect».
People with low self-esteem often receive (or continue to receive) the following messages from their environment: that they are unsuccessful, that they have low intellectual level, that they are not capable.
Some of these reasons and in the worst cases a combination of them, results in a sense of low self-esteem. We need to emphasize here that our experiences from childhood alone are enough to reduce our confidence because during childhood we create some entrenched views about ourselves that are difficult to change later in life as adults.
How we can understand that we have a low self esteem?
If we feel without any particular reason that we are ugly, unsuccessful or unwanted and if we continue to feel like that even when we take exactly the opposite messages from our environment, then unfortunately we are captive to the vicious circle that we lack confidence and self esteem.
People with low self-esteem are usually hypersensitive, sheepishly, feeling rejected by others, find it difficult to take decisions, they are offensive, they always shout to get attention and they need continuous confirmation for their value from others.
People with low self-esteem usually choose to shut themselves and be isolated from others and often become aggressive in order to do that. Many times they talk about themselves and they try to persuade others of their value. The coverage of their insecurity is based on the excessive visibility.
In some other cases people with low self-esteem are too modest to the point that reduce themselves and their achievements because they believe they are not as important as other people tell them.
Another characteristic of people with low self-esteem is that they try to copy and imitate others who believe they are successful. If there is confidence and self esteem there is no need to imitate the personality of another individual. Unfortunately, this action instead of strengthening the confidence of the people it mocks them down even more because anyone can distinguish the difference of authentic from the copy! Thus, their confidence is reduced even more.
Building confidence and self esteem
Accept your self as it is
Our first step towards self-improvement is to accept our self, with its advantages and its defects, just as it is. Nobody is perfect and we all have points in our personality or appearance that could be improved. But this self-improvement analysis should not take us under. Instead, it should give us the courage and desire to fight and to become better. The defect is a human characteristic. We should love our faults because it is an integral part of our unique identity and personality.
Change the way you “see” yourself
Self esteem and self-confidence is reduced because we tend to attach too much importance to all our negative points while turning a blind eye to our positive points. We must change the way we see ourselves! It is always good to know our self but this knowledge should not lead us only to the discovery of what we do well or on all those things we have to change. Self-knowledge is the possibility of us to recognize our talents, our successes and our abilities. We all have special talents that only if we accept and recognize them we will be able to raise them to the surface.
Start small – plan big
In order for us to increase our confidence and self esteem, we must have some victories in our hand! We first need to set small goals, which we can achieve. Slowly – slowly we can build our confidence and we will start to believe that we are capable to achieve even more difficult goals!
Always think positive
Positive thinking! We should stop thinking the worst for our abilities and ourselves. When the inner voice of pessimism and insecurity begins to shout in us, we should make it stop! Yes, we can achieve things! Yes, we are capable and deserving! Yes, we are attractive and cannot deal with everything! To make others believe in us, you must first believe in ourselves.
Do not always blame yourself
We should not blame ourselves for everything. We ought to realize that we should not get all the blame for things that happen in our lives. In other words, if someone rejects us this does not mean that we fail in love. It could be simply because our chemistry does not fit with the other person. If we were rejected for a particular job, this does not mean that we do not have the background and abilities to work. We were simply not the right person for this job and this does not mean that we are not the appropriate person for another!
Nobody is perfect
We must get rid of our perfectionism and accept that all people, rightly or wrongly, have flaws and weaknesses. That is the beauty of all of us. We should have an objective view of ourselves and we should be fighting with all our strengths to achieve our goals. We must dare to take risks because success requires some risk. We can take the risks only when we have faith in our selves and only when we learn to appreciate our abilities.
If we manage to win low self-esteem and build confidence, then we have managed to get rid of all the burdens that keep us away from our dreams, wishes and our needs. If we win ourselves, we will be free to create, to dare to take risks to succeed and to claim all that we want for ourselves.France doomed to anti-Semitism: archbishop
The archbishop of Paris and head of the Roman Catholic Church in France, Andre Vingt-Trois, said that France was doomed to a "pandemic of anti-Semitism" during a visit to Israel.
"France is doomed to a pandemic of anti-Semitism," he told a news conference in Tel Aviv with Israeli Tourism Minister Isaac Herzog after arriving on his first visit to the Holy Land.
"The feeling is fueled by a certain amount of events but we can be French and Catholic and not be frightened about meeting Jews and even enjoy it."
Calling himself "sensitive" to the feelings of French Jews who have suffered from anti-Semitism, he said that the "situation of Judaism in France and of Jews can only be followed with vigilance".
"They (Jews) know that in a serious situation, we are ready to be at their side," Vingt-Trois said, emphasising the "importance of relations between the Catholic church and Judaism".
The archbishop said he intended to convey a message of "hope" during his five-day visit to the Holy Land accompanied by 600 clerics.
"Those committed to building peace can transform what can appear a situation of hopelessness into one of security," he said.
In June, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert paid tribute to France's efforts to combat anti-Semitism, after meeting leaders of the country's 600,000-strong Jewish community.
French-Israeli relations have often been strained over the question of anti-Semitism -- France is home to the world's third largest Jewish community as well as Europe's largest Muslim population, at five million.
In incendiary comments made in 2004, Israel's then prime minister Ariel Sharon urged French Jews to emigrate immediately to Israel, due to the threats he said they faced at home.Apple has been named as the biggest corporate tax avoider in the United States after booking $218.55 billion (£171.6 billion) of profit offshore last year.
The tech giant was able to save $65.08 billion (£51.1 billion) that it should have paid in tax thanks to its convoluted arrangements.
The report revealed that last year three quarters of the Fortune 500 companies use subsidiaries in offshore tax havens where they sent a total of $2.42 trillion (£1.9 trillion) of income.
In the US alone this amounted to $715.62 billion (£561.9 billion) in tax which they avoided paying.
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Apple has been named as the biggest corporate tax avoider in the United States after booking $218.55 billion (£171.6 billion) of profit offshore last year
The report of said many of the biggest companies in the world use a foreign office to ‘disguise’ their profits as coming from another country even if they are not.
It was published days after Apple announced that it is building a massive new campus in Battersea, South London.
The 500,000 sq ft site will house Apple’s 1,400 employees in London and is part of a $9.93 billion (£7.8 billion) development of the site of a former power station.
The report reveals that the the top 30 tax avoiders based in America collectively operated a staggering 2,509 tax haven subsidiaries.
Apple was the top with three foreign subsidiaries, all in Ireland, but they constituted $218.55 billion (£171.6 billion) of profit booked overseas.
Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook (above) has called attempts to make it pay more tax ‘political crap’ and has said that the company follows all relevant laws
In second was pharmaceutical giant Pfizer with 181 offshore subsidiaries through which it funneled $192.57 billion (£151.2 billion) of income.
The report also highlighted sports giant Nike which holds $10.57 billion (£8.3 billion) offshore whilst Goldman Sachs had £21.9 billion in foreign companies.
The investment bank had 987 offshore subsidiaries in offshore tax havens, 537 of which are in Cayman Islands despite not operating a single legitimate office in that country.
The study was written in the US by pressure group Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.
Matthew Gardner of the ITEP said: ‘The hard fact is that the US tax code incentivizes tax haven abuse by allowing companies to indefinitely defer taxes on offshore profits until they are ‘repatriated.’
‘The only way to end this kind of tax avoidance is by closing the loopholes in the tax code that enable it’.
Apple has a long history of minimising its tax bill through creative arrangements such as funneling its profits through its Irish office.
In August, the EU hit the company with a $14.39 billion (£11.3 billion) tax bill because it viewed the ‘sweetheart’ deals with Ireland as a breach of European law.I still can't get over the surprise -- or should I say shock -- of hearing a Sikh woman implore other Sikhs to vote for Donald Trump. This was at Gurudwara, a Sikh temple, in San Jose, Calif. The woman was a white American who had converted to Sikhism, and wore ultra-traditional garb: a turban, robe, and kirpan (a ceremonial sword). She was selling bangles and religious objects outside the prayer hall.
"Donald Trump is the only person who can defend America from the Muslims. Let's all vote for him and save America," she said to passersby.
I know I should have ignored her, but I couldn't help walking up to her and saying: Don't you realize that to the people Trump is appealing to, we are all Muslims; that the turban on your head looks very much like what Osama bin Laden wore; and that the dark skin of the people you are preaching to is what really offends these racists?
She responded by yelling at the top of her lungs: "Trump is going to make America great again; he tells it like it is; look at what crooked Hillary did in Benghazi!" I walked away, because I realized that I was speaking to a segment of America that is not well educated and won't listen to logic.
But it isn't just the uneducated, it seems. Silicon Valley, where I live, is one of the most ethnically diverse and educated places in the world. Immigrants like me fit right in and we welcome others--of all nationalities and religions. No Silicon Valley executive, with the exception of Peter Thiel, has expressed support for Donald Trump -- because his values are antithetical to what the Valley stands for.
So I was even more shaken up when one of my Indian-American friends, a successful venture capitalist, told me that he planned to vote for Trump because he will "put the Muslims in their place." He uttered the same anti-Muslim sentiments that we hear in Trump's tirades. I was dumbfounded that there are more people in the technology world who would vote for a person who built a platform based on racism, bigotry, and xenophobia, who couldn't look beyond their religious biases.
Perhaps all of this shook me up because I still vividly recall the days after 9/11, when anti-Muslim hysteria was at its peak. Dark-skinned or Arab-looking people with beards (like me) became targets of angry mobs. I had refused to heed the advice of my friends to shave my beard and had angry insults hurled at me when I ventured into a small town on my way to the North Carolina coast. Two of my Sikh friends' children were so fearful that they cut their hair and removed their turbans. Indian women who wore ceremonial "bindis" on their foreheads were disparaged and labeled "dotheads."
Since 9/11, there have been dozens of hate crimes against Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims. This is what happens when you stoke the flames of racism and bigotry.
Sadly, these are demons that Donald Trump has already unleashed on America -- until recently one of the most open, inclusive, and tolerant countries in the world. Yes, all human beings have biases, and there has always been some racism beneath the surface. But America has been making great strides from its days of slavery and segregation. For the last five decades, to express racist views has become increasingly unacceptable.
Now, a presidential candidate is retweeting members of the Ku Klux Klan -- and his party is standing behind him. Politicians who decreed immigration and free trade are rallying against it. Respected political leaders remain silent when Trump spews racist venom, makes sexist rants against Latino beauty queens, and we see videotapes dignifying sexual abuse and misogyny.
It is very likely that the majority of the U.S. will take a stand and vote against Trump. Despite America's flaws, it does have a collective conscience and does do the right ethical and moral things.
But damage has already been done. Racism, bigotry, and xenophobia have again risen to the surface and become acceptable. The world has seen a side of America that has shocked it, and the country has lost moral ground. How will the U.S now stand up to tyrants who perform ethnic cleansing, leaders of corrupt banana republics who turn their countries into cash registers for their businesses, and despots who ignore the constitutions of their countries, when the same sentiments are openly being expressed by a potential president of America?Seven years ago, Robert Hanawalt ditched a sales career in Washington to move to Prague, where he quickly realized that he could live indefinitely without official paperwork.
He taught English illegally for four years on 90-day tourist visas. The trick? Quick trips over the border, which reset the clock with a fresh passport stamp.
"I did that," Mr. Hanawalt says. "But after the first few times I thought, 'Why even bother? Nobody is checking these things.' "
But as nine countries, including the Czech Republic, join the European Union's borderless Schengen zone Friday, Brussels is now ordering member states to get tough on visa policy.
That could spell trouble for an unlikely class of illegal immigrants: American expats. Attracted by English teaching jobs, the low cost of living, and societies just waking up to the possibilities of Western tourism, thousands are estimated to be living and working illegally in central and eastern Europe.
Prague quickly became an expatriate magnet. Today, 5,000 Americans are registered with the US Embassy here, though there's no official tally of the total number of Americans living in the Czech Republic. Local media estimate it to be nearly 20,000.
Brussels is taking aim at such visa riders. Now, Americans and Canadians can initially travel visa-free to Schengen countries for up to 90 days. But if at the end of that time they want to stay, they must go somewhere outside the zone – Ukraine or Montenegro, for example – to apply for a long-term visa.
Many expats are wondering what to do now, having set down roots here.
"There is definitely some panic about Schengen," says Evan Rail, a travel writer who has lived in Prague for eight years, but has been "riding a tourist visa" for the last two.
Hanawalt has gotten a valid residency permit and runs a business helping other Americans in Prague negotiate the country's immigration bureaucracy and get legal themselves. Mark Wright, who has been teaching English illegally in Prague for two years, found another teaching job at a language school that says it will help him obtain a visa.
Other Americans are applying for Czech business licenses, another avenue to obtaining a residency visa. But some are taking their chances.
"Unfortunately one can't go up to a government official and ask exactly how much harder it will be to live here illegally in the new year," says Mr. Wright. "It's possible enforcement might not change at all, and I know some expats who are banking on it."
The Czech interior ministry is promising increased enforcement. Spokesman Vladimir Repka wrote in an e-mail this week that in 2007 more than 4,000 people were deported for visa violations, though he did not know how many were Americans.
Schengen's expansion is affecting others as well. Ukrainians, long accustomed to unfettered travel to Poland, now need a visa even for day trips. Slovenia is closing down unmanned footbridges along its border with Croatia.
Not every American in Prague is greeting Schengen coldly. "As someone living here legally, I think it's only fair that some of the permanent tourists here be made to do the same thing," says Mark Anderson, who moved here six years ago and started his own cleaning business.Plants Posted by Rhonda Santos, APHIS Public Information Officer in Animals
Two adult Asian longhorned beetles on a maple tree.
To some people the smell of summer is a fresh cut grass or morning dew, but to me summer is the scent of healthy trees in full bloom. It reminds me that summer isn’t over yet and there is still time to be outdoors. And with August as Tree Check Month for the invasive Asian longhorned beetle (ALB), it’s a good time to take a look at your trees to make sure they are beetle free.
Last month, a homeowner on Long Island, N.Y., outside in her own yard, captured an adult beetle. She visited the website then called the ALB hotline telephone number 1-866-702-9938 to report the beetle. New York State’s Department of Agriculture and Marketing together with USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service responded and collected the beetle, which was ALB. Six infested trees were found on the property.
In 2008 a Worcester, Mass. resident noticed beetles she had never seen before on her backyard trees. Curious, she typed out the the insect’s description on an internet search engine. Somewhat disbelieving when an alert popped up telling her to call federal authorities at her entered description, which she did. It turned out she had discovered and reported a previously unknown infestation of ALB in Massachusetts. The beetle was first discovered in 1996 when a Brooklyn, N.Y. resident mistook holes left by ALB chewing their way out of a tree for bullet holes from vandals using his tree for target practice. He reported the odd occurrence to officials who ultimately realized it was beetles not bullets that caused the damage.
Exit holes on a tree trunk.
Concerned community residents, noticing something amiss or unusual, have helped efforts to find and get rid of this dangerous pest. ALB is not native to the United States, and we don’t want it here. Aside from the potential impacts to industries that rely on the trees that the beetle attacks, there is a danger to residents that weakened, infested trees could drop limbs or cause other problems in the community. The beetle essentially starves the tree by creating tunneling inside that disrupts the flow of nutrients and from which the tree simply cannot recover. It is a sad tale for the infested tree but also for any community affected by an ALB infestation. Finding and stopping beetles before they can impact communities is key.
Tunneling shown on a cut branch.
Please get outside and look for and report any beetles or signs of ALB damage on trees. You can look for adult beetles, larva in cut or damaged wood, exit holes (a little smaller than a dime), egg sites (smaller than a quarter and look like chew marks), and of course oddly dead or fallen branches. The sooner beetles and infested trees are found, the sooner we can save other trees from being attacked, and ultimately eliminate the beetle. Plus, you’ll be outside smelling all the scents of summer while you still can and checking your trees at the same time.
After the first frost the adult ALB die and won’t be seen again until next summer. But beetles could be developing, and growing, and tunneling inside your trees. Check now to ensure you won’t see any adult beetles next summer. For more information on ALB, visit our ALB website.
Fresh egg sites on a tree trunk.Get the latest from TODAY Sign up for our newsletter
May 28, 2013, 8:12 AM GMT By By Diane Mapes
After you’ve eaten like a cave man -- focusing on meat, veggies, fruits and nuts and foregoing dairy, grains, refined sugar and anything processed -- what’s next? Working out like our Paleolithic ancestors.
Paleo fitness -- also know as natural movement, primitive movement or primal fitness -- eschews elliptical trainers and free weights. Instead followers scramble around in trees, power lifting rocks and logs.
Shape Magazine named it one of the top 13 fitness trends to watch in 2013; Time calls it “the next big thing” in fitness. Outside magazine simply refers to it as “the workout that time forgot.”
Even when there’s no saber-tooth tiger or woolly mammoth to hunt down, the goal of the cave man workout “is to perform practical tasks, physical actions that you would perform in the real world, both in day-to-day and challenging situations,” says Erwan Le Corre, who founded the MovNat fitness system in 2008.
Like, say, chasing down a bus or cab instead of your dinner.
“People … perform basic human movements such as squatting, kneeling, stepping, balancing, crawling under an obstacle, jumping over another one, then lifting and carrying an object -- or someone -- over a distance, and many other movements,” Le Corre says. “Instead of plunking people in gyms and have them do boring repetitive workouts using machinery and trying to isolate muscles, we have them move a lot, to move in many ways they used to when they were kids.”
Most modern fitness programs focus on muscle-isolation and cardio-conditioning. But the body doesn’t work in isolation; it works synergistically, as a unit, he says.
“To be healthy, you need to move frequently and ideally, you need a variety of movement patterns, like we do when we are young children,” he says. “The more varied the movements, the better for health, fitness and resiliency.”
Darrell Kirk, 51, didn’t join a formal paleo fitness program, but came up with his own natural workout based on things he used do as a kid.
“I've always admired the way children run and play for hours and thought this would be a great exercise program,” he says. “It’s fun and it’s healthy.”
Kirk’s workout involves everything from “roughhousing with his son” (especially swinging and spinning him around) to stand-up paddle-boarding to obstacle courses in the woods to running the huge flight of stairs near his Seattle home.
Thailand MovNat Retreat attendees team lift a log as Master Instructor Vic Verdier (right) looks on Today
Others, like New York’s Ret Taylor, have created their own MovNat-inspired meetup.com groups that gather on weekends in Central Park to run barefoot through trails, swing their body from branches, hoist logs over their heads and generally act like, well, cave men and women.
Brandon Sewall, director of training at Primitive Movement, says it’s about value rather than vanity.
“Physical education a hundred years ago was about developing physical competency for real life,” he says. “Now fitness is degraded to padded machines and artificial movements patterns that are all about building vanity. It’s all about building show muscles instead of ‘go’ muscles.”
Participants in Sewall’s program may carry a large boulder down the beach or throw and catching cobblestones. Sometimes they walk and balance on unstable surfaces or sprint across a park or hang from a tree branch for as long as possible before landing.
“Primitive movement encourages organic resistance,” says Sewall. “You’re coping with the elements that Mother Nature throws at you instead of adding more volume and reps to your workout. You adopt not only to your environment but to the weather outside.”
And you’re also training your body to respond to unexpected -- or even unsafe -- situations.
“It doesn’t matter if you can bench 300 pounds if you can’t run upstairs and carry someone down who’s unconscious before a burning building is about to collapse on you,” he says. “It’s about being strong but also helpful and useful.”
Mishka Shubaly, a 36-year-old writer from Brooklyn, likes the functional aspects of the paleo workout.
“If you want to … be able to lift things or run fast or run a long time -- then doing exercises that incorporate the full range of motion, complex exercises that involve your entire body, that’s going to be the stuff that’s less likely to get you injured,” he says. “And more likely to get you to a level of actual fitness as opposed to just being a show pony.”
With the paleo workout your mind and your body don’t get bored, so you avoid fitness plateaus or peaks.
“With this method of training, it’s a never ending 45-degree angle,” says Sewall. “You get better and better and better at each of these skills.”
MovNat Workshop participants in Orlando, Fla. practice a foot-pinch climb using a lamp post Today
Exercise physiologist and personal trainer Jason Karp has a few reservations about functional training, despite its popularity.
“I totally agree with getting away from isolated movements in the gym with machines and doing more functional movement but I don’t know if we should be telling people to climb trees,” he says. “That’s taking it to the extreme.”
Instead of leaping from the gym into the branches of a Japanese maple, he suggests taking things slow.
“Transition away from the machines that guide the movement and use more free weights that are three-dimensional movement,” he says. “And then use your own body weight. Do body weight exercises like chin-ups and pull-ups and pushups rather than lifting external weights off the ground. Do things that are similar to what you do in real life, like squats, which is like bending down to pick up a pile of laundry.”
Sound advice since no matter what your fitness level, that cave will always need cleaning.
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The progress (which may not be recent) appears to be in programming tricks to push the iterations starting from 196 into more and more millions of digits.
It is not true that iterating almost always seems to lead to a palindrome. Unless iterating leads to a palindrome "fairly quickly," one almost never seems to arrive at a palindrome. For a number with few digits, an eventual palindrome is fairly likely. As the number of digits grows the likelihood seems to decrease rapidly. Let $s(x)$ be the result of applying the reverse and add operation to $x$. There is no proof which rules out the possibility that for all $x$ there is a $j$ with $s^j(x)$ a palindrome, but it seems highly unlikely. If we examine a large range of numbers and classify $x$ as a probably never getting to a palindrome if none of $s(x),s^2(x),..s^{50}(x)$ is a palindrome then we will have some errors (probably under $1\\%$) which can be discovered by pushing out to $s^{500}(x)$. But if we push out that far, or even just to $s^{300}(x)$ then we are likely to never have an error (that we can discover.)
There is (according to Wikipedia) a 19 digit number which arrives at a palindrome after 261 iterations and this is the current record. I tried 500 random 10 digit integers (actually, random integers under $10^{10}.$) Of them, 224 went to 300 iterations without a palindrome. There were 13 cases which did arrive at a palindrome but taking at least 30 iterations. They took 30,30,32,32,32,34,38,41,42,46,49,66 and 88 iterations.
Further discussion Some observations and questions in no special order:
Let $r(x)$ be the reverse of $x$ and $s(x)=x+r(x)$ be the result of applying the reverse and add operation to $x$.
If $x$ is a multiple of $11$ so is $r(x)$ and hence $s(x)$ and all future iterates $s^i(x)$
if $x$ has an even number of digits then $s(x)$ is a multiple of $11$
A palindrome with an even number of digits is a multiple of 11.
Of the $9\cdot10^M$ palindromes with $2M+1$ digits, about $\frac{1}{11}$ are multiples of $11.$
Call $x$ special if no carries occur in the addition $x+r(x).$ In this case $x+r(x)$ is a palindrome. Call $x$ exceptional if $x+r(x)$ is a palindrome but $x$ is not special (i.e. some carries do occur). By definition, $s(x)$ is a palindrome exactly when $x$ is special or exceptional.
If $z=s(y)$ then when we appropriately match up $z$ with $r(z)$, corresponding digits will be equal or differ by $1$ (in case of a carry immediately before one but not the other.) Here appropriately means that when $z$ has one more digit than $y$ we do not match the leading $1$,
So, if $x$ has an even number $2M$ of digits then $s(x)$ is a multiple of $11$ which, if not a palindrome, misses it only by having some positions which should be equal differ by $1$ and perhaps having a leading $2M+1$st digit which is a $1$. If $x$ has an odd number of digits then almost the same is true.
The previous comments shows that integers of the form $s(x)$ are fairly special. What can be said about numbers of the form $s^2(x)$, $s^3(x)$ etc? Certainly by $s^6(x)$ (and usually earlier) we have had an even number of digits at some earlier stage and hence are at a multiple of $11$ from then on.
Clearly there must be many solutions of $s(x)=s(y)$ with $x
e y$ since the the image set is much sparser. We can see that directly because for $y=\sum_0^{N-1}a_i10^i$ we have $s(y)=\sum_0^{N-1}(a_i+a_{N-1-i})10^i.$ This usually presents many chances to increase one of $a_i,a_{N-1-i}$ by $1,2,3$ or even more and lower the other by an equal amount to get $x$ with $s(x)=s(y).$
Recall that every $y$ with $s(y)$ a palindrome is special or exceptional (and vice versa). Roughly $(1.8)^{-N/2}$ of the $N$ digit integers $z$ are special and I do not see that knowing also that $z=s^j(x)$ for some $x$ changes that. So for small starting $x$ there is a fair chance of getting to a special number as we repeatedly apply $s$. However this chance gets smaller as the number of digits rises. This suggests that if iterating $s(x)$ gets into enough digits without running into a palindrome, it is unlikely to ever arrive at one.
Here is some justification of the counts: Let $N=2M$ be even. There are $9\cdot10^{N-1}$ integers $x=\sum_{0}^{N-1}x_i10^i$ with $N$ digits. The proportions of these which are special and exceptional are easy to give exactly but less than $\frac{1}{1.8^M}$ of them are special and and less than $\frac{1}{10^M}$ are exceptional. This is because there are $100$ ways to pick each of the $M$ pairs $x_i,x_{N-i-1}$ (except for $90$ ways to pick $x_0,X_N$.) To be special there are only $55$ choices with $x_i+x_{N-i-1}\le 9$ (except $45$ for $i=0$). A number is exceptional if each pair $x_i,x_{N-1-i}$ has sum $0$ or $11.$ (I think I proved that to my satisfaction.) For $N=2M+1$ the ratios are about the same taking into account the central digit.
Final thoughts Here is an easier related problem which might be called the 49 problem, I don't know if there is a 49+49=98 problem although we have just looked at the 98+98=196 problem. 196+196=392 and I've spent time on the 392 problem but it is unrelated. Here is the 49 problem: Call an integer $z$ very even if all digits are even (equivalently,if $z=d(x)=x+x$ for an $x$ with all digits less than $5$).
Q: for which $n$ does $n,d(n),d^2(n),\cdots$ arrive at a very even integer?
Up to 20001 there is a single starter which gets to a very even number after 47 doublings but no sooner. Curiously 49,98,196,392,... is the first example which never seems to arrive at a very even number. I actually included this example because I thought there would be some integers which provably never lead to a very even number. My proposed proof was that $x,d(x),d^2(x),\cdots$ is eventually periodic mod $10^j$ for any $j$, so one would just need to find the appropriate $j$ where every member of the cycle had an odd digit. However now I see that the $\mod 10^j$ orbit has length $4\cdot 5^{j-1}$ so almost surely does have a $j$ digit very even member (which may be the tail end of much much longer integers with plenty of room for odd digits.) However it seems clear that when the number of digits is small there is a reasonable chance of bumping into a very even number but that goes to $0$ exponentially in $d$ for a "random" $d$-digit number. It would be |
come up at hearing set for Wednesday by a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee on the methods used by Russia and other authoritarian governments “for undermining democracies throughout the world.”
The chairman of the Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, Republican Lindsey Graham, and the senior Democrat, Sheldon Whitehouse, wrote to Comey and acting Attorney General Dana Boente last Wednesday asking for "any warrant applications and court orders — redacted as necessary to protect intelligence sources and methods that may be compromised by disclosure, and to protect any ongoing investigations — related to wiretaps of President Trump, the Trump Campaign, or Trump Tower."
(Additional reporting by Julia Edwards Ainsley and Jonathan Landay; Editing by Peter Cooney)Nick Diaz may finally learn his fate next week.
On the agenda for the next Nevada Athletic Commission meeting, there is a hearing on a motion for reconsideration and proposed settlement agreement regarding Diaz. The meeting is scheduled for Tuesday in Las Vegas.
Items from an agenda are moved often, so there is no guarantee that the Diaz situation will be resolved this month. NAC executive director Bob Bennett told MMA Fighting that Diaz is on the agenda as of Thursday, but it's not set in stone.
In September, Diaz was suspended for five years and fined $165,000 by the commission for his third drug test failure for marijuana. The NAC, though, never provided Diaz's legal team with a written decision, which left the door open for settlement talks.
In October, the NAC admitted in a statement that it was negotiating a settlement with Diaz's team, which is now being led by the UFC's law firm Campbell & Williams. Sources told MMA Fighting in October that talks were going well and Diaz could fight as soon as summer 2016.
Wanderlei Silva's disciplinary re-hearing is also on the agenda. Silva evaded a drug test in May 2014 and was subsequently handed a lifetime ban by the NAC. In judicial review, though, a Nevada judge ruled Silva's punishment was "arbitrary and capricious" and sent his case back to the commission.
Also on the agenda, Invicta FC is asking for a license to hold a show in Las Vegas on March 11.Attorney General Jeff Sessions has stepped into the Bundy prosecution after Wednesday’s mistrial, ordering a third-party examination of the case in light of the latest government snafu.
“The Attorney General takes this issue very seriously and has personally directed that an expert in the Department’s discovery obligations be deployed to examine the case and advise as to the next steps,” said Ian D. Prior, principal deputy director of public affairs, in a late Wednesday statement.
The decision to intervene came after U.S. District Chief Judge Gloria Navarro declared a mistrial over the government’s “willful failure to disclose information” to the defense, saying it would have been “impossible” for the four co-defendants to receive a fair trial.
SEE ALSO: Mistrial bolster’s Bundy’s claim of federal persecution, gives prosecutors black eye
“Failure to turn over such evidence violates due process,” Chief Judge Navarro said in the courtroom as reported by the Arizona Republic. “A fair trial at this point is impossible.”
Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, his sons Ammon and Ryan Bundy, and Ryan Payne of Montana have been charged with 15 felony counts stemming from the 2014 armed standoff with the Bureau of Land Management at the Bundy ranch near Bunkerville.
The examination represents the first direct public intervention by the attorney general in the Nevada case, which began last year under then-Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch.
Acting U.S. Attorney Steven W. Myhre, who oversees the prosecution, said he welcomed the input from Washington, D.C.
“We respect the ruling of the Court and take very seriously our discovery obligations,” Mr. Myhre said in a statement. “The Office welcomes the assistance of the Attorney General as we continue to evaluate the case in light of the Court’s ruling.
No deadline was given for the attorney general’s examination, but Chief Judge Navarro set a Jan. 8 hearing on defense motions to dismiss the case. The next trial is tentatively scheduled to begin Feb. 26.
Mr. Sessions has said little in public about the Bundy case. One exception came during a July 12 speech to law enforcement in Las Vegas at which he praised Mr. Myhre and insisted, “I’m not taking sides or commenting on the case,” according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
The trial, which involves 19 defendants spread over three tiers, has been riddled with setbacks for the prosecution, including a previous mistrial, hung juries and acquittals on lesser figures in the April 2014 armed confrontation with BLM agents.
Judge Navarro said the prosecutors had willfully failed to disclose key evidence in the case, including FBI records about surveillance and government snipers at the Bundy ranch; activity logs, law-enforcement threat assessments showing the Bundy family posed no threat of violence, and internal reports about BLM agent misconduct.
She dismissed the jury after seven weeks in the latest trial involving the second of the three tiers of co-defendants.
All four in the latest trial are considered leaders of the confrontation with the BLM, which began after agents tried to impound the ranch’s cattle following Cliven Bundy’s refusal for years to pay grazing fees in a protest over federal land management.
Ian Bartrum, professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas law school, said that some have questioned the Trump administration’s commitment to the Bundy prosecution, given that “the Bundys are very popular among the Trump base.”
“I’ve even seen some [I think unfounded] claims that US Attorney’s office has deliberately sabotaged its own prosecution,” Mr. Bartrum said in an email. “I think that is very, very unlikely — but this could be a signal that the DOJ is taking the case very seriously, in order to quell those sorts of doubters.”
On the other hand, he said, “this could foreshadow a way out for the prosecution.”
“In other words, the DOJ expert could come in, review the necessary disclosures, and conclude that the government can’t win if it turns everything over,” Mr. Bartrum said. “That would give the US Attorney cover to dismiss the case.”
The government lost its star witness earlier this year when Daniel Love, the BLM agent in charge of the Bundy operation, was fired after a federal investigation found that he misappropriated rare minerals and then told a subordinate to conceal the misconduct.
He had previously been faulted for using his position to obtain tickets to the Burning Man festival.
Larry Klayman, an attorney for Cliven Bundy, urged Mr. Sessions in a Thursday letter to order prosecutors to drop the charges and launch an ethics investigation against Mr. Myhre, his staff and “complicit FBI agents.”
“Jeff, in the interests of justice, much less fundamental fairness, it is now incumbent that you do your job,” said Mr. Klayman, founder of Judicial Watch and Freedom Watch. “To put it bluntly, the time has come to ‘take sides.’ This travesty must end now.”"One cheer for democratic culture; another for democratic structure; three cheers when they join together in collaboration."
~Anonymous
"Strulture”?
A new (or overlooked) relationship demands a new term: A “strulture” is a collaborative and mutually enhancing relationship between structure and culture. This relationship obtains, e.g., where:
A “democratic structure” (larger scale institutions and patterns of governance) and a “democratic culture” (attitudes and commitments at the local, grassroots, or inter-personal level) mirror each other, support and protect each other, and contribute to the overall accessibility, inclusiveness, growth, and strength of workplace/economic democracy.
Positive Examples
Negative Examples (where the absence of one undermines the other)
El Pollo Criollo (EPC): Here a support organization (Federation for Economic Democracy, forerunner of the ICA Group) assisted laid off workers in taking over a defunct chicken processing plant using a genuinely democratic structure that gave them controlling numbers on the firm’s Board. But this structure, by itself, had nothing to offer them when EPC was forced to close due to underhanded competitive pricing by a multi-national chicken processing corporation. Why not? Because the workers had not been empowered to design ways to continue working together, or even separately, should their enterprise go under. A good structure was not enough. Central CT Middle School (not its actual name): In this case, a group of graduate and undergraduate students under my coordination convinced a middle school principal to allow us to facilitate study circle workshops with his seventh graders. These focused on enabling the younger students to discuss in a open and dialogical way what they were learning, to assess it, and make recommendations to improve or reshape their own classroom experience. It worked wonderfully well for over two years, but began to fall apart at the beginning of the next year. Despite the principal’s support, he had been overruled by a newly hired Superintendent, who decreed that subjects other than the core math, science, social studies, and English were to be verboten, as of the next semester. Hearing about this, the students became enraged at the loss of their art and music, as well as study circle courses, and many of them cut classes or became unruly in them.
In this case, we had managed to begin building a very close and empowering culture, one where the students could feel their own voices were heard and their talents appreciated. But we poured all our time and energy into that, and totally neglected the structural or larger institutional context, failing to reach out (until too late) to our students’ parents or to other teachers and teacher organizations to create allies. And, also, failing to look for potential support among outside allied organizations, such as Everyday Democracy – which is located in our state and had pioneered the use of citizen dialogue to resolve community problems – for assistance with the School District and its administration. We were blind-sighted institutionally, despite our astonishing success in building a democratic culture.
Lessons? – and an Example
Perhaps “culture” and “structure” are not invariably separate, contrasting, clashing, etc. If so, advocating that either one trumps the other might be better replaced by seeking “culture-enhancing structures” and “structure-enhancing cultures”.
We could try seeing the relationship here as analogous to that between the lyrics and melodies of a song. If one or the other is totally missing, you don’t have a song at all. If one is present but under-developed (schmaltzy or clichéd, for example), this weakens or degrades the whole song. And, if one overshadows or dominates the other, this will have the same result.
Beyond this, for a really great song, you need lyrics that resonate with, reinforce, enrich the melodies, and vice-versa. This is way more than merely fitting into the time spans or matching the sound strength (loud vs. soft) of one another. It calls for something akin to an art of collaboration.
One really fine example of this art is a process designed by poet, librarian, and writing mentor Wendy DeGroat, which she calls the “Kiva Feedback Ladder”. Though originally designed as a mentoring guide, I think it can be readily applied to a host of other situations, including ones involving conflicts between individuals, organizations, loyalties, ideologies, etc. As such, it could help turn aggressive antagonists into collaborative allies.
Wendy sent me a pdf version of her ladder (see below), which is adapted from other writing mentor guidelines, e.g., Harvard’s Project Zero. Here’s a question about it you might want to ask yourself: Shoud the Kiva Feedback Ladder be counted as an instance of “democratic structure”, or as one of “a democratic culture”; or should it rather be understood as a “democratic strulture” – playing a role in, and combining aspects of, both structure and culture?The New York Times today features key Democrats fretting over Hillary’s inability to grapple with the Trump phenomenon. In a front page, above the fold, Sunday New York Times article ("Unusual Race Tests Playbook For Clinton Bid"), major Democrat powers are letting it be known that Hillary Clinton has not figured out how to gain traction against Donald Trump.
When you think about it, we’ve seen this movie before, but recognizing the actual situation is so painful that it will be a long time before the Clinton campaign and its media auxiliaries dare face the truth. Allow me to explain.
Amy Chozick, Alexander Burns, and Jonathan Martin write:
…key Democrats say they are growing worried that her campaign has not determined how to combat her unpredictable, often wily Republican rival, to whom criticism seldom sticks and rules of decorum seem not to apply.
They have a right to be worried.
The sense of nervousness crystallized this week when Mrs. Clinton devoted campaign events across California to hitting Mr. Trump for not releasing his tax returns and depicting him as a cold corporate titan who profited off the housing crisis. Such charges helped undermine Mr. Romney four years ago. Yet Mrs. Clinton’s remarks received little in-depth coverage in the news media, while cable channels went live with Mr. Trump’s rat-a-tat recitation of “Crooked Hillary,” his favored nickname for her.
Key people like Chuck Schumer and Al Sharpton offer their thoughts on what is being done wrong.
“As soon as she clinches the nomination, we need a high-level person in the campaign whose sole job is to respond to Trump, almost on an hourly basis,” said Mr. Schumer, who has begun conversations with Clinton officials about who could fill that role.
And:
“Sometimes, you get the feeling that they’re in a professional boxing match and he’s in a street fight, and they’re coming in with their gloves on,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, expressing dismay over the Clinton operation’s apparent lack of appetite for combat. “This is a street fight with a guy with a razor and a broken Coca-Cola bottle,” he added, “and you’ve got to fight him like that.”
They see part of the problem. But they cannot bring themselves to admit what is really going on. Hillary Clinton is playing Margaret Dumont to Donald Trump’s Groucho Marx.
While Trump is no mere comedian aimed at getting laughs and nothing more, he is mining the same vein of public sentiment that Groucho did: near universal resentment over phony pretentiousness. In the 1930s and 1940s, it was social conventions related to class – opera goers who lacked any real interest in music, but were signaling their status with expensive clothes and tickets to lavish productions.
Today, the stakes of pretentiousness and phoniness have escalated to the point where they deeply affect everyday lives. Political correctness about welcoming un-vetted Muslims by the tens or hundreds of thousands can endanger our lives. As was vividly illustrated by recent events in San Bernardino, where locals were reluctant to speak up out of fear of being labeled Islamophobic.
Just as Margaret Dumont could only make her situation worse by responding to Groucho’s mind-bending mockery:
Debates have broken out in Mrs. Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters over the best approach to take. Some advisers worry that by running against Mr. Trump as she would a traditional Republican candidate, Mrs. Clinton is actually making the reality-television star appear more legitimate.
Donald Trump’s comfort with the media gives him a fluidity that is akin to Groucho’s ability to change the framework of a conversation on a dime, leaving poor Margaret sputtering and unable to follow the pace as fast as the audience could:
For now, her aides appear to be throwing ideas against a wall to see what sticks, including trying out different monikers after the Democratic National Committee’s “Dangerous Donald” flopped. An internal favorite is “Poor Donald,” with its implication that Mr. Trump, famously defensive about his net worth, is not nearly as wealthy as he lets on.
This won’t work for the same reason that Margaret Dumont was perpetually the object of ridicule. The audience (and today’s voting public) has had its fill of being lied to, of being manipulated, of being expected to engage in virtue signaling when a more authentic response lives in the collective gut.
The best movies of the Marx Brothers are among the rarest of comedy classics: popular worldwide and across the decades. The reason is that they address something fundamental: that we all resent having to toe the line dictated by our social (and political) overlords, and we cheer for cheeky fellow who refuses to play that game and turns the conventions against those who normally wield them to enforce their own version of order.Democrat Senator Bob Menendez is about to go on trial for corruption in New Jersey and a federal judge has ordered he physically remain in the court room throughout the entire process.
Irritated, Menendez filed a request to the court asking if he could leave for votes in the Senate. Federal prosecutors did not mince words when issuingtheir opposition to the request and reminded him he isn't above the law simply because he is a U.S. Senator.
"After being indicted twice for depriving the people who elected him of their right to his honest services, defendant Robert Menendez now demands that this Court disrupt his criminal trial so that he can perform his duties as a United States Senator. Defendant Menendez was indicted in 2015 and 2016 for bribery, conspiracy, honest services fraud, false statements, and violating the Travel Act. Those indictments allege a seven-year bribery conspiracy in which he traded the power of his public office for a lavish lifestyle that included private jet rides and vacations in Paris and the Caribbean," they wrote in a response. "The only reason defendant Menendez’s trial is scheduled for September 2017, almost two-and-a-half years after he was first indicted by a grand jury, is because he has spent that time pursuing a meritless argument that the Constitution immunizes him from prosecution—an argument that has been rejected by every judge to have considered it. Now he seeks to use his status as a United States Senator to pick and choose the dates on which his criminal trial will be conducted."
"This is not the first time defendant Menendez has sought special treatment from this Court. At defendant Menendez’s very first appearance, he asked to be exempted from the routine requirement that defendants surrender their personal passports because of his status as a United States Senator," the response continues. "This case began with defendant Menendez being treated like any other defendant, and it should end that way....only a United States Senator can try to hide behind the very office he corrupted to avoid accountability to the public for his actions."
Brutal indeed.
If Menendez is convicted, the issue of resignation will certainly be a topic of discussion on Capitol Hill. Democrats are reportedly circling the wagons around Menendez and will not demand he leave his position. If resignation occurs or if Menendez ends up doing time in prison, Republican Governor Chris Christie will appoint someone to replace him, shifting the balance of power in the Senate.Rules of Engagement is a 2000 American war film directed by William Friedkin, written by Jim Webb and starring Tommy Lee Jones and Samuel L. Jackson. Jackson plays U.S. Marine Colonel Terry Childers, who is brought to court-martial after men under Childers' orders kill a large number of civilians outside the U.S. embassy in Yemen.
Plot [ edit ]
In 1968, a disastrous American advance in the Vietnam War has Lieutenant Terry Childers (Samuel L. Jackson) executing an unarmed prisoner in order to intimidate a captive North Vietnamese army officer into calling off an ambush of U.S. Marines. His act thereby saves the life of the wounded Lieutenant Hayes Hodges (Tommy Lee Jones), though many of Hodges' men die in the battle.
In 1996, now a colonel, Hodges is about to retire from the Marine Corps and is reminiscing about his years in uniform. As a result of wounds he sustained during Operation Kingfisher, he was no longer able to continue serving as an infantry officer, so the Marine Corps sent him to law school and he continued his career as a JAG officer. He subsequently enters the Camp Lejeune Officers Club, where numerous Marine officers wait to honor his service at a pre-retirement party. Hosting the event is his old friend, Colonel Terry Childers, who is now the commanding officer of a Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU).
Subsequently deployed to Southwest Asia as part of an Amphibious Readiness Group, Childers and his embarked MEU are called to evacuate the U.S. Ambassador to Yemen from the embassy grounds as a routine demonstration against American influence on the Arabian peninsula and in the Persian Gulf turns into rock-throwing and sporadic automatic-rifle fire by snipers from nearby rooftops. After escorting Ambassador Mourain (Ben Kingsley) and his family to a waiting helicopter, Childers returns to the embassy to retrieve the American flag; meanwhile three Marines are killed by snipers on nearby rooftops. Childers then orders his men to open fire on the crowd and "waste the motherfuckers", resulting in the deaths of 83 irregular Yemeni soldiers, most of whom were armed, and injuries to over 100 more, saving the lives of the remaining US Marines and Embassy staff.
Back in the U.S., the U.S. National Security Advisor, Bill Sokal (Bruce Greenwood), pressures the military to proceed with a court-martial to try to deflect negative public opinion about the United States and salvage American relations in the Middle East, placing all the blame for the incident onto Childers.
Childers subsequently approaches Hodges and asks him to be his defense attorney at the upcoming court-martial. Hodges is reluctant to accept, knowing that his record as a JAG officer is less than impressive and Childers needs a better lawyer. But Childers is adamant because he wants an attorney who has served in combat.
With little time to prepare a defense, Hodges visits Yemen, only to find an uncooperative government and firsthand account of the serious injuries the crowd members endured. Most of the evidence is stacked against Childers, particularly the fact that no one else in his team can testify to having seen gunfire coming from the crowd, in particular Captain Lee (Blair Underwood), who hesitated to follow Childers' order.
Sokal is determined for him to be convicted and is met by the overzealous prosecutor, Major Biggs (Guy Pearce), who believes Childers to be absolutely guilty. Sokal at one point burns a videotape of security camera footage revealing that the crowd were indeed armed and firing at the Marines, evidence that would potentially exonerate Childers. He also blackmails Ambassador Mourain into lying on the stand and saying both that the crowd had been peaceful and that Childers had been violent towards him and his family during the evacuation.
Colonel Hodges meets with Mourain's wife after the ambassador's testimony to hear her side of the story. Although she admits Childers had been valiant, she refuses to testify and destroy her marriage.
During the trial, Hodges presents a shipping manifest proving that a tape from an undamaged camera which had been looking directly into the crowd—the tape Sokal had burned—had been delivered to Sokal's office, but failed to show up at the trial, arguing that this tape would not have been damning evidence against Childers if it had, in fact, shown the crowd was armed.
Captain Lee is grilled on the witness stand by Major Biggs and despite trying to give favorable testimony, leaves doubt of Childers' innocence.
Childers himself eventually takes the stand and engages in a fierce verbal battle with Biggs. Biggs produces a tape which contains the recording of Childers' poor choice of words when giving his order. While defending his actions, Childers loses his temper while stating that he would not sacrifice the lives of his men to appease the likes of Biggs. Hodges is left at a loss for words, knowing that this could easily doom Childers because they do not have any credible evidence to defend Childers's claims that the crowd was armed and his poor choice of words can be interpreted by the jury as being prejudiced towards Yemenis or having a gung-ho/cowboy attitude.
Already at an advantage, the prosecution presents the Vietnamese colonel who witnessed Childers execute a POW in Vietnam, Colonel Cao, as a rebuttal witness, trying to drive home the idea that Childers is malicious. Hodges cross-examines him and gets him to testify that had the circumstances been reversed, Cao would have done the same thing. After the trial, Hodges visits Sokal and asks him what happened to the tape; Sokal denies its existence.
Childers is found guilty of the minor charge of breach of the peace (for having disobeyed his order to just show his Marines), but not guilty of the more serious charges of conduct unbecoming an officer and murder. A final title card reveals that no further charges were brought against Childers and that he retired honorably from the Marine Corps. The title card also explains that both Sokal and Mourain lost their jobs after being convicted of destruction of evidence and perjury, respectively.
Cast [ edit ]
Production [ edit ]
The script was based on an original screenplay by James Webb, who developed it with Scott Rudin. William Friedkin was hired to direct, but then had trouble collaborating with Webb on rewrites of the script. Rudin passed the project over to Rickard Zanuck, who then hired Stephen Gaghan to work on the screenplay. Webb hated Gaghan's work and frustrated the filmmaker's attempts to get cooperation from the Department of Defense. Eventually this was obtained. Location shooting took place in Morocco, Nokesville, Virginia, Warrenton, Virginia (military base scenes), Hunting Island, South Carolina (Vietnam scenes), Mount Washington, Virginia (Gen. Hodges' estate scenes).[1]
Reception [ edit ]
Critical [ edit ]
The film received negative reviews upon release, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it 36% with some critics stating "the script is unconvincing and the court room drama dull". The American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee described it as "probably the most racist film ever made against Arabs by Hollywood".[2]
Director William Friedkin, however, dismissed accusations that the film was racist:
Let me state right up front, the film is not anti-Arab, is not anti-Muslim and is certainly not anti-Yemen. In order to make the film in Morocco, the present King of Morocco had to read the script and approve it and sign his name... and nobody participating from the Arab side of things felt that the film was anti-Arab. The film is anti-terrorist. It takes a strong stand against terrorism and it says that terrorism wears many faces... but we haven't made this film to slander the government of Yemen. It's a democracy and I don't believe for a moment they support terrorists any more than America does.[3]
Friedkin later claimed the film "was a box office hit but many critics saw it as jingoism".[4] He says that James Webb later saw the film on the recommendation of his friend Colonel David Hackworth; Webb then rang Friedkin to say how much he liked it.[5]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
Friedkin, William, The Friedkin Connection, Harper Collins 2013
Further reading [ edit ]A scene from the remake of Flowers in the Attic staring Heather Graham and Kiernan Shipka that will be released by a US cable channel this year. Photo: James Dittiger
Ask any V.C. Andrews fan about the 1987 film adaptation of Flowers in the Attic and she’ll probably tell you that it’s all wrong. The film soft-pedaled the novel’s incest, altered the ending, and screwed up most of the details (it was arsenic-laced doughnuts, not sugar cookies). They didn’t even include the tar incident. What a relief that the upcoming Lifetime TV movie adaptation promises to be faithful to all the dark and sordid details of the novel. After all, many of us have been waiting three decades to climb up the stairs to the attic with Cathy again.
Flowers in the Attic, a novel about four children who are locked up and mistreated in their rich grandparents’ mansion while their conniving mother tries to win an inheritance, was published as adult fiction in 1979, and it was as adult fiction that it hit the New York Times best-seller list within weeks, despite the fact that nobody had ever heard of V.C. Andrews. But reading Flowers in the Attic quickly became a rite of passage for teenage girls in the 1980s. Copies of the book and its sequels were passed from girl to girl, as if we could peer through the novels’ foil-embossed keyhole covers to the powerful secrets within. For many of us, Flowers in the Attic was the start of a love affair with V. C. Andrews that lasted throughout our teens, until it was replaced, somewhere around our first college lit class, by a sense of mild embarrassment. Oh, it was a phase, we told ourselves.
And yet, as all the buzz about a soon to be released Lifetime adaptation in the US reveals, we are clearly not over Flowers in the Attic. For women of my generation, Cathy Dollanganger’s story continues to possess a weird, singular power. It’s also an elusive one, and most of us have a difficult time articulating why Cathy’s story embedded itself into our imaginations, and why we’re so excited to revisit it now.
So why was Flowers in the Attic so uniquely appealing to its first teenage readers? The novel is narrated by Cathy Dollanganger, who is imprisoned with her siblings at the age of 12 and finally escapes at the age of 15. It’s a harrowing tale of abuse and neglect that includes beatings, starvation, and poisoning. It’s also, notoriously, the story of an incestuous love affair between Cathy and her older brother that culminates in sexual assault. Sure, those shockingly novel themes attracted readers, but the emotional payoff for teens was much deeper than the thrill of reading something taboo. In large part, Flowers in the Attic drew its power because it gave voice to a visceral, adolescent feeling of being held hostage by your own family.
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Cathy is restricted by her mother, disapproved of by her mother, and ultimately abandoned by her mother. Any teenage girl could relate; even if we didn’t share the abuses she suffered, we felt all of her adolescent feelings of victimization, hopelessness and resentment—especially at our own mothers. Cathy’s experience vindicated our own feelings of how unfair our treatment was by our families, and the litany of horrors she suffers fueled a powerful sense of righteous anger.
Flowers in the Attic contained the emotional stuff of adolescence that was missing from the YA novels that proliferated in the 1970s and ‘80s. Even Judy Blume, queen of important YA topics, wouldn’t get close to this dark, messy territory. Like Blume’sForever…—the other novel girls passed around in the 1980s, due to its semi-titillating-and-very-informative content about safe sex—the books we were supposed to be reading to help us cope with our various adolescent challenges delivered many reassurances that things would eventually be OK. By contrast, Flowers in the Atticindulged our fear that things were so deeply fucked up that they might never be OK. Near the end of Flowers in the Attic, Cathy even comments on how inadequate media is for addressing her emotional life:
Chris and I had educated ourselves from reading so many books, and television had taught us much about violence, about greed, about imagination, but it had taught us hardly anything that was practical and useful in preparing us to face reality.
Survival. That’s what TV should teach innocent children. How to live in a world that really doesn’t give a damn about anyone but their own—and sometimes, not even their own.
The novel addressed the disconnect between feelings that were hard for us to acknowledge and fiction that we were supposed to like. Despite its excesses, it conveyed a sadness about being robbed of normalcy that felt authentic to teens that were experiencing varying degrees of their own family dysfunction. In that way,Flowers in the Attic was a uniquely comforting story.
But V.C. Andrews’ ability to give voice to the chaotic anger of our teen lives isn’t the only reason why Flowers in the Attic resonates with us still. The novel and its sequels also recognised a deep and abiding fear that has shaped women of my generation: the fear of turning into our mothers.
As Cathy’s love and adoration of her mother, Corrine, turns into bitterness and anger in Flowers in the Attic, she becomes determined to get free of her family and be nothing like her mother. Yet through the decades that span the novels that follow, Cathy finds herself becoming more and more like Corrine. Petals on the Wind (1980) is driven by Cathy’s desire for revenge, which compels her to look and behave like Corrine in order to seduce her husband.
By the end of that novel, Cathy has also begin to duplicate her mother’s choices: She begins an incestuous family with her brother, lies to her children about his identity, and finds herself installing children’s beds in her own attic. The final words of Petals on the Wind are Cathy’s ominous monologue: “But... I am not like her! I may look like her, but inside I am honorable! I am stronger, more determined. The best in me will win out in the end. I know it will. It has to sometimes... doesn’t it?”
If There Be Thorns (1981) ratchets up the filial conflict, as Corrine moves next door to Cathy’s family and poses as a mysterious dowager so that she can spend time with Cathy’s sons. Cathy, now in her 30s and grappling with the reality of parenting, begins to soften in her judgment of her mother. She tells her son Jory, “When I was ten, I used to think that adults had it so easy, with all the power and rights to do as they wanted. I never guessed being a parent was so difficult.” Eventually, Cathy and Corrine find themselves locked together in a cellar. The ensuing fight starts a fire that threatens to kill them both. Corrine sacrifices herself to save her daughter, enabling Cathy to finally, posthumously, forgive her mother.
The plotlines may be outlandish, but the patterns of Cathy’s relationship with her mother are oh-so-familiar. Cathy wants to be different from Corrine but feels terrified that she can’t stop herself from turning into her; that tension is at the heart of all the Dollanganger novels. The series isn’t so much about disrupting destructive family patterns as it is about expressing their horrible inevitability. By locking them up together, Cathy’s mother all but guarantees that Cathy and Chris will end up creating an incestuous, dysfunctional family just like hers. Even their family name, Dollanganger, suggests that Cathy and her siblings are never more than just doubles of their parents. And Seeds of Yesterday (1984) seals the deal when Cathy dies in the attic of a mansion built to be just like the one in which she was imprisoned as a teen.
V. C. Andrews’s preoccupation with escape, confinement, and difficult moms was likely motivated by her own personal experience. Due to an injury suffered in her teens, Andrews used wheelchairs and crutches throughout her life, and lived a solitary existence with her mother as companion and caregiver. (Andrews died before the prequel Garden of Shadows was published in 1987, and though there's much debate on the topic, it's most likely all other V.C. Andrews novels besides the Dollanganger series, two novels in the Casteel series, and My Sweet Audrina were written in full or in part by others.) It’s not hard to imagine the feeling of permanent imprisonment Andrews may have felt.
After all, she did dedicate Flowers in the Attic to her mother.But these are obsessions we all have, too, and so we devoured the books and suffered the disappointment of that first film adaptation. It’s no surprise that a new television adaptation of Flowers in the Attic is on the horizon in the US. The girls who came of age with Flowers in the Attic are now in our 30s and 40s, and if the much buzzed about Dotty Bingo survey from earlier this year is to be believed, most of us have already turned into our mothers. (Some of my generation even have daughters of their own, and they worry that the helicopters they’re piloting may be as oppressive as the attics they once read about.)
Revisiting Flowers in the Attic is a bit like reading it alongside your teen self. You can replay all the emotions you had when you first read it, but you can’t really feel them anymore. It’s not nostalgia that draws us back to Flowers in the Attic and the Dollanganger novels. And it’s not because they’re fun, either. (The novels are neither as good as you thought they were, nor as a bad as you’d like to remember them.) Instead, it’s because V.C. Andrews continues to give voice to feelings that are hard for us to acknowledge. Like Cathy, we got out of our mother’s attics—but we never quite escaped them.
SlateI have problems with the opening of The Avengers. So did Marvel and Joss Whedon, it seems. They apparently wrestled with how to open the movie, and at one point they had the above sequence at the start - a very grim, very dark way to open a movie that is anything but grim and dark.
Watching that I have to wonder what the other half of the wrap-around is. If the entire film takes the form of Maria Hill recounting the story to the shadowy SHIELD leaders, there has to be an ending. She seems like a real horrible bitch here, so I would guess that the ending is a switcheroo, with her actually being chummy with Nick Fury after supposedly reporting him.
The opening itself is gripping, and it does cast the ending action in a whole new light - but the wrong light, I think. Avengers 2 can open with someone complaining about the destruction and death toll of the invasion, but the movie itself needed to end in triumph. Having this scene at the beginning of the movie would have shaded everything that came after as a pyrrhic victory. I believe that the film's positivity is what allowed it to beat the hell out of The Dark Knight Rises at the box office, and this opening would have undermined that.In an exclusive interview Tuesday with this news outlet, Gen. David L. Goldfein addressed, among other priorities, the consequences a lack of a budget would cause, the future of technology development at the Wright-Patterson headquartered-Air Force Research Laboratory, and welcoming input from President Donald Trump to lower the cost of weapon systems without sacrificing capability.
RELATED: Air Force redirects more money to small businesses; area firms benefit
The four-star general was at Wright-Patterson to mark the 75th anniversary of the Doolittle Raiders historic attack against Japan in World War II.
Under current spending caps, the Air Force will confront a $2.8 billion shortfall if Congress and the White House fail to agree to |
rotation.
Langston Galloway (nine points on three triples) shot the ball well, but Van Gundy never went back to him when he left the game in the second half because of bleeding.
Van Gundy admitted that was a mistake. But he would only go so far in taking the blame.
The slow starts had him mention tweaking the starting rotation – even as he struggles with the playing rotation.
“It’s a little bit mind-boggling, two games in a row where we really weren’t ready,” Van Gundy said. “I didn’t think we played as hard we were capable of at the start of the game, so we have to figure that out — whether it’s those five guys, changing their mindset or whether we have to change the lineup to get some guys in there who can be ready to go at the beginning of the game.”
Quotable: “When we started the game, he was being aggressive and he was talking, too. So what I like (in my mind) you want to do that? I'm going to kick your ass then. So that's what I did.” Embiid on Pistons center Andre Drummond.
Contact Vince Ellis: vellis@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @vincent_ellis56.On August 1 I reported here at PJ Media about the ongoing Obama administration discrimination against non-Muslim Syrian refugees, noting that at that time, fewer than one percent (43 of 6,877, or 0.7 percent of the total) of refugees admitted to the U.S. as of July 31 were Christians, Yezidis, and other Syrian religious minorities.
For the month of August, 3, 159 Muslim and 30 non-Muslim refugees were admitted to the U.S. - again, fewer than one percent.
And so far for September (as of today, 9/10), the numbers are even more depressing: 749 Muslim and just 2 Christian refugees, with non-Muslim admittance representing just 0.2 percent of the current monthly total.
So year-to-date, of 10,817 Syrian refugees admitted 10,742 were Muslim, and just 75 were non-Muslim (0.7 percent), while non-Muslim minorities in Syria make up at least 12 percent of the population.
During a media conference call just days after my August report, sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), both the Obama administration officials and the media were incurious and apparently unconcerned about the ongoing discrimination of non-Muslim minorities.
In fact, only one media outlet asked about the problem.
Coordinator: Absolutely and as a reminder if you would like to ask a question you can press Star 1 on your phone and record your name when prompted. Our next question comes from Lauren Ashburn with EWTN. Your line is open. Lauren Ashburn: Thank you very much and thank you for taking my call. The percentage of those Syrian refugees who have been let into the country - what percent are Muslims? Do you have that breakdown? Anne Richard: Yes, most are Muslims over 99% are Muslims. Lauren Ashburn: And then what percent are of religious (execution) are fleeing (because they) say religious persecution? Anne Richard: I don’t have that breakdown for you.
And that was the entire substance of the discussion about why so few non-Muslim refugees were being admitted.
The USCIS-sponsored conference call was just days before the State Department released its annual international religious freedom report, which said that genocide was being carried out by the Islamic State against Christians, Shia and Yezidis.
This echoes statements by Obama administration officials this year, including the assessment by Secretary of State John Kerry back in March, where he said the attacks by the Islamic State against religious minorities constituted genocide:
"My purpose here today is to assert in my judgment, (ISIS) is responsible for genocide against groups in areas under its control including Yazidis, Christians and Shiite Muslims," he said, during a news conference at the State Department. Kerry said that in 2014, ISIS trapped Yazidis, killed them, enslaved thousands of Yazidi women and girls, "selling them at auction, raping them at will and destroying the communities in which they had lived for countless generations," executed Christians "solely for their faith" and also "forced Christian women and girls into slavery." "Without our intervention, it is clear that those people would have been slaughtered," he said.
And yet Kerry's statement was only made AFTER the House of Representatives unanimously passed House Concurrent Resolution 75 declaring that the Islamic State was engaged in genocide.– 30 July 2013– 1538 words
Good artists copy. Great artists steal. — Steve Jobs, (mis)quoting Pablo Picasso.
Letterpress is a fantastic game. I remember how magical and fun the UI felt when I first played it. Letterpress was released when I was in the midst of completely rewriting the Exec Errands app, which involved a lot of custom UI components. I learned a lot about custom UI for iOS during that project, but Letterpress had some super advanced mojo happening in its UI. I wondered if I would ever be good enough to create something quite so magical as that. I was also shocked to learn that the entire UI of Letterpress is written using OpenGL instead of UIKit. I guess that's why they say, "You never go full Brichter."
For quite a long time I have wanted to write a 2-player turn-based game using Apple's Game Center infrastructure. Recently I was inspired by a board game that my family enjoys playing, and I decided it was just the right kind of game to turn into an app and experiment with turn-based game development.
I gave myself two challenges while developing the app:
Create an abstractable turn-based game library that could be used to create subsequent game apps. All I would need to do in the future is write the game specific logic and interface, then the library would take care of the rest of the game-state and turn-based logic for free. Other boilerplate things like Themes and Sharing actions would also be handled by this library. This turned into a library of code called CCCGameKit. See how much of the Letterpress aesthetic I could achieve using my newfound custom UI chops, but I could only use UIKit, Core Graphics, and Quartz Core. This should also be a library that could be used in any app. Rewritten components like Alert Views and Action Sheets should have drop-in API and delegate protocols so that, as much as possible, standard UIKit components could just be replaced with these custom implementations without much code changing. This library of code eventually turned into CEKit.
CEKit turned out to be pretty compact:
...while CCCGameKit was a bit more complex:
With the combination of CEKit and CCCGameKit, I produced an app that is pretty darn close to the look and feel of Letterpress. Thus, Tetra for iOS was born.
Below are some screenshots and gifs of parts of the game, especially demonstrating some of the similarities betwen the Letterpress and Tetra UI.
Disclaimer: gifs are displayed at 15 frames per second, but rest assured that the app runs at a full 60 fps rate on hardware all the way back to iPhone 3GS.
Launching the game:
"How to Play" prompt on first launch:
...which leads to the game instructions:
The list of current games and turn states:
Swipe to remove a game (I am most proud of this interaction because it was the most difficult to get working correctly; sample of some of the code at the end of this post):
Game board view controller:
Menu action sheet spawned by the Hamburger Button in the top right of the screen (in Letterpress all menus are alert views, however I still like action sheets for many-choice menus):
Alert View with flat pill buttons:
The alert view animates in from the top of the screen and falls off the bottom when dismissed. Each time it appears the amount and direction of rotation are random so each alert is unique:
Bubble labels pop open and closed to display ephemeral messages:
Animated bubble label (sample of code at the end of this post):
When the game ends in a tie (which is very rare), the board does something a bit whimsical, just for fun:
One new view controller I created for the app was a custom Matchmaker View Controller for starting a new game. The standard Apple Game Center matchmaking interface is quite cumbersome and can take up to 5 taps to start a game with a friend. I decided it could be done in 1 tap:
There is also a theme system in the app which will re-skin all the components with different colors:
The second hardest thing to accomplish while trying to achieve Letterpress-level UI exactness was implementing the navigation bar which adds a slight shadow when the content below is scrolled up underneath the navigation bar:
Somewhat more difficult is also animating the navigation bar color to a lighter shade when a dark theme is in use (sneak peak of code at the end of this post):
Graphics
With the exception of the pre-loaded screenshots for the "How To Play" view controller, there are only four graphic assets in the app. All of the other visual elements (including all of the game pieces, disclosure indicators, hamburger buttons, etc) are drawn programmatically using Core Graphics and Quartz Core and cached as UIImages. The only graphics that are fetched remotely are the player avatars from Game Center.
Results
Overall I am really happy with how things turned out. This has been the most challenging software product I have built as a side-project. I started the app on May 14, 2013 and have been working on it during random hours on nights and weekends. In total it has been about 100 hours of work. Making this app has been extremely satisfying because it forced me to learn many new things about UI code and forced me to think about how to abstract and generalize functionality from the beginning so that the code may be reused in future apps.
This has certainly been the culmination of my 3 years of professional Objective-C programming. I don't think I went Full Brichter, but maybe I was able to go Half Brichter.
Some stats according to cloc:
4707 lines of code in CCCGameKit
2158 lines of code in CEKit
4498 lines of code in Tetra-specific files
Frame rates:
60 fps on iPhone 5
60 fps on iPhone 3gs
60 fps on iPod Touch 5th gen
50+ fps on iPad Mini
50+ fps on iPhone 4
I'm sure if I worked a bit more on image caching and compositing I could get the iPhone 4 and iPad Mini up to 60 fps. Perhaps in v2.
Things I didn't implement for v1
There were a few things I purposefully did not implement for v1 because of time constraints (or more likely, they are just out of my grasp to implement in UIKit, for now...)
Drag panning alert views - In Letterpress, you can drag alert views up and down the screen with your finger. You can dismiss alert views by pressing a button or by flinging them off the screen by pulling them down quickly. This feature didn't seem strictly necessary to me, however now that I have a handle on UIPanGestureRecognizers from getting the "Swipe to Remove" interaction right, I think I know how to implement this in v2. Swipeable view controller navigation - Much like Windows Phone's Metro UI framework, Letterpress allows you to move between screens in the navigation stack by swiping across the screen to move between them. For now I am just using a stock UINavigationController to handle view navigation (and doing my own navigation bar magic within the stack). Swipe navigation was not something I wanted to tackle in v1. I suppose this could be accomplished using a custom Container View Controller, but this seemed beyond the scope of the app for now. Maybe this was something that was easier to implement in OpenGL. Game-preview-to-game-board-zoom - When you tap on a game in the main game list in Letterpress, the game preview (represented by colored squares) magically zooms from the preview frame to the full screen while also fading the letters and rest of the game chrome into view. I also render a preview of the current game-state, however for now I just do a simple push to the game board. I plan to make this transition more magical in v2.
Sneak Peek of the Code
For the curious, here are a few glimpses into the codebase.
The logic that handles adding/removing the shadow (and changing the color) of the navigation bar when content scrolls beneath it:
After setting all of the properties, the creation of the pill buttons UI happens almost exclusively in the layoutSubviews method:
Similarly, the hamburger menu button is rendered in code during layoutSubviews:
Everytime I see a bubble label appear it makes me smile because it reminds me of Pop-Up Video. Here is some of the animation code responsible for displaying a bubble label:
In order to correctly implement the Swipe to Remove in the game list cells, I had to implement part of the UIGestureRecognizerDelegate protocol. I learned that UITableViewCells also implement this protocol, so I had to be careful to call super in the case my recognizer was not the one being triggered by scroll or swipe gestures:
Coming Soon
Tetra should be available on the App Store by the end of August. I just need to clean up a few bits of UI here and there, and then I can ship it.
Thanks to Loren Brichter, Karen Cheng, Eric Florenzano, Jason Kozemczak, Dan Loewenherz, Chris Mitra, Paul Stamatiou, and Cristian Strat for proofreading this post.
Further discussion on Hacker News.
— Fin.Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The British Veterinary Association says the breeding of Scottish Fold cats should be banned
The British Veterinary Association has warned breeding of Scottish fold cats should stop because of health fears.
The breed has had a surge of popularity after celebrity owners such as Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran posted photos on Instagram.
The cats, which originated in Scotland in the 1960s, are famous for their small floppy ears.
However, this is the result of a genetic condition that can cause them to have short and painful lives.
Image caption Celebrities such as Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift own Scottish fold cats
One of the most famous cats on the internet is a Scottish fold who lives in Japan called Maru, whose videos have been watched more than 300 million times on Youtube.
The breed is popular because it is "cute", says Gudrun Ravetz, the president of the British Veterinary Association.
She told BBC Scotland: "These cats have become so popular on social media and with celebrities.
Image copyright VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO/AFP/Getty Images Image caption A Scottish fold cat is pictured during a cat exhibition in Kyrgyzstan
"People are wanting to have these cats because of that, but unfortunately it is another example of us prioritising how a pet looks rather than their quality of life."
She says the cats have a genetic mutation that affects their cartilage which leads to the folding of the ears and an owl-like appearance.
"The cartilage is deformed and it is not supporting the ears," Ms Ravetz says.
She says the cartilage mutation also leads to problems with other parts of the cat's body.
"These genetic mutations, which all the Scottish fold cats will have, develop into lifelong incurable and painful diseases such as a type of arthritis."
What is the Scottish fold cat?
Image copyright VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO Image caption Wearing a hat and glasses, a Scottish fold cat looks on during a cat exhibition in Bishkek
All Scottish folds are descended from a white barn cat named Susie who was discovered living on a farm near Coupar Angus in 1961.
She caught the eye of a local shepherd and cat fancier, William Ross, who noted that her ears folded forward.
The Rosses started a breeding programme and in 1966 began registering their cats with the Governing Council of the Cat Fancy, the UK's pedigree cat registry.
However, in the early 1970s, the GCCF stopped registering folds because of concerns about ear disorders and hearing problems.
The breed's popularity in the UK fell after this but the United States soon took the cats to its heart.
They were first introduced to the US in 1970 when three kittens from one of Susie's descendents were sent to a research centre in Massachusetts for a study of their mutations.
When the research was abandoned, the cats were re-homed.
One of the cats found his way to Salle Wolfe Peters in Pennsylvania, who is thought to be chiefly responsible for developing the breed in the United States.
The breed is still popular in the US and has been exported around the world.
Health problems
Image copyright VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO Image caption A boy and his Scottish fold cat dressed in a hanbok costume attend a cat exhibition
The GCCF said it had maintained its ban on the breed since the 1970s on health grounds.
Rosemary Fisher, from the GCCF, said: "They are cute but then you realise the health problems they have.
"We don't register them or even allow them to be exhibited or put in our shows."
However, the breed can be registered with other organisations in Britain and around the world.
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Some advocates for the breed say that responsible breeders never mate one Scottish fold to another, instead combining them with an American Shorthair or British Shorthair.
They claim that this leads to less possibility of congenital health problems.
"No. That's not the case," says Ms Ravetz from the British Veterinary Association.
"All cats with this folded ear appearance will have the genetic mutation.
"The rate at which they get the disease and the severity of the disease can be different but they will all to some degree have an incurable, painful and lifelong disease. We should not be breeding pets that can have these problems."
Image caption Vets say people should not be prioritising looks over health
Dee has been breeding Scottish Folds for 10 years, even providing pop star Ed Sheeran with his beloved cats.
She says: "If I had discovered there had been a significant problem I would certainly have stopped breeding them.
"But when you balance that against the number of health issues that occur in other breeds, you could argue that for most pedigree breeds."
The British Veterinary Association said that, unlike dogs, most cats do not have any pedigree.
They said about 80% of cats were just plain "moggies" but they were worried that social media was driving a fashion for designer cats who were bred for appearance rather than health.
Image copyright VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO/AFP/Getty Image caption The Scottish fold cat originated in Scotland but has become popular around the world
Ms Ravetz said: "There is no excuse for breeding from an animal who we know is going to suffer a painful and lifelong incurable disease.
"There are plenty of lovely moggies out there in rescue homes looking for a forever home that would make lovely pets for people."
She added: "This desire to have something based on looks rather than quality of life is across many of the pets we are getting and that's being fuelled by social media.
"There is also a rise in what we call brachycephalic dog breeds - the pugs, the English bulldogs, the French bulldogs - that can have a range of problems including debilitating breathing problems. This is because we are prioritising how they look."
Veterinary industry journal Vet Record is banning advertisements which use flat-faced dogs.
It has now said it will be reviewing the use of the Scottish fold cat.
Vet Record editor Adele Waters said: "There is really something wrong in the way that we as a society believe that it is right to breed animals for their looks.
"It is perhaps something that we should question."
There is currently no breeding ban on the Scottish fold cat or restrictions on cat breeding in the UK but the Scottish government said it was considering introducing a ban on the breed.
It added: "The Scottish government would encourage anyone breeding any type of animal to avoid breeding from any individual animals with genetic problems likely to give rise to ill health."WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A top congressional Republican on Sunday criticized President Barack Obama's expected decision to reverse the Bush administration's limits on embryonic stem-cell research, calling it a distraction from the country's economic slump.
U.S. Rep. Eric Cantor also says the policy reversal could lead to embryo harvesting, which "shouldn't be done."
"Why are we going and distracting ourselves from the economy? This is job No. 1. Let's focus on what needs to be done," Rep. Eric Cantor, the Republican whip in the House of Representatives, told CNN's "State of the Union."
Obama's move, scheduled for Monday morning, is part of a broader effort to separate science and politics and "restore scientific integrity in governmental decision-making," White House domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes said Sunday. The Bush administration's 2001 policy bars federal funding for research on embryonic stem cells beyond the cell lines that existed at the time.
Cantor, R-Virginia, has been among the leaders of GOP opposition to Obama's economic policies.
In a conference call with reporters, Barnes said funding research is also part of the administration's plan to boost the plunging U.S. economy.
"Advances with regard to science and technology help advance our overall national goals around economic growth and job creation," she said, adding, "I think anytime you make an effort to try and separate these pieces of the puzzle, you're missing the entire picture."
Because stem cells have the potential to turn into any organ or tissue cell in the body, research advocates say they could yield cures to debilitating conditions such as diabetes, Parkinson's disease and spinal injuries. But because work on embryonic stem cells involves the destruction of human embryos, many conservatives supported the limits former President George Bush imposed by executive order in 2001.
"Frankly, federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research can bring on embryo harvesting, perhaps even human cloning that occurs," Cantor said. "We don't want that. That shouldn't be done. That's wrong."
The Bush policy limited federal funding to work on 60 existing stem-cell lines, but only 21 of those have proven useful to researchers. Congress voted to roll back those limits in 2006 and 2007, but Bush vetoed the legislation both times, leading to Democratic charges that he had put politics over science.
Dr. Harold Varmus, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and co-chairman of Obama's science advisory council, said Sunday that Obama will "endorse the notion that public policy must be guided by sound, scientific advice."
Obama's order will direct the National Institutes of Health to develop revised guidelines on federal funding for embryonic stem cell research within 120 days, said Varmus, who joined Barnes in the conference call with reporters.
"The president is, in effect, allowing federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research to the extent that it's permitted by law -- that is, work with stem cells themselves, not the derivation of stem cells," he said.
Supporters of the ban said researchers could still obtain private funding or explore alternatives such as adult stem cells. Opponents said the research could be carried out using embryos left over in fertility clinics, which otherwise would be discarded.
Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Missouri, told reporters that reversing the Bush ban would "once again say to the rest of the world that we will be the beacon for cures and for hope." She credited her support for federal funding in part for her 2006 election.
"I think it's a great moment, and I'm proud of [Obama] for reversing that executive order," McCaskill said.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Alabama, said the Bush policy imposed ethical limits on science.
"My basic tenet here is I don't think we should create life to enhance life and to do research and so forth," Shelby said. "I know that people argue there are other ways. I think we should continue our biomedical research everywhere we can, but we should have some ethics about it."
CNN's Elaine Quijano contributed to this report.
All About Barack Obama • Stem Cell Research • George W. BushGet ready to breathe in and breathe out, Harry Potter fans — a recent theory is sparking up a conversation on the Internet on how the entire series could've changed. The single theory is based on one passage in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, involving the most underrated Hogwarts house — Slytherin.
The speculation, outlined by Tumblr user crazybutperfectlysane, discusses the idea of Cassius Warrington of Slytherin being chosen to compete in the Triwizard Tournament instead of Cedric Diggory. Both characters would still continue to help each other throughout the book up until the very end, when Voldermort still decides to kill Warrington. The user discusses the possibility that this might've united the Slytherins against Voldemort so they could have fought against him in the Battle of Hogwarts. Pretty crazy right? The entire post is below.
However, the theory train didn't stop here. Another user, aplatonicjacuzzi, took it upon themselves to delve deeper into what Warrington's death would mean to Slytherin, Hogwarts, and Harry. This would include Slytherins realizing that pure bloods aren't safe from Voldemort, joining Dumbledore's Army, and eventually facing off against He Who Must Not Be Named at last. The rest of the imagined storyline is below.
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These two posts are currently circling the Internet, even though both are two months old. It makes sense — it's serving up the right amount of fresh "what if?" options we always need every few months. We can't imagine how different the stories of all our favorite characters would be like or how Harry Potter could have had different kinds of support at Hogwarts. Guess that's all we can do now: wonder how and what could change the story we love and treasure so much.By Tom Heap
Presenter, Radio 4's Costing The Earth
Masdar City aims to be powered solely by renewable energy sources
The world's first zero-carbon city is being built in Abu Dhabi and is designed to be not only free of cars and skyscrapers but also powered by the sun. The oil-rich United Arab Emirates is the last place you would expect to learn lessons on low-carbon living, but the emerging eco-city of Masdar could teach the world. FIND OUT MORE Costing The Earth: Eco-City Limits Monday 29 March 2100 BST, BBC Radio 4 Or listen later on the BBC iPlayer At first glance, the parched landscape of Abu Dhabi looks like the craziest place to build any city, let alone a sustainable one. The inhospitable terrain suggests that the only way to survive here is with the maximum of technological support, a bit like living on the moon. The genius of Masdar - if it works - will be combining 21st Century engineering with traditional desert architecture to deliver zero-carbon comfort. And it is being built now. Masdar will be home to about 50,000 people, at least 1,000 businesses and a university. It is being designed by British architects Foster and Partners, but it is the ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who is paying for it. And it will cost between £10bn ($15bn) and £20bn ($30bn). Renewable energy The architects are turning the desert's greatest threat - the sun - into their greatest asset. The quality of air will be better than any other street in the Gulf and in the world, and that alone will bring you safety, health and happiness
Kaled Awad, director of the Masdar project They have built the biggest solar farm in the Middle East to power the city and to offset the inevitable burning of diesel and baking of cement in construction. They are also experimenting. One project involves a circular field of mirrors on the ground, all reflecting towards a tower in the middle. That, in turn, bounces the light down in a concentrated beam about a metre (3ft) wide to produce heat and drive generators. But I was told firmly not to wander over and feel the warmth, as it could fry me in seconds. The international team of engineers have real pride in their work. This is more than building to them, it is a lab bench with the freedom to get it wrong, and Masdar's chief architect Gerard Evenden loves the concentration of expertise: "What Abu Dhabi is beginning to generate is the Silicon Valley of renewable energy." Keeping cool The Emirates have seen one of the world's most spectacular building booms paid for by oil and made tolerable by air conditioners, which also depend on oil to feed their vast appetite for energy.
Lunar technology has begun to influence our thinking
Gerard Evenden, architect But Masdar will have to be low temperature and low carbon. Part of the solution is apparent the moment you walk in. And you do "walk in" because this is a city surrounded by a wall, a defined boundary. Unlike the upward and outward sprawl of Dubai or Abu Dhabi, Masdar is compact like ancient Arab cities. Streets are narrow so buildings shade each other, and the walls and roofs of buildings will do their bit to shed heat too. The vertical faces are dressed with screens which look like a terracotta mesh. They keep the sun out but let the breeze in. And as architect Gerard Evenden says: "Lunar technology has begun to influence our thinking." One idea being tested is using a thin foil surface covering, a gas or vacuum blanket, to keep the heat out. It is an idea dreamt up for a moon base. To encourage a breeze, wind towers are being built, drawing draughts through the streets without using energy. Masdar will still use electricity for gadgets, some air conditioning and, most crucially, to desalinate sea water but, when it comes to power, the city has a simple mantra: "Only use energy when you have exhausted design." Driverless vehicles Conventional cars must be checked in at the city gates and then you can choose between the oldest and newest modes of transport. At street level, it is all pedestrianised and the planners have done their best to keep the city compact and foot-friendly. But if fatigue overtakes you, then slip down a level and meet the Personal Rapid Transit or podcars. These driverless vehicles are guided by magnetic sensors, powered by solar electricity, and they stop automatically if an obstacle appears. They are programmed to go where you ask. Kaled Awad, director of the Masdar project claims: "The quality of air will be better than any other street in the Gulf and in the world, and that alone will bring you safety, health and happiness." The future success of the project will be clear to see. On top of the wind tower, there will be a beacon betraying the city's actual energy use: red for too much, blue for just right. It will be 45m (147ft) up and visible for miles around so, when Masdar is finished in five to 10 years' time, we will all know if it is in the red. Costing The Earth: Eco-City Limits will be broadcast on Monday 29 March at 2100 BST on BBC Radio 4 and will be available on the BBC iPlayer.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable versionOpposition to the Harper government’s planned Memorial to the Victims of Communism is staggering—with even the prime minister’s supporters strongly opposing its design and location, EKOS polling data shows.
Sixty-three per cent of those polled who intend to vote Conservative in the upcoming federal election oppose the memorial, a project of the Harper government that has been vigorously backed by senior Conservatives despite controversies about its location, its lack of architectural merit, cost and political symbolism.
The iPolitics/EKOS poll shows that 77.4 per cent of Canadians strongly oppose the memorial and 82.7 per cent of residents of the National Capital Region [NCR] oppose it. In Canada and the NCR only four per cent polled strongly support the memorial.
Among non-Tory voters, 83 per cent who intend to vote Liberal oppose the project and 84 per cent of polled who intend to vote NDP oppose it. Among other supporters of national parties, opposition remains at the 83 per cent mark.
“Rarely do you see an idea that’s so clearly opposed by the public,” said EKOS pollster Frank Graves.
NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar, who has been among the memorial’s fiercest critics, said the new numbers only confirm what he’s been hearing.
“Most people, when they have learned of this project and where it’s going to be located and the process by which it’s been placed in this particular location, are against it,” said Dewar. “That’s a clear sign to the government that they’re out of touch with the public.”
Ottawa’s mayor, Jim Watson, criticized the location of the memorial and the National Capital Commission for not consulting with the City of Ottawa. Watson will be speaking to a motion related to the memorial at a city council meeting next Wednesday.
According to Graves, the “good news” for the government is that most Canadians are blissfully unaware of its plans to erect this giant monument on Ottawa’s historic Wellington Street. The controversial 5,000-square-metre structure would be located between the Supreme Court of Canada and the Library and Archives Canada building.
As the cost of the structure has ballooned to an estimated $5 million and the cost of the prime land has been estimated at $16 million, opposition to the project has galvanized.
In his analysis of the poll, Graves attributes the government’s determination to build the memorial on prime land that was set to be the site of a Justice Department building named after Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau to the Tories’ antipathy toward the Supreme Court (and communists).
“This location will skilfully occlude that despised institution with a huge celebration of things arguably dear to the government’s re-election plans and ideologically consistent with their cold war era views of Godless commies,” writes Graves.
The poll shows that 63 per cent of Canadians have not heard of the planned memorial, but 61 percent of NCR residents are aware of the plans.
EKOS asked respondents to review the design, which will feature one hundred million “memory squares” each representing a life lost to Communism regimes world wide, and to describe in one word their reaction to the memorial.
Respondents were also asked to rank the priority of a new facility in the NCR – and among options – the victims of communism memorial was dead last.
Graves suggests that the federal government “had best hope the deal can be closed on this before the election because given the depth of opposition we suspect there will be a groundswell of protest that will probably jettison this ‘unnecessary’ and ‘wasteful’ project.”
Graves said that the Harper government is trying to appeal to the Ukrainian and Polish communities, in an effort to secure their votes. The memorial’s significance to victims of Chinese communism has been blurrier, given the Harper government’s generally cordial relationship with Beijing.
“The Ukrainian and Polish population is sizeable and they have vey stark memories of victims of communism and have legitimate reasons that should be celebrated. The trouble is those thing happened in other counties at different times and they’re really not relative to most Canadians,” he said.
This study involved an online only survey of 2,116 Canadians. The field dates for this survey are May 12-19, 2015. The margin of error associated with the total sample is +/-2.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.Cauliflower “Mock” Potatoes
I’ve tried lots of recipes that I’ve found online and adapted to be the most simple possible. I don’t enjoy cooking, but I do enjoy remaking my favorite meals into keto-friendly versions. Without a doubt, this is my most used recipe. I have these “potatoes” about 4 times a week. My husband loves them, and he’s not on keto.
There are plenty of versions of this recipe out there, but here is the simplest, 10-minute version:
One 10 ounce bag of frozen cauliflower – 3 grams carbs
About 4 ounces of cream cheese (reminder – DO NOT use low-fat cream cheese) – 4 grams carbs
One tbsp. of butter (NOT margarine or an low-fat substitute)
I simply microwave the cauliflower for about 6 minutes in a microwave-safe bowl. Then I toss it in the food processor. It helps to have the cream cheese and butter already in the bowl of the processor, because adding the hot cauliflower makes the ingredients warm, gooey, and ready to mix. Process the whole thing until smooth. YUM.
Sometimes they turn out too soft (more like whipped potatoes), sometimes a bit stiffer. Try playing with the right timing and more or less cream cheese to get the consistency you want.
There is another good recipe here. These use Dubliner cheese and may have more carbs.
One 10-ounce bag of cauliflower yields two hefty servings. When I looked up the carb count of frozen cauliflower online, I saw some large numbers; however, my Kroger brand 10 oz. bag is 4 grams of carb, with 1 gram of fiber. That’s what I’m using to calculate this carb count.
Of course, you can use a “real” head of cauliflower, but I just like the simplicity of making it with the pre-measured, ready-to-go frozen vegetable.
Total for recipe – 7 grams of carbs
Total per serving – 3.5 grams of carbsLinux 4.9.2
From: Greg KH <gregkh-AT-linuxfoundation.org> To: linux-kernel-AT-vger.kernel.org, Andrew Morton <akpm-AT-linux-foundation.org>, torvalds-AT-linux-foundation.org, stable-AT-vger.kernel.org Subject: Linux 4.9.2 Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2017 08:52:54 +0100 Message-ID: <20170109075254.GA19754@kroah.com> Cc: lwn-AT-lwn.net, Jiri Slaby <jslaby-AT-suse.cz> Archive-link: Article
I'm announcing the release of the 4.9.2 kernel. All users of the 4.9 kernel series must upgrade. The updated 4.9.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-4.9.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-st... thanks, greg k-h ------------ Documentation/sphinx/rstFlatTable.py | 5 + Documentation/virtual/kvm/api.txt | 1 Makefile | 2 arch/arc/include/asm/cacheflush.h | 6 - arch/arc/mm/cache.c | 13 ++- arch/arm64/boot/dts/nvidia/tegra210-p2180.dtsi | 18 ++++ arch/arm64/kvm/hyp/switch.c | 8 + arch/powerpc/boot/ps3 |
a team high 18 points and Glass adding 14. In addition, senior A.J. Merriweather (Jackson) finished with 13.
For UNC Greensboro, guard Francis Alonso scored a game high 23 points, while forward RJ White finished with a double-double on 16 points and 11 rebounds.
In the first half, the Bucs’ defensive effort was strong, holding UNCG to 38 percent shooting from the floor and forcing nine turnovers. However, ETSU’s offense also struggled with seven turnovers and a 39 percent shooting clip, allowing the Spartans to keep the score close.
Even with those offensive issues, the Bucs still found themselves leading the game at 26-22 with just over two minutes left in the half. At that point, however, the Spartans’ offense woke up with a 9-2 run to close the half and take a 31-28 advantage into the break.
The second half started in a nightmarish fashion for the Bucs, as Alonso scored eight points to power a 15-3 run by the Spartans and stake UNCG to a 46-31 lead with 16:07 left in regulation. The lead stayed 16 until the 12:25 mark at 55-39, as the Bucs went to a full-court press and started to surge, outscoring Greensboro 20-4 over the next nine minutes of play to tie the game at 59-59 with 3:54 left in regulation.
Unfortunately, from there the Spartans outscored ETSU 13-7 to win by six.
The Bucs will return to play this weekend in the Southern Conference Tournament, taking on Mercer at 8:30 p.m. on Saturday night in Asheville, N.C. For more on ETSU men’s basketball throughout the 2016-17 season, visit ETSUBucs.com and click on the men’s hoops link.From any type of glance at the primary or secondary statistics, there’s little reasoning behind Marian Gaborik’s early season slump. There doesn’t seem to be anything previously suggesting an aging decline; in 2014-15, he established the best possession rates of his career and finished with a shooting percentage that was well above his career average. He scored 27 times in 69 games, which included a team-best 10 power play goals. Based on all available data, his off-season player evaluation concluded with the line, “It appears to be status quo with Gaborik – and that’s not really a bad thing at all.”
With one goal and one assist through 11 games, one could chalk up his early lack of production to an unlucky start to the season – his 92.5 PDO is seven full points below his previous career-low amongst available data – Darryl Sutter has seen something he’d like the 15-year veteran to focus on.
“He needs to be closer to the net and needs to finish, clearly,” Sutter said. “Two easy things to address.”
A check of the information at SportingCharts.com, a site that contains information on players’ average shot distance, indicates that Gaborik’s 24 shots this season have come from a distance of just over 25 feet, and that’s not out of whack with what his career averages are. Five of those 24 shots came in last night’s loss to Chicago, so perhaps that’s a signal that the traditional goal scorer is starting to get back on track.
“The shots haven’t been there for me as much as I’d like to, so it was nice to get some shots, but I obviously need to do more to help this team, and that’s just the bottom line,” Gaborik said. “I need to do more overall.”
The 33-year-old got off to a sluggish start a year ago, totaling only eight points through the team’s first 30 games (though he only played in 18 of the 30). He’s yet to rekindle his chemistry with Anze Kopitar, and has seen time alongside Nick Shore and Trevor Lewis when things haven’t clicked alongside Los Angeles’ top center.
“At this point, we’ve been together on and off, and whoever I’m there with, I just need to find my game to where it needs to be, wherever, whichever position I’m going to be in,” he said. “That’s the bottom line. I have to do that.”
He’s not the only forward going through a dry spell. Outside of Milan Lucic and Tyler Toffoli, both of whom have done some heavy lifting offensively, the only five-on-five goal scored by a Kings winger this season came off Gaborik’s stick in the win over Colorado three Sundays ago.
When he faces the St. Louis Blues tonight at the Scottrade Center, he’ll look to reprise the pair of goals he scored in the building last year, if not the end team result. Los Angeles ceded the last four goals of the game on December 16 and lost, 5-2.
“[Those goals were] just from areas right in front of the net,” Gaborik said. “One was a power play goal, one was a 5-on-5 goal, so I just need to get into those areas a little more, and like they always say, find those ugly goals and just try to drive the net and create some opportunities there, and try to play well defensively, and offense comes from there.”
Like any premier goal scorer, his goals have traditionally come in a multitude of ways. Wristers from the slot – like his goal against the Avalanche. Rebounds. “Bang-bang hands plays” around the net, as Sutter referenced a day after last year’s game in St. Louis.
Gaborik is an established player with a long NHL history, and he fully understands his role and the challenge.
“You win games with goals, obviously, but a lot of things come into play before that, and of course I don’t like my production, that’s the bottom line,” he said. “I need to be better, but just the overall game, it comes down to the little things, doing the little things right, and just go from there.”
-Advanced stats via War-on-Ice, Stats.HockeyAnalysis.com, Sporting ChartsOnly Bjorulf Knows: Part II
← Previous Part | Next Part →
By James Fadeley
Special thanks to Dan Riggins and Erik “Frown” Bergman
Sigbjorn heard Aron swallow, and couldn’t blame him. There was at least a score of them, though smaller ones seemed to hide behind their ranks. Far too many for four Ravens, caught out in the open, to take on. Worse, the hills were no longer too steep to charge down.
“Back,” Sigbjorn hissed. He began to crawl in reverse, dragging his weapon across the grass. “Get to the river.”
His men obeyed, slinking along. Until a warbling scream cut through the air, a thick blade pointed their way.
“Run!” The varl screamed, scrabbling to his feet. “Pass the river! Get to the forest and stick together!”
Aron snapped around. “But you sai—”
“Now!”
They charged towards the wood line, fiery rock raining down around them. Most of the smoking slag missed, though Marteinn yelped as a round blazed past his ear. Sigbjorn heard the din of thundering stone. The enemy warriors pursued them.
The sound was drowned out as Tomas hit the river first, almost slipping over on a slimy rock. He recovered, and without finesse wallowed through the current. Marteinn and Aron followed, but Sigbjorn noticed the wolves still gathered about their meal. They were readying themselves to pounce on the spearman.
With a sprinting start, the varl launched himself, sailing half over the river. Descending, he took a bounding hop, splashing a geyser of water skyward and finishing his flight.
Landing before Tomas, Sigbjorn roared. His voice echoing through the trees.
The wolves, once ready to spring, instead shrank before the deafening howl. The largest turned and bolted, his tail between his legs. The smaller ones chased after him, no braver than their leader.
As Marteinn and Aron ascended the banks, the varl reached down and grabbed a large rock.
“What do we do?” Marteinn asked, huffing. His seax was drawn, as was one of his throwing axes.
“You remember the Halsar weave?”
They nodded. Tomas grinned, reaching for the hunting javelins over his shoulder.
“Aron, with me. Marteinn, Tomas, go west. And shout when you throw, dammit!”
The two men rushed to obey just as they heard the splash of the dredge hitting the water. Sigbjorn snorted and stepped away from the tree line. At this distance, he could discern their open helm faceguards and angled horns, rancorous grimaces on their beige faces.
“Right back at you, cave faeners,” he uttered as he picked a target, reared back and hurled his rock.
The payload sped through the air and struck the brow of a stoneguard who failed to raise his tower shield. Sigbjorn laughed at the agonizing, shaking yelp of his victim, and snatched another rock before dashing into the forest’s shadows.
He heard them give pursuit with renewed vigor. Aron fell into step alongside, and Sigbjorn slowed to allow the youth to maintain pace. There was a snap of tree branches as the stone men entered the woods.
Someone shouted. Something clanked.
The varl counted his steps. One, two… and on the fifth, he turned. “Throw!”
Aron spun about, plucking an arrow from his quiver and nocking. He fired without reservation and Sigbjorn saw leaves zip and flutter, caught in the missile’s flight. There was another clank and Sigbjorn waved the youth on. “Go!”
It was six or seven steps before the next cry came from the west, the sound as horrible as death. Sigbjorn feared the worst, then remembered Tomas’ ailment. He barely suppressed the urge to laugh. Don’t. It’ll weaken you.
Another five steps, and Sigbjorn spun and hurled his stone. In the flash, he counted five on their tail as the stone caught a grunt in the chest. Seeing nothing more he could throw on the ground, the varl ran. Aron pulled alongside him and he waved the youth away. “Split! Go!”
As Marteinn’s scream echoed in the forest, Sigbjorn knew it was time. Cupping a hand over his mouth, he faced the west and shouted. “Flock!”
Flipping around, Sigbjorn took his sword with two hands, holding it defensively. A trio of grunts charged, their bizarre axes raised and yellow eyes alight with fury. Angling away, Sigbjorn clenched his teeth and aimed low, launching himself into a whirling tempest of steel.
Spinning, the world was a smeared blur, but he felt the resistance against his weapon. He heard the reverberating wails and relished in their suffering. Recovering, he saw two thrashing against the leaf-covered earth, the third still standing upon a deeply gashed leg. Black oozed from the wound, dripping upon detritus.
The grunt stood, raising his weapon. Hate them as he did, Sigbjorn respected his enemy’s bravado. Before his foe could strike, the varl sank steel into the dredge’s chest. As the life went out of the grunt’s eyes, Sigbjorn kicked outward, freeing his blade.
The remaining pair still struggled. One had lost his leg, the stump spurting dark ichor. The other was wounded but intact, almost to his feet. Sigbjorn met this one with a raised blade. Yet he swerved as he chopped, cleaving his foe’s axe-arm.
The maimed grunts’ howls chased the varl as he ran east.
Shuffling from the right drew his attention, and Sigbjorn realized it was Aron falling into step. They charged on until coming to a few shrubs large enough to hide them.
“You,” the boy huffed as he ducked down. “You fought them?”
“Yes.”
“But didn’t… didn’t slay them?”
“No.”
“Why…?”
The varl met the boy’s gaze with a stern glare. “Because it grinds them down, makes them waste food and care on the helpless. Burdens them with those who cannot fight and survive on their own, and weakens their will. You’re not the only one who should sing tales of the Ravens, got it?”
Aron’s mouth opened and closed a few times like a fish out of water. He managed a weak nod.
“Good. Now shut the faen up.”
Trembling, Aron obeyed.
They waited and listened. The forest echoed with the clamor of dredge armor, but the din came from many directions. After a moment they heard rapid footsteps, far softer than the stone men could make. Sigbjorn whistled, and Marteinn and Tomas appeared around the bush.
“Anyone pursuing?” the varl asked.
Tomas shook his head. Marteinn smirked.
“Alright, follow me.”
Sigbjorn led them north. Occasionally, they spotted the shapes of dredge wandering about the forest gloom. Each time, the varl altered their course, avoiding engagement until they at last reached the river again. Despite their urgency, they forded the slow stream as quietly as possible, keeping splashing to a minimum.
Their drenched clothes dripped over the northern bank as they rose. Marteinn whipped droplets from his sleeves, and spoke. “Next stop Reynivik.”
Slag struck the sand, sizzling and scorching the dirt.
Sigbjorn fixed his sight to the base of the hill from which the dredge had appeared. Several figures huddled there. Dredge of some kind but far smaller, more proportional to men than varl. A few whirled raised slings, preparing another volley.
The varl felt his brow twitch and he stepped toward his foes. Then took another step. He heard the men behind him follow. He began to jog. Then run, even as another salvo of hot rock sailed over their heads. He could see the slingers grow unnerved by their charge. They edged away, threatening to rout.
Sigbjorn bowed, ramming the first with his horns.
The slinger flew back, bowling into another. As the pair tumbled to the earth, Sigbjorn raised his sword and swung down, cleaving through a third. He thought he heard a high-pitched shriek as black splattered against the dancing grass. The limbless dredge dropped, grasping their fresh stump.
Taking a moment to survey the battle, Sigbjorn witnessed Tomas spear one of them, before kicking his foe away. The impaled slinger managed to remain standing, cradling a dripping abdomen and scrambling back. Marteinn guffawed during battle, twirling as he slashed a foe’s arm, then using his momentum to hurl an axe behind him. The spinning blade found its mark in a fleeing slinger, forcing them to a knee. Before that dredge could recover, an arrow found their flank, finishing the task.
Sigbjorn looked to Aron as the youth reached for another round. One of the downed dredge stood behind him, drawing a stone dirk from their belt and preparing to stab down.
The varl sprinted, and stabbed just above Aron’s shoulder. The tip sank into the slinger’s neck. The dredge’s poised arm dropped listlessly to the side before they toppled to the ground. Jerking his blade free, Sigbjorn realized that Aron stared at him with eyes more white than blue. With a grunt, he patted the youth’s shoulder.
Marteinn ducked a knife swing, and hamstringed the last foe. A pained shout reverberated from the dredge’s stone helm, black spreading over the hem of their dark orange sash. Marteinn grabbed the slinger’s head from behind and held them down, a kick to the elbow sent their stone blade flying into the grass. “Hey, Aron! Get over here!”
The youth warily approached, scanning the remaining dredge. No more had the will to fight— the remaining handful huddled together, shivering with bowed heads. Marteinn smirked and flipped his seax over, offering the handle to the boy. “Do it.”
Aron stared at the blade for a moment, before looking to Sigbjorn for approval. A faint murmur came from the cowering dredge who watched, but none moved.
You should stop this, a voice whispered to the varl. Yet he waved a hand regardless. “Go on.”
Aron swallowed, slipping his bow over his shoulder. He took the seax with both hands and focused on the restrained slinger. The dredge’s breath rattled, while the dark pool on their robes widened under a heraldic mark of a triangular sun.
“It’ll be merciful,” Marteinn promised.
Tomas glanced away.
The youth tightened his grip on the weapon. With a shrill cry, he stabbed. The tip followed the curve of the slinger’s outfit, burying itself in the grooves of the sternum. The blade stuck halfway, and Aron leaned forth to thrust further within.
The dredge gasped as the light of their eyes dimmed, before going slack in Marteinn’s grasp.
A powerful wail came from the crowd. A pair of the dredge clansfolk held a smaller, robed figure in check. The little one struggled to escape their grip, desperate to reach the dead slinger. The howl sank into a haunting and low groan, until the dredge lowered to their knees, defeated. Aron stared at the pitiful figure, his eyes sorrowful as he realized what he had done, and released the embedded seax.
Marteinn chuckled as he dropped the body, which fell against the soil with a dull thud. Something tumbled from the slain dredge’s pouch with a chime. The lunatic grinned as he plucked two blue crystals.
“I’ve always wanted to play with these,” Marteinn said, bouncing one of the gems in his palm. He stepped toward one of the shuddering clansfolk, who stared at his mad grin. Marteinn cracked the twin crystals together, causing them to glow. With a cackle, he slipped them into the dredge’s robes.
The other dredge edged away, while the one Marteinn chose stood there, strangely calm. Then they turned and ran, tearing past their peers. The dredge got a considerable distance before hurling themselves forward, the Shatterstones igniting. The flash was swiftly lost in the black cloud of smoke, the bang echoing over the plains.
As the dark mist cleared, Sigbjorn saw the ashy remains of the dredge. They were nothing more than a limp pile, split into at least two parts. The only noise was Marteinn’s sinister giggling, a haunting rhythm that the varl found himself echoing. Until he looked at the others.
Tomas grimaced, his jaw drawn tight while his knuckles whitened over his spear’s haft. Aron winced painfully, his whimpering voice cracked as he repeated to himself. “It’s what we got to do. It’s what we got to do.”
He was wrong, Sigbjorn. Fearing death is natural, but a life of terror drives us to seek our own tomb. The thoughts weren’t the varl’s own, but they came to him like a carrion bird coveting a meal. They were slag, Hadrborg damn them. They deserved it. A faint taste of the horror they’ve inflicted.
Marteinn sauntered back and stomped a boot against the corpse bearing his seax, withdrawing it with a squelch. “Well boss, what do you think? Fingers?”
Sigbjorn looked at the lunatic and saw something in him. A fetish for violence that was everything the Ravens were, are and ever would be. And for the first time in more than a century, it sickened him. Yet that was what he, and they, were. The varl shook his head. “No, no time. But we have to slow their warriors down.”
Marteinn nodded and took a step forward, before a huge hand barred his way.
“No. I’ll do it.”
The dredge clansfolk raised their gazes as Sigbjorn strode forth, gripping his massive blade to render them the mercy of steel.
No one spoke as they left the carnage. Blood dripped from Sigbjorn’s sword with every heavy footstep. With each droplet upon the grass, the wonder grew heavier in his mind. Even before the onslaught, the dredge did not run. They simply sat there, bowing their heads and accepting execution. Not one had attempted to escape. He realized that Marteinn’s Shatterstone victim had fled only to save the other clansfolk from harm.
Someone nudged him. Sigbjorn realized it was Tomas.
“What?”
The mute pointed at the varl’s blade.
“Ah, right,” Sigbjorn said, taking a cloth from his satchel. Best not to leave a trail.
“That was some fun, eh kid?” Marteinn asked, elbowing Aron. “How does it feel? To be a real Raven?”
Aron said nothing, staring at the ground as he walked.
“What? Too good to—”
“No more talk,” Sigbjorn bade as he finished cleaning his weapon. Truthfully, he was in no better a mood than the youth, but thought to offer a reason. “Keep your ears keen for any more trouble. I don’t want to be caught blindsided again.”
Marteinn sneered, but obeyed.
They traveled for some time when they heard a sound on the wind. A howl of anguish, wavering at the precipice where grief becomes rage.
They all stopped to listen, glancing at one another at a loss for words to explain.
“Go, swiftly,” Sigbjorn ordered, taking off. The others were right behind him.
To be continued…
Head over to The Official Banner Saga Forums and discuss with other fans!The four-year court battle that led to the Supreme Court ruling gay-marriage bans unconstitutional in June cost Michigan taxpayers $1.9 million in legal fees paid to the plaintiffs' attorney team.
The court ordered the state to pay $1.9 million, the vast majority for legal fees, near 5,420-plus labor hours billed at $350 per hour.
April DeBoer and Jayne Rowse, of Hazel Park, sued the state in 2012 after narrowly avoiding a car crash that left them wondering what would happen with custody of their three (now four) individually adopted children if one parent were to die.
Michigan law only allows married couples to jointly adopt, and based on the 2004 voter-passed gay-marriage ban, the couple and their children were excluded from the protections of joint adoption.
The Detroit News reports attorney Carole Stanyar, who spent the most time on the case, 2,182 hours netting her a $763,875 fee, received her final payment from the state Wednesday.
"Four years without a paycheck, fronting costs in a case of this magnitude, was certainly hard on our families," Stanyar told The News. "The fee statute was enacted to empower and encourage the vindication of civil rights. I do feel empowered, and very encouraged. So, I guess the law is working as Congress intended."
Dana Nessel worked 1,165 hours for $407,785; Kenneth Mogill, 1,011 hours for $353,920; Robert Sedlar, 237 hours for $83,160; Mary Bonauto, 796 hours for $278,845; and Vickie Henry, less than a week for $11,235.
These costs are separate from any labor hours or extra expenses, such as fees and travel costs for expert testimony, Attorney Bill Schuette's Office incurred in defense of the state gay-marriage ban.
"I'm declining comment at this time," Schuette spokeswoman Andrea Bitely told MLive when asked for the figures in an email Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge Bernard Friedman, presiding over their initial lawsuit, told the two Hazel Park nurses that challenging adoption laws wouldn't do; they needed to challenge the voter-approved law that really stood in their way -- Michigan's gay marriage ban.
In August, 17 months after Friedman ruled the ban unconstitutional and eight weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court agreed with him, putting the issue to rest once and for all, Friedman officiated the couple's wedding in a Southfield ceremony.
Request for legal fees:AllTime10s created a viral video describing 10 things that could trigger the next mass extinction. Truth Teller gets to the bottom of the claims. (Davin Coburn/The Washington Post)
AllTime10s created a viral video describing 10 things that could trigger the next mass extinction. Truth Teller gets to the bottom of the claims. (Davin Coburn/The Washington Post)
Livr, the social network for drunk people, had all the trimmings of an ascendant tech start-up. A slick promotional video featuring two Eisenbergian CEOs. A hip Web site littered with buzzwords and trademarks. Press releases. Stickers. Posters. T-shirts. An auspicious, grass-roots buzz that began in Reddit’s technology forums and bubbled into the mainstream press.
Livr’s only problem? It was all fake — an elaborate hoax engineered by Brandon Schmittling and Brandon Bloch, two Brooklyn creatives with a lot of free time and little patience for what they call the “absurdity” of modern Internet culture. After dreaming up an idea for a start-up so ridiculous no one would believe it, Bloch and Schmittling set out to entice people to buy in. They bought a domain name, designed a Web site, enlisted actors to play Livr’s earnest co-founders; they “leaked” a fake press release on Reddit, promising an improbable “online party at all times,” a social network limited only by the user’s blood alcohol concentration.
First Engadget blogged about it. Then Next Web. Soon Mashable and CNN. Within hours, one of Silicon Valley’s top investment firms contacted the Brandons, asking if they needed venture capital.
“Livr was one of those ideas you have when you’re sitting around the bar with your friends, and someone says, ‘Wouldn’t it be crazy if...?’ ” laughed Bloch. “But these days there’s no such thing as too crazy. The cultural landscape is just getting more and more absurd.”
In the purer, wide-eyed days of yore, April 1 marked a once-in-a-year-opportunity to print phenomenal whoppers in newspapers, tell your children penguins can fly and otherwise violate the everyday norms of human behavior. But pranksters hardly need an annual indulgence for their hijinks anymore: On the Internet, after all, every day is April Fools’ Day.
In the past week alone, online hoaxers convinced wide swaths of the online world that a deranged man dressed as a clown wandered unchecked around Staten Island; that Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte casually biked to his meeting with Obama; that R&B singer Trey Songz was gay; and that searchers finally found Malaysia Airlines Flight 370... about 15 times over.
There’s no denying the reality-bending, eyebrow-arching absurdity of these times, where “reality TV” denotes one of television’s more fictionalized outputs and the news swims in headlines too crazy to be true. It’s kind of like the classic ice-breaker game two truths and a lie: A bank mistakenly deposited $31,000 in a teen’s account, and he spent most of it in days. North Koreans must cut their hair like Kim Jong Il. A major chain restaurant will offer milkshakes made with wine. Can you tell which story is fake?
“I don’t see the distinction much anymore, between fantasy and reality,” explained Bloch, who spends his days making “corporate documentaries” — a field that surely straddles the two. “In my mind, the line is blurred.”
Exactly who is doing the blurring, though, is up for debate. Although it’s easy, and perhaps comfortable, to blame the deceivers, the reality is far more complicated. The Web incentivizes page views, no matter how they’re racked up. And so hoaxes are hatched not only by lone pranksters but also by Web-savvy marketers and public relations firms eager for attention. They’re often propagated by journalists hungry for clicks and starved for time. Then they’re swallowed whole by an audience drowning in so much information — such a cacophony of demands on their eyeballs and attention — that only the truly crazy stuff stands out.
“Americans are just bombarded with information,” moaned Allen Peterson, the executive director of Wine to Water, a tiny water charity behind the “Miracle Machine” hoax of a few weeks ago, which promoted a newfangled gadget that claimed to turn water into wine. “I mean, to get their attention on something like the water crisis? The question is, how do we even get that in front of them?”
Wine to Water’s hoax was perhaps the most forgivable ruse in recent memory. A five-person nonprofit organization based in Boone, N.C., Wine to Water funds clean-water projects in Haiti, Ethiopia and six other countries. It pays for the projects through donations and sales of its branded wine. After a CNN documentary about the group ran in December, the multinational PR firm Publicis approached Peterson with the offer of a pro-bono marketing campaign that would play off the Wine to Water name — and get the water crisis in front of millions of people who wouldn’t spend two seconds on it otherwise.
Peterson and his organizatison weren’t concerned about the tactics or the implicit commentary on America’s painfully short, misdirected attention span. He reasoned that, if the hoax could save one child, the deceit would have paid off.
It did. Water to Wine’s donations have shot up more than 20 percent since the hoax; Peterson estimates his charity will reach an estimated 6,000 more people in 2014.
But not all hoaxsters share Peterson’s altruism, or Bloch and Schmittling’s sense of philosophical inquiry. A number of Web sites that propagate fake stories — including Mediamass, or the dubious News-hound.org — profit from display ads when their frauds go viral. Others redirect to phishing sites that attempt to draw out the gullible clicker’s e-mail address and personal information.
But the most common class of Internet prankster overlaps, mundanely enough, with the April Fools’ prankster of yesteryear. There is no ulterior motive — unless the pursuit of attention and #lolz constitutes ulterior.
“My friend just has a strange sense of humor and thought it would be funny,” Gemma Sheridan, 26, of Britain, wrote in an e-mail in reference to the mysterious creator of News-hound.org. Sheridan’s name may seem familiar: A viral story circling the Internet last week claimed she had been stranded on a desert island for eight years, forced to build a hut from clamshells and strangle goats to survive.
“It doesn’t matter to me if people believe it or not,” she added. “It’s just a hoax and people will move on to another one.”
They already have. Days after Sheridan’s shipwreck story went viral, another News-hound story — this one about the Earth’s gravitational field going down for a few minutes on April 4 — took off on Twitter. (Ironically enough, that bit of astronomical urban legend originated as an April Fools’ joke... in 1976.)
It’s easy to condemn the wide-eyed naivete of the Twitter dolts sharing this latest hoax: Haven’t they learned yet? Couldn’t they just Google it?
But condemnation is futile. The Web, after all, is an organism spun to divert and distract attention. Might as well condemn the entire multibillion-dollar industry of display ads, or the fresh-faced 21-year-olds graduating from journalism school and disappearing into an industry where their worth is judged by the clicks they generate.
Better yet, blame the very foundations of human nature, which wants to trust. To believe. To experience real awe — even for a fiction. As Plato wrote 2,300 years ago, before even the Bible told a story about turning water into wine, “everything that deceives may be said to enchant.”
“People are interested in trading this reality for another one,” Brandon Schmittling, Livr’s co-founder, said simply. “They want life to be entertainment.”
It’s no wonder one day in April is no longer enough.SIA is a cryptocoin based on SIA Storage – a decentralized cloud storage system that allows users to enjoy safe and 100% anonymous storage for a small fee. The system is based on decentralized nodes all around the world.
The storage service received many positive reviews so far and looks like it is becoming a decent alternative and rival to giants such as Amazon S3 and Dropbox.
Until not long ago, the only way to mine SIA coins was by either using a GPU rig or by renting HDD space to others via Minebox. It does make sense since the decentralized storage system relies on thousands of users from all around the globe who provide free HDD space.
However, not long ago SIA Tech released an ASIC for SIA coins.
Meet the Obelisk SC1
SIA Tech was a bit reserved about this ASIC miner. Therefore, no one knew exactly what it will be until Friday 23th. Even then, there is still little information about it and new info is being released every day.
What we know so far is that the Obelisk is a 28nm full custom ASIC that is being designed and will be manufactured by a third-party US-based semiconductor company. According to SIA Tech, it is a trustworthy company wit a 20-year track record in ASIC design. If that is true, then we might expect good quality hardware, opposed to those ASICS that are designed by enthusiasts.
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Hashrate and Price
Until Friday 23th, it was unclear about the hashrate and the price of the Obelisk. Now we know that the ASIC costs $2499 and can be preordered on their site.
The presale will start in 1 day (Wednesday, 2pm eastern time) and will last for one week.
Announcing the Obelisk Sia ASIC miner presale! Presale begins Wednesday at 2pm EST, will be open for 7 days. https://t.co/CgbwRKCsIc
— Sia Tech (@SiaTechHQ) June 23, 2017
The expected hashrate of the Obelisk is 100 GH/s, which means that with a block reward of 20M SC/DAY the monthly revenue will be of 60,000 SC. The revenue will be higher in the beginning and is expected to get to 60,000 SC/month when 10,000 Obelisks will be sold. This is expected to happen by June 2018.
SIA Tech claims that the power draw of the miner will be below the 500W mark. Combined with the expected hashrate of 100 GH/s, we get some impressive numbers. It is certain that once the Obelisk is released, there will be no room left for GPU SIA coin miners.
Finally, SIA Tech promised to introduce decentralized mining pools by the time the miners will be shipped. This will allow users to choose between solo and pool mining.
Shipment and Payment
While the presale starts in 1 day, the first ASIC shipments are expected to happen in June 2018. There might be delays since ASIC manufacturing isn’t something SIA did before, so personally I take the expected shipment date with a pinch of salt.
Just like most ASIC manufacturers, SIA Tech will only accept Bitcoin for their miners. They won’t accept SIA coin as payment since the relatively new coin does not have the liquidity it takes to handle such massive transactions in such a short period of time. Bitcoin does.
Package
According to SIA Tech, the miner package includes everything, even the power supply. They promise that the setup is minimal.
Controversy and Critics
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Now, there has been a lot of controversy regarding the release of the Obelisk SC1. You probably noticed the tension in the forums about this new ASIC. That was expected since ASCIS are rarely welcomed in the mining community to begin with. On the other hand, the introduction of ASICs was rather beneficial for the cryptocurrency world and it defined cryptomining as we know it today. This is why I prefer to stay away from any bias as much as possible when making my research about any specific ASIC.
People have been also complaining about SIA Tech only accepting Bitcoin as payment. The daily fluctuations of the cryptoccurency price greatly affect the final price of the ASIC and many users are not okay with that. Yesterday, SIA Tech officially acknowledged this issue and promised to compensate the loss if the price of the currency drops by up to 5%.
The main downside about the Obelisk SC1 is that it does not support any other algorithms except the one for SIA coin. Most popular ASICs can work with multiple coins that are based on the same algo, which gives them more versatility and lifespan. This is the only downside about the Obelisk SC1 that does make sense in my opinion.
In Conclusion
Whether the Obelisk SC1 will be a good ROI or not, it will definitely change the way SIA coin is mined and traded. I really hope that it will be for the best.
While the price of the Obelisk SC1 is rather impressive, the ASIC is expected to outperform any GPU rig. According to the official site, each ASIC chip performs as well as 100 GPU’s. I think that’s something to consider.
What do you think about this upcoming ASIC? Will it be worth the money? How will its release impact the SIA coin?
Thank you for reading. As always, your comments, suggestions and questions are welcome.
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I think just getting people out there is the best cure for that. We’re changed through our experiences. That’s kind of fundamentally what my book is about, and why I’m doing the work I’m doing. I want to give people experiences that change them. Words are cheap. What you see and feel and taste and touch and smell, that what’s going to resonate with the decisions you make.
Kirk on Little Stony Falls in Virginia Nik Haase
Tell me a little more about the other work you’re doing.
I’m developing a company called Southern Appalachian Expeditions in partnership with Ace Kayaking. It’s my goal to do outdoor guiding and interpretive sessions with folks in this area who are interested in getting a feel for our surrounding environment. We’re going to be doing guided river trips and guided hiking trips, where the focus is on experiential learning. We’ll teach about geology, biology, and native ecosystems, and we’ll do it in a fun way where people are excited and having a good time. So here pretty soon, in addition to just being able to go rafting on the Ocoee, adventurous folks in the Knoxville area—and even people that aren’t that adventurous but want to try something new—can come out to the Obed or to Big South Fork and have a river trip in a wilderness setting with an interpretive focus.
Both volumes of Kirk's book, Whitewater of the Southern Appalachians, are now available for purchase.IRISH WATER HAS been put on the State’s books – at least provisionally.
In an update on its website, the Central Statistics Office said the beleaguered utility had been placed on the list of bodies which are directly or indirectly controlled by Government.
“This is a preliminary and provisional classification, agreed with Eurostat, pending a final classification decision,” the CSO said.
“This approach was agreed between CSO and Eurostat during the 2014 EDP dialogue as a prudential measure in the event that a final classification decision on Irish Water had not been reached by the time of the March EDP [Excessive Deficit Procedure] notification.
“A classification proposal on Irish Water is currently with Eurostat.”
Such updates to the ‘Register of Public Sector Bodies’ are made twice a year by the CSO.
The EU Commission’s statistical body is due to decide whether the company can be judged to be independent from government next month.
To meet the Eurostat test, the utility must cover half of its operating costs from income received from customers.
Back in January, the Commission expressed concern about the Government’s revised water charges package.
In a draft report as part of its review of Ireland’s post-bailout economic progress, it said the extent to which Irish Water can borrow on the markets had yet to be determined.
The document warned that the utility may not be able to become self-funding, as charges had been capped until the end of 2018.
If Irish Water fails its market test, it could mean the budget deficit would be increased by about 0.3% of GDP.
Ministers have said repeatedly over the last few months that they remain “confident” the company will pass the European test.Update: The SpaceX Falcon 9 ORBCOMM-2 launch has been delayed 24 hours to allow for more preparation time.
Monday night has a 10 percent higher chance of a good landing, tweeted SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
The announcement was followed by a statement from ORBCOMM:
"Upon further review of the static fire data, SpaceX has determined that an additional day prior to launch will allow for more analysis and time to further chill the liquid oxygen in preparation for launch."
The commercial space company will attempt to land the Falcon 9 first-stage at Cape Canaveral after launch, but this is a secondary objective. The first objective being the delivery of 11 ORBCOMM satellites into orbit. The low-Earth orbit satellites will provide reliable communications to and from remote areas of around the world.
The new launch time will be Monday at 8:29 p.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with a five minute window.
This time change is the latest delay for SpaceX's return to launching rockets since June when a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a resupply capsule to the International Space Station exploded minutes after launch.
SpaceX postponed the ground testing of the rocket's engines and its systems, also known as a static fire test, from Wednesday until Friday. There were also several technical delays during testing.
Footage from a tracking camera that followed the first-stage of the Falcon 9 during a landing attempt. The footage starts at about 10 km in altitude. Falcon 9 first stage approached the drone ship “Just Read the Instructions” in the Atlantic Ocean after successfully launching the Dragon spacecraft during the CRS-6 mission to the International Space Station on April 14. Footage from a tracking camera that followed the first-stage of the Falcon 9 during a landing attempt. The footage starts at about 10 km in altitude. Falcon 9 first stage approached the drone ship “Just Read the Instructions” in the Atlantic Ocean after successfully launching the Dragon spacecraft during the CRS-6 mission to the International Space Station on April 14. SEE MORE VIDEOS
Musk shared on Twitter on Saturday morning SpaceX will attempt to land the Falcon 9 rocket booster at Cape Canaveral instead of a drone ship as they have in tried in the past.
The first stage will attempt to make a controlled landing at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1, previously a U.S. Air Force testing range known as Space Launch Complex 13, according to a SpaceX news release.
This will be the first ground landing attempt for Falcon 9.
The Orlando Sentinel has learned the Federal Aviation Administration issued a license on Friday for the ORBCOMM-2 launch. The license includes SpaceX's plan to "fly-back" the first-stage rocket booster, according to a statement from the FAA.
Last month, Jeff Bezos and his company Blue Origin successfully landed their New Shepard rocket’s first stage in West Texas after launching it to the edge of space. If SpaceX sticks their landing Falcon 9 would become the first orbital rocket to make a ground landing.
There is a 20 percent chance that weather conditions could delay the launch on Monday, according to the Air Force's 45th Weather Squadron.
The upgraded Falcon 9 is set vertically on Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral in position for launch.
SpaceX will livestream the launch starting at 8:05 p.m. on Monday.
Check back for launch updates and be sure to like the Go for Launch Facebook page.Police said the accident happened at 10.30pm opposite Soi Na Klua 18 in Moo 5 village in Tambon Na Klua of Chon Buri province’s Bang Lamung district.
Rescuers of the Sawang Boribun Thammasathan Pattaya Foundation and local residents rushed to rescue the tourists from the bus. Most suffered minor injuries and several fainted.
The bus driver, Thaweechokchai Plaengthaisong, 49, said he was driving the tourists to a traditional Thai massage parlour but the soi was a downhill road. He tried to slow down the bus but its brake malfunctioned.
The driver said he tried to shift to a lower gear but the gear did not work either so he tried to control the bus with the steering but it rode past the road end into the beach and eventually stopped in the shallow sea.edited 20may2015 ar
Some of the more general networks, although there are thousands of them. Also consider the special social networks devoted to sharing video (YouTube), music (Imeem) or photo's (flickr), as well as Usenet, Listserv's and forums. NEW 1jun2015: moved SocM search engines to'social media search engines' under'search engines.'
Social networks
top choices
Most popular one, more then 1.2 billion accounts. Popular info only, family affairs, groups, unions, hobby's and general interest.
Aimed at business users to find peers, competitors, jobs, opportunities, experts.
Mini blogging network, useful for monitoring trends, news. Real-time. With the search engine at search.twitter.com. Also try Twitter Trendsmap
Social networks
maps
Published twice a year (June and December). Also offers the older maps so you can see the conquest of Facebook for world domination. See what other networks are used in the world. Lists the top 3 per country.
Social networks
international
edited 20may2015 ar
checkin, checkout, check check.
Google's challenger to Facebook. If you have a Google account, you automatically have a Google Plus profile. Hardly used anymore
People, Music, Videos and Radio. Searchable.
"..store text for a certain period of time. [...] mainly used by programmers to store pieces of sources code or configuration information [...]. The idea behind the site is to make it more convenient for people to share large amounts of text online." Often used by international hacker groups to post press messages or hacked/leaked information.
Pin interesting stuff on your wall. More and more being used to share articles and used as an RSS reader.
Mainly an online addressbook that automatically syncs and updates your contact information.
Social News service. Users can post content in a link or by self written text. Other users then vote the post "up" or "down" to determine the ranking on the front page. Also searchable.
Social networks
Dutch
Eng.: Where Are You (now). For sharing online diaries made by people who are on the road, on travel, on holiday etc. Intended for travellers who wish to update the home front on there whereabouts. About 265.000 accounts, and 2.6 million travel stories.
Social networks
Dashboard, portals
Monitoring and managing multiple social media (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Foursquare etc.), based on keywords. Also see Monitter.com. Tweetdeck lookalikes.
Create your own dashboard to monitor your topic of interest or search using keywords.
Owned by Twitter, real-time updates for Twitter, Facebook. Also posting. Web-based only. Bought Seismic. Alternatives: Hootsuite, Monitter, Gremln.
Social networks
Introduction: Some tools to use multiple social networks more effectively, such as browser plugins or specialised SN browsers. WARNING: most free services demand access rights to your profiles that may be too much for you.
Measures the influence of users on SN, calculating a 'Klout score'.
Supports Facebook and Twitter. Requires a Facebook account to sign in.
Personalised, real-time newspaper based on your Twitter account. Searchable for other Tweeted newspapers.
Owned by Twitter, real-time updates for Twitter, Facebook. Also posting. Web-based only. Bought Seismic. Alternatives: Hootsuite, Monitter, Gremln.
A waterfall-style of tweets. Add a search term and tweets start falling down. Each Search gets a different colour in the "waterfall" making it easy to follow. Hover over a tweet to pause the falling. Search options include: Lists, Search terms (with or without hashtags), Geolocation. You can also exclude terms, services and users from your search. Must take a look at the Feature page. Requires a login with your Twitter account.
Management tool for multiple social media.
Social networks
edited 5dec14 ar
Analyses of followings and followers on Twitter of your own account only..
Analyse followers. WARNING: wants to update profile and post tweets.
Online sentiment analysis tool for current events, companies, products and people. Search news or Twitter.
Search Twitter history, as far as Twitter allows you to.
Provides a social media search and analysis service, sentiment analysis, top keywords used, top users, real-time.
Takes a username to return statistics on number of tweets over time, tweet density, daily/hourly tweets, interface used, replies and retweets. 11feb14: Very slow, non functional.
Trending topics on Twitter, in the Netherlands only.
Powerful Twitter analytics tool. Analyse any Twitter account, except private ones.Provides backup capabilities.
Publishes a timeline graph plitting the number of followers, following, tweets over time. WARNING: needs access to your profile and wants to post tweets for you. Also try Twenty Feet (registration required).
Stats data on Twitter users: dozens of different answers to questions on number of tweets, first tweets, followers, mentions, lists, retweets, etc.
Finds the first tweet on a topic or keyword. Slow.
Social networks
Geoplots
Global, real-time map of tweets. Tweets flash and leave, counters below the map do calculations and show hashtags.
Accepts a keyword and plots the geo location of tweeters on a map.
Social networks
Twitter
Official Twitter search engine. The list of operators is just below the search box
Twitter ID and username converter. Find the Twitter handle for a Twitter ID, or, find a Twitter ID for a Twitter handle. Search on a Twitter ID: twitter.com/intent/user?user_id=16600244
Social networks
By Neuro Productions. Takes a username to graphically display the network of followers. Very slow.
Analyse Twitter accounts and their followers/following.
A Twitter visualisation tool, displaying the mentions and hashtags used the most in recent tweets by a single user.
Social networks
Metasites
edited 24jan13 gn
Annotated listing. January 2012.
Annotated listing, January 2011.
Extensive list (approx.225) of media monitoring companies and tools, fee-based as well as for free.
Social networks
postponed
No longer active, commercial only, then updates just once every 60m. Statistical tool, accept a full Twitter search query to return an overview with tweet volume over time, top users, tweet vs retweet, top words, top URLs and source.
Supports Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and many others. Announced that they are no longer supporting updates in 2011. Still downloadable at a.o. Filehippo
Mainly Dutch social network. In Dutch. Offline since 02 Dec 2013.
Real-time search engine, searches Facebook, Google+ and Twitter. Updates automatically.(Temporarily?) out
Was very useful to find "respected" people that are placed in Twitter lists. You could even interview people via Listorious. Completely disappeared and replaced by its sister site MuckRack (see below)
Ping.fm was acquired by Seesmic which in turn is now acquired by HootSuite 2012.Powerful Drone Can Seriously Lift 500 Pounds
Close
Norwegian drone maker Griff Aviation has an amazing drone that can lift up to 660 pounds, including its own 165 pound weight. The drone’s name is called the Griff 300 with the number taken from the gross weight in kilograms it can carry. According to its maker, the Griff 300 can travel with whatever it’s carrying for 45 minutes.
Even the company’s origin name is already packed with power. Griff Aviation takes inspiration from an ancient symbol of vigilance and protection: the griffin, a powerful and legendary beast that is half an eagle and half a lion.
Through Leif Johan Holland’s, the CEO of Griff Aviation, experience in drone videography, safe drone operations are given prime importance. Customers will be guaranteed safety as Griff Aviation had its drones certified by two drone regulatory agencies. Griff 300 is the first drone in the market to acquire certification in the U.S. by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and in the European Union by the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Griff Aviation’s Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) technology is also apparently the first to be flight approved by the Norwegian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA).
It should be noted that its payload is also customizable. You have the option to choose features that assist in wind turbine maintenance, something green energy companies can look forward to. This ability readily allows Griff users to choose a drone suitable for their own needs.
As Griff 300 is only the first in a series, another drone which will be called Griff 800 is also being readied for release. Expect it to be even more powerful as it will be able to carry up to 800 kilograms or 1,764 pounds. The company will push the current drone design even further than its current lifting capacity. Holland remarks that it is the start of an aviation revolution.
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A domestic violence shelter serving male victims has opened in Arkansas and is perhaps one of the first of its kind, according to Arkansas Online.
The Taylor House Domestic Violence Shelter for Men could be the first registered, stand-alone shelter for men in the country, said Patty Duncan, executive director of the non-profit Family Violence Prevention in Batesville, a city in northern Arkansas.
“Many people do not realize that domestic violence also affects men,” Duncan told Arkansas Online. “It’s not just male-female relationships. Domestic violence includes intimate partners, family and household members.”
The new shelter opened in October. It’s already housed five men.
“We know there are more victims out there,” Duncan told the paper. “Those that we have housed are receiving good services, I feel.”
The shelter has nine beds and includes space for men who are accompanied by children. Duncan said that if needed, there is room to expand. The home used by the non-profit was donated by a local family, Arkansas Online reports. Previously, the group had been housing men fleeing violence alongside women.
“My perspective on that was we try to offer peer support, and I don’t want to necessarily segregate male and female, but let’s offer men a location that is run by their peers,” Duncan said. “It’s going to be easier for a male victim to go into a program and speak to someone about their feelings, their emotions, their fears, their concerns, to someone who may not judge them and may not look like an abuser to them.”
According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention statistics cited by the Huffington Post, a large number of domestic violence victims are men, and their abusers can be either other men or women.
One in four American men will be domestic violence victims during his lifetime– or upwards of three million male domestic violence victims every year. Statistically, one man is abused by a domestic partner every 37.8 seconds, according to HuffPo.
“Domestic violence is not just a women’s issue; it’s a family issue,” Duncan told Arkansas Online. “A victim is a victim, and we want to help them become survivors in their own right.”Windows tablets will gain market share in the coming years, but not fast enough to challenge the dominance of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, IDC said on Tuesday.
IDC is projecting Windows tablets to occupy 10.2 percent of the market by 2017, growing from a projected market share of 3 percent this year. By comparison, tablets based on Android and iOS will register slight dips in market share.
In 2017 Android will have a tablet market share of 58.8 percent, compared to the projected market share of 60.8 this year. Apple’s iOS will have a tablet market share of 30.6 percent in 2017, compared to 35 percent this year.
Over time, Microsoft’s market share in the tablet market will increase, thanks to more devices and aggressive pricing. But underlying Windows OS, device design and application problems will continue to prevent faster growth, said Tom Mainelli, research director of tablet research at IDC.
Windows worries
Acceptance of Windows 8 wasn’t as strong as Microsoft hoped, and the company confused customers by creating one OS designed for both desktops and tablets, Mainelli said.
“Microsoft still believes people want a tablet with the power of a PC,” Mainelli said, adding that people don’t want the complexity of a PC in tablets.
Consumers are also still not sure what to make of the two OS flavors—Windows 8 for x86 processors and Windows RT for ARM processors—Mainelli said. Microsoft in October shipped Windows 8.1 to succeed Windows 8.
“They are forced to sell hardware with one of three Windows OSes, that’s at least one too many,” he said. “Microsoft internally has a better handle on it, now they have to market it better.”
In addition, the application ecosystem for Windows 8 is still weak, Mainelli said. Microsoft is pushing unified application development for tablets and laptops, but that approach is complicated by the different screen sizes on various devices, he said.
“I don’t think that’s the best way to write apps for any of those platforms” since users interact with different devices in different ways, Mainelli said.
Design dilemmas
Only one hit tablet is needed for Windows OS to succeed, but there’s been little innovation in device designs, Mainelli said. There are many device vendors launching similar Windows tablets. Microsoft, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Toshiba, Acer and others are offering Windows tablets.
“How those vendors differentiate continues to be a challenge,” Mainelli said.
Microsoft is trying to parlay its past success in PCs into hybrid devices that have tablet and laptop functionality. The hybrid devices come with a range of features that include detachable screens, and hybrids are also are being referred to as “2-in-1” devices.
“The idea of 2-in-1 sounds good, but we haven’t seen success in products,” Mainelli said.
However, Mainelli expects a big marketing push for Windows tablets that could boost shipments. Microsoft will not give up on the tablet market, Mainelli said.
“Microsoft and its partners would like to see that growth happening more quickly.”(Newser) – Electromagnetic radiation has been around since the universe first formed; it is, in its "most familiar form," light, reports the World Health Organization. But as cellphone towers and gadgets proliferate, electromagnetic radiation has increased, and some claim a sensitivity to it. One woman in France is now getting roughly $900 a month from the government in disability pay, reports the BBC. Marine Richard, 39, who says she's had to move to a barn without electricity in a remote region of France to escape electromagnetic waves, calls the decision a "breakthrough" for those who experience electromagnetic hypersensitivity. But the court in Toulouse—which ruled last month that her symptoms stopped her from working—did not go so far as to call EHS an illness, reports Yahoo News UK.
Though people like Richard have claimed a range of adverse health symptoms, from headaches and nausea to loss of libido and depression, the WHO reports that "scientific evidence does not support a link" between the electromagnetic fields and the symptoms; that "scientific knowledge in this area is now more extensive than for most chemicals"; and that anxiety about exposure could be causing these health problems. In the US, the parents of a 12-year-old boy at a Massachusetts school filed a lawsuit on Aug. 12 claiming that their son has been dealing with headaches, chest pains, nosebleeds, nausea, dizziness, and rashes since the school installed a new wireless network in 2013, reports ABC News. The family is asking for $250,000 in damages. (West Virginia is home to a town for those who say they've been sickened by WiFi.)When the United States overthrew the Taliban regime in 2001, it was the most capable state in the world—sufficiently powerful to deter the ambitious and reassure the fearful. These days, geo-political rivalry is back, as new powers have risen and old ones have recovered some of their vigor. Without prejudging whatever new grand strategy the Trump administration has in mind for this new landscape, the United States is clearly in competition—sometimes globally and sometimes only regionally—with Russia, China, and Iran. In most of the world, America’s policies for the last 20 years have driven these competitors toward each other or solved security problems for them that they would otherwise be forced to solve for themselves.
For the United States, the value of skilled statecraft lies in the ability to tie competing nation-states up in knots by engaging their national-security interests in ways that benefit America. When America intervenes to manage a civil war, other powers can throw darts at the Americans from the sidelines; when it is absent, those on the sidelines have to solve the problem for themselves, and will often disagree about the solution.
From a strategic perspective, then, a dramatic reduction of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan—or even a complete drawdown—would likely realign regional behavior in ways that would drive current U.S. adversaries apart, force them to deal with difficult local problems, and encourage other regional powers to seek better ties with Washington. From an American perspective, it is a win-win.
A U.S. drawdown would almost certainly reorient Iran’s approach to its neighbor to the east. Many Americans don’t know that the fundamentalist Sunni-Taliban government of Afghanistan and the orthodox Shia government of Iran came to the brink of war in 1998. The Taliban repressed Afghan Shiites, many of whom live in the western part of the country, near the Iranian border. At the same time, Iran provided arms and financial assistance to the "northern alliance" of Afghan Tajiks and Uzbeks, who never surrendered to the Taliban government. The Taliban, in turn, received strong backing from Pakistan. Within Pakistan, sectarian attacks on Shia were and remain quite common.
All of these factional tensions persist to this day. As many have observed, a Sunni-Shia civil war remains interwoven with conflicts across the greater Middle East. Were the United States to significantly reduce its support to the current government of Afghanistan, Iran would likely find it in its own interest to cease its reported flirtations with the Taliban and lend support to the Afghan government, or to broker a settlement between the two. Iran is interested in building a new “silk road” trading route that runs from Central Asia to the Persian Gulf, which could best flourish in a peaceful Afghanistan. Moreover, Iran would probably find it reasonable to station more military forces on its eastern border to deter Taliban misbehavior. Overall, an increase in Taliban influence is ultimately a threat to Iran's security, and would place a new constraint on Iran's adventurism elsewhere in the region, where it typically seeks gains at the expense of U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia and Israel, who inevitably come to Washington demanding assistance to shore up their positions.The Cato Institute regularly publishes a report titled Freedom in the 50 States.1 According to the most recent edition, since 2010, North Carolina has improved substantially, advancing from 26th to 19th place in the overall rankings. Unfortunately, in the “alcohol freedom” category, we continue to languish in 35th place.2 This overregulation of alcoholic beverages harms the North Carolina entrepreneurs who would otherwise enter the market as producers and sellers; it harms the North Carolina consumers who would otherwise
enjoy a wider range of alcoholic beverages at lower prices; and it harms the North Carolina economy as a whole that would otherwise be growing at a faster rate. If we truly want North Carolina to be “first in freedom,” we need to reduce the burden that excessive regulation places on the production, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages.
Bootleggers and Baptists
In 2014, the economists Adam Smith and Bruce
Yandle published a book with the provocative title, Bootleggers and Baptists: How Economic Forces and Moral Persuasion Interact to Shape Regulatory Politics.3 As they explain in the preface:
Durable social regulation evolves when it is demanded by both of two distinctly different groups. “Baptists” point to the moral high ground and give vital and vocal endorsement of laudable public benefits promised by a desired regulation. … “Bootleggers” are much less visible but no less vital. Bootleggers, who expect to profit from the very regulatory restrictions desired by Baptists, grease the political machinery with some of their expected proceeds. They are simply in it for the money. … The theory takes its name from the classic example of laws requiring liquor stores to close on Sundays, which were supported by both local alcohol bootleggers and anti-alcohol Baptists. … Both members of the politicking coalition are necessary to win. The Baptists enable accommodating politicians to say the action is the “right” thing to do and have folks believe them. The bootleggers laugh all the way to the bank — and may occasionally share their gains with helpful politicians.4
When it was originally put in place, the regulatory regime that governs the production, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages in North Carolina was presumably supported by an alliance that included — not just metaphorically but literally — bootleggers and Baptists. Nowadays, while some Baptists no doubt still take an interest in alcoholic beverage regulation, they are joined by a broad spectrum of concerned citizens who, regardless of their religious affiliation, worry about the harm that alcohol abuse inflicts, not just on the abusers themselves, but also on their families and on society as a whole. As for the bootleggers, their role is now filled by government bureaucrats, wholesale distributors, large brewers and distillers, and other interest groups who benefit from the regulation of alcoholic beverages.
The Liquor Sale Monopoly
The most extreme alcoholic beverage regulations pertain to “spirituous liquor,” defined in the North Carolina General Statutes as:
Distilled spirits or ethyl alcohol, including spirits of wine, whiskey, brandy, gin and all other distilled spirits and mixtures of cordials, liqueur, and premixed cocktails, in closed containers for beverage use regardless of their dilution.5
The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission (ABC) maintains a complete monopoly on the distribution of such liquor, and — with a few minor exceptions — such liquor may only be sold in stores owned and operated under the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission’s authority.6 In short, the regulatory regime doesn’t just discourage entrepreneurs from entering this market; entering the market is a crime, and violators are subject to fines and incarceration.7
Of course, even the threat of criminal sanctions does not always stifle the entrepreneurial spirit completely. Robbie Delaney, who runs the Muddy River Distillery in Belmont, North Carolina, likes to point out that, whereas in Kentucky entrepreneurs created a billion-dollar industry based on the legal production of whiskey, in North Carolina entrepreneurs created a billion-dollar industry based on its illegal distribution.8 Where the threat of prosecution failed, however, a government enforced monopoly has succeeded. Bootleggers no longer dominate the liquor business the way they did in the days of NASCAR’s origins. Instead, the state-run Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission exercises virtually complete control over distribution and retail sales.
There is no public-interest justification for maintaining this state monopoly over the liquor business. The vast majority of states allow private businesses to distribute and sell liquor;9 yet the rate of alcohol related deaths and underage drinking are no higher in those states than they are in the 17 states that continue to monopolize the business.10
If it weren’t for the state monopoly, entrepreneurs would be operating hundreds of private liquor stores in North Carolina, and they would be competing for business with each other and with entrepreneurs operating thousands of grocery stores and other retail outlets. As it is, however, a limited number of ABC stores keep the same limited hours and charge the same artificially high prices for the same limited selection of products.11
The Wholesale Distribution Oligopoly
Unlike liquor, private companies are allowed to distribute and sell beer and wine in North Carolina, but the trade is tightly regulated in ways that discourage entrepreneurship. The biggest impediment to entrepreneurship is the system of wholesale distribution that is mandated by statute and administered by the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission.12 While there are a small number of exceptions for small brewers and vintners, larger producers are not allowed to sell directly to retailers at all. Instead, they must deal with a limited number of licensed wholesale distributors who enjoy a profitable oligopoly on this trade. In addition to enriching the distributors at the expense of retailers and consumers, this expensive,
three-tier system of producer/distributor/retailer protects the big producers by giving small producers a powerful incentive to stay small.
A report in the Charlotte Business Journal vividly illustrates how this form of protectionism discourages entrepreneurship and inhibits economic growth:
The Olde Mecklenburg Brewery is walking away from its $130,000 investment in the Triad — just a year after expanding into that market. The decision comes as Charlotte’s largest brewer inches closer to producing 25,000 barrels of beer this year. At that point, N.C law requires breweries to hand distribution over to a third-party. … The law makes it frustrating, but necessary, to leave that market, says Ryan Self, director of sales. “Every drop counts. It’s one of those laws of unintended consequences,” he adds. “It takes OMB from something that is growing every year as an employment and tax creator and puts us in a holding pattern.” … OMB knows it will face difficult decisions as demand for its products continues to grow. “Our existing accounts sell more and more beer every year,” Self says. “We’ll have to pull back and say, ‘Who’s not getting beer this year?’” It also limits the ability to create new varieties and seasonal brews. … “It completely clips our wings as far as trying new things,” Self says.13
Speaking recently at a conference at Johnson and Wales University, OMB’s Ryan Self emphasized another reason why the brewing company is reluctant to exceed the 25,000 barrel-per-year threshold: turning its marketing over to the distribution cartel would mean firing 11 of its people.14
Other Regulations
The ABC monopoly and the wholesale distribution oligopoly are merely the most egregious elements of a vast regulatory regime. The chapter of the North Carolina General Statutes that deals specifically with the regulation of alcoholic beverages consists of 123 densely packed
pages, and there are many other alcoholic beverage regulations buried in other parts of the statute book.15 The chapters of the North Carolina Administrative Code that deal specifically with alcohol law enforcement and the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission consist of 143 pages, and, again, there are other alcoholic beverage regulations buried in other chapters of the Code.16
Forty-three different types of permits and licenses are required for 43 different activities involving the sale of alcohol.17 In the case of a premise licensed to sell alcohol, a new permit is required for every change of ownership.18 Gambling devices are forbidden, as are premises with living quarters attached,19 and all licensed premises must adhere to a recycling plan approved by the ABC.20 There is a rule that forbids the owner of multiple premises from moving alcoholic beverages from one premise to another.21 There is a rule that restricts happy hours and forbids some kinds of drink specials,22 and another that forbids distilleries that offer tours from selling any specific visitor more than one bottle per year.23 There is a rule forbidding the sale of alcohol on public college campuses,24 and another stating that viticulture and enology may be taught only at colleges, universities, and community colleges.25 There are rules governing the content of ads for alcoholic beverages,26 rules governing the size of alcoholic beverages in hotel mini-bars,27 and rules governing the number of bottles or cans of beer in a “case.”28 There are rules governing how much alcohol a private citizen may possess and how much he or she may transport into the state.29 There are rules governing wine tastings.30 There is even a rule that forbids the sale of alcoholic beverages at bingo games.31
Making matters worse, this vast array of rules and regulations is administered by a variegated group of agencies that includes, not only the Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission and the Alcohol Law Enforcement Agency, but all the various state and local police forces. These agencies exercise a good deal of discretion in how they interpret and enforce the rules, which makes consistency impossible, compliance confusing, and abuse inevitable.
Dealing with this complex regulatory regime isn’t a problem for the large producers, distributors, and sellers. They have compliance officers and lawyers who are intimately familiar with the regulations — indeed, in many cases they helped write them — and they have long-standing relationships with the staff of the regulatory and enforcement agencies. For small-time entrepreneurs who want to enter the market for the first time, however, the regulatory regime constitutes a huge barrier. It’s very difficult for them to become familiar with the entire body of laws and rules, let alone acquire the expertise and contacts that are needed in order to deal effectively with all the relevant agencies. Some of them try and fail, and some of them never try at all.
Conclusion
Support for the existing system of alcoholic beverage regulation will undoubtedly remain strong in North Carolina. The “Baptists” — i.e., the concerned citizens — will continue to support the system because they believe (wrongly) that it protects society from the harms associated with alcohol abuse. The “Bootleggers” — i.e., the government bureaucrats, wholesale distributors, large brewers and distillers, and other interest groups that benefit from the regulations — will continue to support the system because they believe (rightly) that it protects their jobs, their power, their investments, and their profits.
Given this strong, ongoing support, it will not be easy to reform the stiflingly repressive regulatory regime that governs the production, distribution, and sale of alcoholic beverages in North Carolina. Nevertheless, there are some hopeful signs. A new generation of sophisticated consumers is demanding more variety and more quality when it comes to alcoholic beverages, and a new generation of entrepreneurs has emerged to serve them. The entrepreneurs, of course, are well aware that the existing regulatory regime protects the big companies at their expense, and they are starting to push back politically.32 More surprisingly, many of the consumers are also aware of the problem, and they too are becoming politically active.33 In short, there appears to be an emerging coalition of consumers and entrepreneurs that is willing and able to oppose the long-standing alliance of established businesses and concerned citizens.
Whether the beer lovers and brewers can be as effective in the future as the bootleggers and Baptists have been in the past remains to be seen. However, similar coalitions of consumers and entrepreneurs have had a number of notable successes with regard to federal Internet regulations and municipal ride-share regulations in recent years, and, perhaps more pertinently, similar coalitions have also had a number of notable successes with regard to alcoholic beverage regulations. In 2011, a coalition of consumers and entrepreneurs persuaded voters in Washington state to approve an initiative privatizing the state liquor monopoly;34 in 2012, a similar coalition persuaded the Connecticut legislature to repeal the state’s ban on Sunday sales;35 and just this year, yet another similar coalition persuaded the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn state laws banning the direct interstate shipment of wine to consumers.36 Let us hope North Carolina’s emerging coalition of beer lovers and brewers will turn out to be as effective as these other coalitions of consumers and entrepreneurs have been.
Alcoholic beverage regulations have stifled entrepreneurship in North Carolina for far too long. Privatizing the state-run liquor business, breaking up the state-enforced wholesale distribution oligopoly, and eliminating unnecessary and unreasonable rules would usher in a golden age for alcoholic beverages in North Carolina and move us significantly closer to the goal of being “first in freedom.”37
EndNotes
1. William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens, Freedom in the 50 States (Washington |
: 55.48% of minutes returning (2nd fewest returning minutes in MLS)
It was an offseason of additions and addition by subtractions for United, which will need to see significant improvement if Coach and United legend Ben Olsen is to keep his job. United’s multiple offseason moves culminated with winning the sweepstakes for US national team striker Eddie Johnson, a player everyone expects to outpace DC’s 2013 leading goal scorer “Own Goal” (seriously, though). Despite a -37 goal differential last year, our shot location data suggests that they were a bit unlucky to finish so low. Having EJ paired with MLS veteran Fabian Espindola, DC’s strikers should score many more goals than the three Linonard Pajoy and an over-the-hill Carlos Ruiz combined for last year.
The loss of Dwayne De Rosario will be felt in the midfield, but even the 2011 MVP lost his starting spot late last season. Stepping in will be former Impact captain Davy Arnaud, who will bring leadership to an otherwise young midfield. United will really hope for a healthy season from likes of Nick DeLeon and Chris Pontius who were both hampered by injuries last year, and will look to continue the progress of Canadian international Kyle Porter. Perry Kitchen returns as the backbone of a young midfield that remains mostly unchanged from 2013, but is poised to be more productive in 2014.
While Klinsmann favorite Bill Hamid remains in goal, United is likely to see a 100% turnover in their defensive backline from a year ago, having brought in proven MLS defenders Sean Franklin, Bobby Boswell, and Jeff Parke, as well as Christian Fernandez, a 28 year old who comes from Almeria in Spain. By drafting Steve Birnbaum #2 overall in the SuperDraft, they also added depth and potential for the future.
Franklin will provide them an attacking option up the right flank that they haven’t had since Andy Najar left the team to join Anderlecht in Belgium. Boswell and Parke will combine to bring 19 years of MLS experience to the central defense, which should give Hamid a stronger confidence in the leadership and organization in front of him. Fernandez has spent time in La Liga and Spain’s Segunda Division, and looks to bring bring a similar attacking style to the left back position, having scored 6 goals in 36 appearances for Almeria over the last two seasons. Finally, Birnbaum looks to be one of their players of the future, and will fill in for Boswell and Parke in the center of defense during a packed schedule that will include the CONCACAF Champions League in 2014.
DC has taken the anti-Toronto FC route, investing across the roster rather than adding big-name DPs at a few positions. While none of their backline is cheap – United picked up Franklin in the re-entry draft because the Galaxy deemed his salary too high, and Parke isn’t a bargain either – United was able to take three of their five highest paid players off the books with the subtractions of DeRo, Jakovic, and Pajoy (who was making an inexplicable $205k per year). They have invested heavily in more experienced, and simply better defenders. With no Designated Players currently on the roster, United have managed to endure more roster turnover than nearly every other team in MLS this offseason without breaking the bank.
All these significant changes make this a year of questions for United; after dominating MLS 1.0 for years, they played a middling role in more recent seasons, a short slump that seemed on the verge of ending in 2012. Was 2013 a regression to the mean, or an outlier as the club turns itself around? Will this be the year Perry Kitchen finally turns into an MLS star, or will he remain atop the list of players on the verge of a breakout season? With a stadium deal being called into question, can they find a new home? Will Ben Olsen save his job, or make the ownership group look stupid for keeping him this long? Can the team begin to turn around record-low attendance numbers, or can they give their supporters something to cheer about?
At ASA we like to look prior data to help us understand what may happen for teams in the future, but the case of DC is a difficult one for us; no team is likely to look or play more differently than United next season. Because of their unpredictability, and because they have nowhere to go but up, the potential for DC’s season might be greater than any other team in the league this year. Will we see them do what the Timbers did last season, improving by over 20 points between seasons and going from conference doormat to MLS Cup contender? Or will they go the route of Chivas USA, and remain at the bottom of the table as the epitome of incompetence.
DC United hopes this will be a transformative season that returns them to the elite of the Eastern Conference. Crucial additions to the attacking and defensive corps have the potential to turn things around, and coach Ben Olsen’s job is riding on it. Supporters are cautiously optimistic, but the public (as evidenced by our ASA poll numbers) remains skeptical. The 2014 season is an important one for United, both on and off the field. We will soon see if one of the most storied clubs in MLS history can turn their form on the pitch around, and if their important stadium plans can get back on track.
Crowd Sourcing Placement: 8th place in Eastern Conference; 263 of 404 (65.1%) voters felt that D.C. United would not make the playoffs in 2014.
AdvertisementsEverton are reportedly looking to re-sign striker Lacina Traore.
According to The Sun, Everton are lining up a move to sign Monaco striker Lacina Traore - despite the Ivorian having already endured one torrid spell at Goodison Park.
The Toffees have seen Romelu Lukaku take huge strides forward this season, with the Belgian now cementing himself as one of the most dangerous strikers in the Premier League.
Yet with interest no doubt building in his signature, Everton need to have contingency plans in place - and manager Roberto Martinez may be considering a familiar face as cover for Lukaku.
The Sun report that Martinez has sent Everton scouts to watch Ivorian hitman Lacina Traore, who is currently playing for Ligue 1 side Monaco.
The 6ft 8in striker spent the second half of the 2013-14 season on loan at Goodison Park, but endured a disastrous time on Merseyside, playing just twice as injuries curtailed his loan spell.
Now though, The Sun believe that Martinez is willing to hand Traore a shock return to Goodison Park, almost two years since his first spell with the club.
Traore's height, strength and remarkable aerial ability make him a dangerous presence, and having struggled at Everton in 2014, he may be keen to finally show the Toffees fans what he can do, should Martinez make a concrete move to sign him in January.Bitwala, the bitcoin-based remittance service located in Netherlands has announced that it has successfully raised investments. Started in 2012, the company has been bootstrapping all this while until the very first fundraising round came along. In the recently concluded seed funding round, the company has raised about 800,000 euros.
Bitwala is one of the leading remittance service providers with over 10,000 customers. The announcement about the closure of seed funding round on 15th of March, 2016 was made earlier today by the company on its website. Among the leading investors in seed funding round is Barry Silbert from Digital Currency Group, the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, the KfW Banking Group, BASF, Carl Zeiss, Evonik, Daimler, Deutsche Post DHL, Dutch Telekom, Robert Bosch and RWE.
The impressive list of names puts Bitwala in a unique position where the who’s who of the European economic sector are invested in the company. Andrea Hesler, in the company’s post, has reported that Bitwala has been very particular about from whom they are going to raise investment as the involvement of right people will help them leverage upon the industry contacts and access that comes along with it. The current set of investors seems to be the right fit for the company’s future expansion plans.
According to the company, they started actively looking for investments about 6 months ago after they realized that they will need more money to scale the business to a global level. Now that they have managed to raise over 800,000 euros in seed investment, how are they going to use it is something to be seen.
Bitwala recently crossed a new milestone by logging in over 2 million transactions during a period of one year. the company shared its excitement with its users by waiving off the 0.5% fees on transactions over the platform for a duration of two weeks. Bitwala is also one of the first companies in Europe to enable bill payments with Bitcoin over SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) bank transfers. Users in Europe can currently use Bitwala service to pay their credit card bills, utility bills, insurance premium, rent, freelancer invoices and even make major purchases.
The use of bitcoin for remittance has always been one of the heavily advocated use cases, mainly due to the smaller transaction fees compared to conventional money transfer services. Unlike traditional services, even the fund transfer through bitcoin remittance to other countries gets executed within hours. Bitwala does just that by allowing users transfer euros to any bank account in the form of bitcoin. Once the user transfers bitcoin to Bitwala, the company will execute a SEPA bank transfer to the addressed account within one day. The recipient will receive a cash deposit in their account.
Bitwala has made its intentions to go global clear so far. With the influx of funds, we can expect to make a move in that direction soon.
Ref: BitwalaThe following interview was originally conducted with the help and translation by my good friend, Xin without whom this would not have been possible © 2017 Wave Motion Cannon
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– Tell us how you were brought on to work on Naruto Shippuden?
Before I came to Japan, I had already decided to try to be involved in the production of Naruto. Fortunately, Zhu Xiao, proprietor of Candybox, had worked for Studio Pierrot and had a good relationship with them, and we was gradually able to hand me cuts to work on for Naruto. Maybe it was because I had been copying Kishimoto’s style, but I got used to it very quickly. At the same time, it was my dream to meet Hiroyuki Yamashita for the longest time. Then I got the chance my last day working at Candybox. From there, Yamashita sent me an invitation to join the production staff. So that’s how I joined team Naruto.
– Studio Pierrot has been one of my favorite studios. A lot of the shows they produce are near and dear to me. What is it like working at studio Pierrot?
For me, I have to say the happiest thing is working with Yamashita because he is always a good role model. Without a doubt, there are so many advantages to working fully in Japan. I can ask my seniors questions at any time, which not only helped improve my animation skills, but also my Japanese as well. It’s important to have a learning environment. After all, being able to exchange ideas and communicate with others is more far more efficient than learning by yourself.
However, what most impressed me is how perfect, how smooth and professional all the departments work together. How production advances to different stages is a more mature proceses I’ve been a part of before. It’s really designed so that we animators can maintain a good mood and performan better at work. And as you can imagine, there’s a lot of stress that comes with pushing projects along. At the same time I also got chance to visit other departments like recording and editing, which made me consider more when drawing cuts.
– I wanted to ask you about your cut on Naruto Shippuden opening #18: How did you swap between characters and still have the hand raise so slowly? Did you animate two frames for every character, moving only the hand slightly before changing to a new character? How long did it take you to to animate that? Who’s idea was it to create such a scene?
This was the first thing I did after meeting Yamashita (who also directed this opening). It’s wasn’t difficult but did require a little patience. First I drew a basic sketch of a bare hand moving upward, than drew each character in sequence. It took a while to adjust the range and speed of hands moving. After that I just needed to focus on swapping between characters. As for the characters’ sequence, the first and the last one had already been decided by Yamashita, the other characters were freely arranged by myself according to five ninja nations and characters’ shape. It took about 4 or 5 days to finish, being my first experience of opening animation. I was so nervous that I couldn’t make it perfect. There were still few mistakes in the final part where all characters slowly move their heads down. Overall though, not bad.
– This cut not only includes effects and character acting, but also has a large amount of details like fabric fluttering in the wind. And the camera angle is interesting as well. Tell us about what went into this shot.
I don’t have strong personal style, you know, so I try my best to work on details to impress the audience. Just as you mentioned: flutters of clothes and hair, I often do that to make the scene more dynamic and fit with character’s emotional state. Also, imperceptible motions like shoulder slouching and head turning is my kind of style. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say it’s a Japanese acting style, a little different from Chinese and American animation. Especially the foe in this cut, it’s full of Naruto’s emotions and dialogues. First I decided where I should set character (thankfully Yamashita’ s storyboard which gives accurate instructions). Then added acting for Naruto with my personal understanding, (honestly, it was a procedure of making mistakes) and the in-betweens. Finally, with full animated( 1k） speed lines showing speed and space changes. This is the whole procedure.
– Your drawings have a very real sense of weight to them. Watching Naruto episode 477, the fight between Sasuke and Naruto felt super intense. What is your approach to animating action?
I have to admit that, to a large extent, it depends on Yamashita’s incredible storyboard and animation direction. I do my best to express that kind of atmosphere to stay true to his intention. Plus, Yamashita invited me here for the production of final battle at that time, so from 2016 everything I engaged in required my specific skills, such as portraying the movement of Naruto and Sasuke’s hair and clothes in episode 683, expressing pound of action scenes in 685, the ability to handle the lens as a producer, and showing of characters’ emotional side
– That scene also has some amazing effects animation. The smoke and electricity look super cool, not to mention the multiple character outlines that pop out when a character gets hit really hard. What’s the story behind animating that scene?
My weakness is still effects animation, to this day I can’t efficiently master the basic rules of nature special effects. So there are still some stereotypical cuts, but fortunately I had been working on smoke and thunder at the time, so came out naturally and unconsciously, yet I myself was not quite satisfied with it. But there’s a trade-off between meeting the needs of quality in the allotted amount of time given, especially for commercial anime. It was a radically extreme period for both my excitement and tiredness when I worked on the fated battle between Naruto and Sasuke. It was the first time that I undertook 70 successive cuts at a time. It was hard not to reach a mental extreme. That kind of fatigue rooted in heart of Naruto and Sasuke was what drove my performance. Maybe that’s the way you achieve full immersion. Also thanks to digital painting I got a lot of chances to try new things, and Yamashita offered me plenty of essential guidance and suggestions.
– This episode (477) was storyboarded by Hiroyuki Yamashita. Did you follow his storyboard closely or add your personal touches to it?
Surly there are also my own stuff in there, but because Yamashita was right beside me. So basically I kept communicating with him everyday, exchanging ideas and expressing my thoughts until it turned into something higher under his instruction. One example is the scene were Sasuke throws three hand daggers. The first setting was to adapt what was in the manga, that darts hit Naruto’s multiple shadow clones directly. At last I made it the way ferret use it—with hand daggers rebounding together, changing the throwing trajectory to hit Naruto, in order to enhance the ornamental values of daggers in Sasuke’s hand, just one moment though, (laughs). When communicating with Yamashita, I clearly feel that he leaves room in every area for as much elaboration as possible. At the same, time he knows what he wants. To make choices and compromises also sets a wonderful example for me. In return, I try to figure out the logic of the performance. It’s a really positive communication atmosphere.
– How strong was Hiroyuki Yamashita’s influence on you? I know you two worked together a lot.
When I was in my college, I was deeply interested by Eight Tails (Bee) vs Sasuke, especially in showing Bee’s sword dancing. Compared to my hero, Hosoda Mamoru’s abilities as a director, I also adore to Yamashita was like witness his growing process from storyboarder to a director, then a supervisor. This made me know where I should be chasing in the future. I watch his cuts so many times… I did a lot practice to learn his style. My brain was so filled with how he depicted objects in motion to the point that people sometimes misattribute some of my early works as his. And he is super talented in anime, but is also very modest. He has good self control, a good balance between work and health. I didn’t just learn anime from him, I also learned how to behave in life.
– How you feel about working with big names of the industry like Naoki Kobayashi?
All of this has turned my awe into a solid road to my destination. My initial drawings are thought of as Yamashita’s. I saw lots of his work, so I imitated his key animation movements. Yamashita is a humble person. Good at his work, strict on himself, heathy in life. For me, he and I are more than coworkers. His way of coping with matters is meaningful to me.
This year, besides Yamashita, Kobayashi Naoki also offered me great help and guidance. Perhaps it’s because we are the same age, our conversations don’t have much of a generation gap.
I first worked with him on his last ED as a key animator, when he worked as a episode director. I got to work on the new Sword Art Online movie due to his recommendation. I deeply sense the great gap between me and the top animators. Kobayashi is not only good at drawing, he also thinks from every aspect of film. His timesheet shows his grasp of details, which requires more than talent, but he has such patience to elaborate on complicated projects. It impresses me a lot. As for this quality, he is on par with Babi JD. Both of them are gifted and hardworking animators and great role models.
– Comparing action animation and character animation, which do you find more difficult to express?
Actually, for me, both action and emotion have the level on beauty, and when reaching a certain level, they both have their own difficulties. To some extent, action animation is more attractive, so it often be labeled as ‘showing off skills’. I think it’s quite unfair to say that. Of course, both of them are pretty damn hard for me (laughs).
So, farewell to Minato. This cut is like a test I set for myself to conquer, and basically had three parts:
1. How to draw tears
2. Expression control
3. Trembling caused strong emotion
Before starting, I watched the live recordings to feel how seiyuu expressed their emotions, which really helps a lot. I even acted alone in front of mirror again and again (laughs). It reminds me of Disney animators, showing their expressions randomly to look for drawing references (laughs). So I began my work after having those experiences and got some inspirations from that. It takes a lot of skill matching up the shapes of mouth when speaking, especially focusing on a key point, synchronizing emotions between voices and characters. The close-up shot took the longest to complete for this cut. The rest of the work was easy, a little patience with a little time to draw key frames one by one. I ran into difficulties for sure, but we didn’t have time costs for a 10 seconds of lavish acting, after all it is a TV program. So plenty of recycling and compounds (by software) were included, which drove me crazy to finish for the timesheet; luckily it worked out.
– Rumor has it you chose to animate Neji’s death. What were your feelings on that? How emotional was it to work on that cut being such a longtime fan of the series?
A cruel battle has a way of making a main character more mature. I think loss is an important part of that and is necessary to push the story forward. But for the reader it can be completely devastating.
I wanted to draw the part were Naruto holds Hinata’s hand, but it it had already been claimed by someone else (laughs). So I had to accept my second wish: Naruto being slapped by Hinata, and Neji’s final words. That was my first time doing 38 cuts at one time. Most of them were speaking cuts, but like I said before, I prefer drawing cuts with meaning in the story, in this case the first time Naruto experienced what it’s like to lose friend. I put my whole attention into character expressions; it was the least I could do for the character.
– Naruto episode 467 was your debut as an animation director: how was your first experience in a new role?
I still lack of enough experience to have good control over the whole episode, although my ambition is to be an episode director. So being an animation supervisor definitely widened my view. It made me clearly realize where I should work harder.
Having somewhat decent drawing skills helps a lot in keeping the episode consistent. An animation supervisor has to make compromises on how to allocate supervision time to keep all 20 minutes of animation consistent. It is totally different from working as a key animator who only needs to worry about 2 dozen cuts.
Even if I only took charge of 100 cuts, it can still be emotionally exhausting by the end of the say. The work is tedious. Just make sure characters’ poses and faces aren’t extremely changed. I almost have no time to revise other works like: camera indication, x-sheet, but I am quite confident I’ll get better as I gain experience doing it.
– Your work on episode 19 and 22 of Kuroko no Basket seems much more subdued than your other work. How animator draw actions?
Basically my rules are: do the key animation based on content of story and with the director’s intention. My personal first concern is digging into the personal qualities of a character in a specific scene. Emotion decides his reactions and performance. First, I make myself think as the character in the scene, feel the surroundings, then go to the key pose, keep correcting between details, like subtle shivers or expressions.
Sometimes I also, like Disney animators, act it out first to feel the rhythm of the character’s movements. When I go to actually draw it I sometimes end up with more exaggeration and obvious rhythmical movement. It’s probably a combination between the accumulation of experience and inspiration. My theory knowledge is quite poor, so I keep conscious memories of basic movements and patterns in my head.
– You publish a lot of genga on Weibo and Twitter, how strict is Pierrot’s policy on that?
I kinda skirt around that since Naruto was originally a manga. While I was drawing Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale I would use my leisure time to practice, and since I worked on Naruto I naturally started drawing Naruto and Hinata. I’ve wanted those two to become a couple since the Chunin Exam. I was pretty happy with the ending as a fan.
– Where do you think you future lies as an animator, staying at Pierrot or doing feature films and series freelance?
My goal is to be a director. But I lack quite a bit of knowledge and experience, so I want to keep working with Yamashita and devote myself to that long term goal, waiting for chance. It is because Pierrot and Yamashita that I am able to get some many chances, they are great benefactor for me. As a Chinese person in Japan, I want to do my best to bridge China and Japan though anime, plus spare no effort to deliver audiences all over the world more happiness.
– You recently worked on the new Sword Art Online movie.
Sure we can talk about it now. I was really nervous about transitioning into the next job. I thought that 2016 would end with the end of Naruto. It’s was a pleasure to join in the production of Sword Art Online The Movie: Ordinal Scale and I am grateful for Kobayashi trusting me.
When I saw such dense key animation for the climax, more dense than the final battle in Naruto, I was astonished. Taking this job has been an opportunity to improve, it might have been beyond my skill level, but I would have regretted not taking it. So that’s that. The staff of A1 give me, a freshman, a lot of patience and trust, and I really appreciated that. I gained some experience animating spectacular battles. It was the first time I saw so many special effects and movement for an animation supervisor to correct. I really learned lot and wish to apply it in the future.
– Anything you would like to say to the Chinese animation industry?
I don’t think I am as good as what people online say. I only can say that I am enjoying the process, facing the difficulties, progressing, and being filled with satisfaction when my work is seen by audiences when I work as an animator. Right now I am unable to create magnificent things like other famous animators do, and nor do I have outstanding skills and abilities. But as a professional, I have much sense of responsibility and attitude to do it better, maybe that’s one reason people back me. So I want to stress that talent is not the only thing that allows a person to reach the summit of the industry.
To take root in this industry, solid effort and patience is most the important thing. I was lucky and got to step onto a famous platform and be recognized by a lot of people. A lot of great animators who are better than me are contributing to the anime industry. For the Chinese animation industry; commercial anime cannot just rely on one person or a few, it is a long term team effort. Perhaps we need more stubborn people, innocent people, to do practical work. We need to get rid of biases for different brands and hostility for resources. And we need to be patient for the anime industry to improve. We are all trying to reach the same goal by different means. We all want to make great work, and share with you.
If you would like to see more interviews with animators please support us on Patreon!MIAMI GARDENS, FL - SEPTEMBER 29: Duke Johnson #8 of the Miami Hurricanes stiff arms Rickey Dowdy #34 of the North Carolina State Wolfpack as he runs with the ball on September 29, 2012 at Sun Life Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida. (Photo by Joel Auerbach/Getty Images)
By Josh Baumgard
The 2015 NFL Draft is still several months away, but with the Miami Hurricanes’ season complete it can’t hurt to take a peek at some of their intriguing pro prospects.
The Canes might’ve finished the season with a subpar 6-7 record, but it appears there’s a solid crop of incoming NFL talent coming out of Coral Gables. Six players are projected to go in the first four rounds, according to CBS Sports rankings, which is run by NFL Draft Scout.
Rounds 1-2: Ereck Flowers, Offensive Tackle
Round 2: Duke Johnson, Running Back
Rounds 2-3: Denzel Perryman, Linebacker
Rounds 2-3: Clive Walford, Tight End
Rounds 3-4: Phillip Dorsett, Receiver
Round 4: Ladarius Gunter, Defensive Back
It also wouldn’t be a surprise to see a player like Dorsett, blessed with superhuman speed, climb up the draft boards after what should be a dynamic performance at the NFL Combine or Miami’s Pro Day.
Defensive end Anthony Chickillo, center Shane McDermott, and offensive guard Jon Feliciano are projected to go in the sixth round or later, while many scouting services expect 9-10 Canes to get drafted overall. In Todd McShay’s first mock draft on ESPN, he projected both Flowers and Perryman to go in the first round.
For comparison’s sake, projections were pulled for in-state ACC rival and powerhouse, Florida State. They’re expected to have 10 players go in the first four rounds, but this figure assumes undecided underclassman Eddie Goldman, Ronald Darby, and Roberto Aguayo declare for the draft.
So although the Canes aren’t expected to churn out quite the same quality and quantity of NFL players this season as the Noles, talent is not as much of a scarcity as Miami’s 6-7 record would seemingly indicate.
Follow Josh on Twitter (@JoshBaumgard)DailyDirt: Helping The Blind With Technology
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
We've seen some early-stage advances for ways that might help restore sight to people with low vision (or no vision), but it will take many more years before the clinical trials and safety approvals are complete. And not everyone will want to undergo an eye surgery to try to regain some vision, either. Fortunately, robots and wearable technology continue to improve, and these gadgets could become very useful for the blind (and the rest of us, too). Maybe we won't just see telecommuting iPads for remote workers -- but also robot assistants for casual and everyday uses, as well.After you've finished checking out those links, take a look at our Daily Deals for cool gadgets and other awesome stuff.
Filed Under: baxter, blind, haptics, low vision, robots, smartcane, smartring, tools, visually impaired, wearables
Companies: tactile navigation toolsAustralian little penguins are a separate species from those living in New Zealand, a team of ornithologists led by University of Otago scientist Dr Stefanie Grosser has shown.
The little penguin (Eudyptula minor) is widely distributed in Australia – from Western Australia along the southern coast of Australia up to New South Wales.
It is also native to the coasts of New Zealand – from Northland to Stewart Island and the Chatham Islands.
As the smallest penguin on Earth, this bird stands at an average height of 12 inches (30 cm) and has a weight of 1.15 kg.
“Systematic and taxonomic questions surrounding this species have long been controversial,” Dr Grosser and co-authors said.
The scientists used genetic techniques to compare little penguin populations from Australia and New Zealand, and surprisingly found that they are not the same species.
“We found a very strong pattern, where New Zealand has its own distinctive genetic group that is clearly very different from the Australian penguin populations,” Dr Grosser said.
“Based on our multilocus genetic analyses and concordant biological evidence, we recommend the Australian little penguin to be elevated to full species status, Eudyptula novaehollandiae, with its type locality restricted to Port Jackson, New South Wales,” the scientists said.
“The New Zealand little penguin should remain Eudyptula minor with the type locality recognized as Dusky Sound, Fiordland.”
According to the team, the two species also seem to have developed their own ‘accents.’
“Other researchers have previously shown that calls differ between Australian and New Zealand little penguins, and females prefer the calls of males of their own species,” Dr Grosser said.
“You could say the Aussies like hearing ‘feesh,’ while ‘fush’ sounds better to Kiwi ears,” she added.
Another unexpected finding was the discovery that Eudyptula novaehollandiae is surprisingly also present in Otago, in the remote southeast corner of New Zealand’s South Island.
“Our genetic data suggest that the Otago and Australian populations are quite closely related,” Dr Grosser said. “Coalescent modeling suggests that the Australian little penguin only recently expanded into southern New Zealand.”
Prof. Jonathan Waters, a scientist with the University of Otago and a co-author on the study, added: “the new recognition of endemic species – unique to our region – is crucial for managing our natural heritage.”
“Elevation of the Australian little penguin to full species status warrants the reassessment of Eudyptula conservation status,” Dr Grosser and he colleagues said.
“While little penguins are globally evaluated as ‘least concern’, their general demographic trend is one of decline. In New Zealand, most populations are currently considered ‘at risk’, with substantial decline also documented in numerous Australian colonies. Currently, the absence of long-term demographic data precludes an accurate conservation assessment of these species.”
“Our study’s findings represent the second recognition of new extant penguin species diversity within a decade, and exemplify that cryptic diversity can remain undiscovered even in iconic taxa. Indeed, additional undescribed penguin diversity may exist elsewhere.”
“Our study further highlights the value of genetic approaches for assessing demographic histories of iconic taxa,” they concluded.
The results were published online December 14 in the journal PLoS ONE.
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Grosser S et al. 2015. Coalescent Modelling Suggests Recent Secondary-Contact of Cryptic Penguin Species. PLoS ONE 10 (12): e0144966; doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0144966This week, the website Fusion published a timeline lamenting “How Art Basel Miami Beach became one big party”. The penultimate entry was Miley Cyrus being invited to play the gallerist Jeffrey Dietch’s party, rather than “painfully cool, underground-ish acts like LCD Soundsystem”. In fact, with her gif-worthy antics, ability to push the right pop cultural buttons, and the fact that she’s, erm, making art herself, Cyrus is totally in sync with Art Basel’s mood, and the party – jointly hosted by V magazine and Tommy Hilfiger – is the hottest ticket in town, with tempers boiling outside in a chaotic queue.
Inside, all is Gatsbyesque art deco splendour, with a stage set up at the far end of the hotel’s grounds, beyond a pool around which naked female performance artists are stalking, wearing only boots, wigs and a layer of body paint. While most events in Miami seem to start late, Cyrus hits the stage on the dot of 11pm with her friends the Flaming Lips, efficiently ripping through Rick James’s Superfreak. She’s wearing a silver glittery wig and what is essentially a mankini (albeit over silver tights), but it’s her charisma and vocal chops that impress. She really can sing, and also sell a song hard – during her 45-minute performance she effortlessly affirms that she’s a star. More problematic, in the parlance of 2014, is the appearance of a large black woman with her breasts out who seems to be there for little more than set dressing, providing more ammunition for those who accuse Cyrus of cultural appropriation.
Having evidently calculated that the crowd would prefer covers of rock classics than her own songs, Cyrus launches into the Turtles’ Happy Together. Backed by a synapse-frazzling light show, and given that it’s one of the most uplifting songs ever written, it’s a shrewd choice. There follows a long spoken ramble about how the previous year, despite the fact that it had catapulted Cyrus to superstardom after the twerking incident, had been the worst of her life, capped by the death of her dog – though this had led her to her current sideline as a sculptor. Despite the fact that Deitch compared Cyrus’s artwork to that of the late Mike Kelley, it’s safe to say that the artworld crowd greet this diatribe with some scepticism.
After a tortured piano ballad, Cyrus resumes what is essentially an upscale version of rock karaoke with a sweary version of Johnny Cash’s A Boy Named Sue and Led Zeppelin’s Since I’ve Been Loving You, navigating the song’s vocal gymnastics with a glorious ease. She’s then joined on stage by Wayne Coyne, whose association with her has been the subject of some disquiet among Flaming Lips fans. Though Justin Timberlake famously donned a dolphin outfit to perform with them on Top of the Pops, the band’s trajectory from America’s pre-eminent cult weirdos to Miley Cyrus’s backing band could surely not have been foreseen even by the wiry, wild-haired frontman.
That said, Coyne and Cyrus, now wedged into a giant rainbow, almost justify this strangest of career moves with two Beatles covers – Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds and A Day in the Life. As the Flaming Lips’ glitter canons and bubble machines roar into life, and men dressed as a mushroom and giant penis mill around the stage, it’s hard not to grin – though this turns into a worried frown when the topless woman reappears and Coyne buries his face in her cleavage.
Ultimately though, Cyrus put on an unpredictable, garish pop show with an edge of decadence (and not just because she smokes weed onstage), underpinned by undeniable talent, perfectly designed for an audience some distance from her normal fans. While the jury may be out on her art, there’s no doubt about Cyrus’s abilities as a performer – or of her ability to conjure a pop moment in the strangest of circumstances.The big story coming out of Nintendo’s 2016 fiscal year is obviously the performance, or rather, over-performance of the Switch, which has sold 2.74M units (and 2.76M copies of Breath of the Wild, which is not a typo). But there’s one more area with some pretty fascinating results for Nintendo: mobile.
Nintendo launched three major games over the course of the past year, and there are some important points to note about each of them. Here are some of the highlights from the earnings report via Daniel Ahmad and Takahashi Moch |
It’s easy to get really disillusioned with government, but they still work for us.” It is unclear who Ohanian’s “us” refers to, but the fight to belong to that “us” is ongoing for many.
Voting on social-media sites eventually unites and distills the user base to a small minority of like-minded content-producers who seek out story “candidates” with the terrible accuracy of a beltway pollster. It doesn’t even matter that, unlike Facebook, Reddit’s source code is open source, because it is nearly inconceivable that the community would agree to dismantle the voting mechanism that lies at the heart of the site. The Very Serious Populists would tell you to go make your own site if Reddit bothers you so much. And maybe they’re right. When their communities die, let’s hope they die of apathy.In the wake of Apple's announcement of iBooks 2, iBooks Author, and the latest version of iTunes U, I'd like to take a moment to step back and look at the technology they all look to replace: paper. There's not much of a question that from a business and from an educational standpoint, the textbook industry is ripe for disruption. The high prices of books, the inordinately strong influence of large buyer blocks like the Texas Board of Education, and even simpler issues like how much a paper textbook weighs all speak to a need to rethink how we distribute and interact with academic texts. I look forward to these disruptions and hope they make education easier and more broadly distributed.
Before we get too far along in this discussion, I want to lay my cards out on the table. I am not against ebooks — I believe that their mass use is not only inevitable but will change the ways that we think and learn. I am, however, deeply concerned about ebooks when compared to paper as a technology. Make no mistake, paper is a technology just as much as an LCD screen is, and as a technology it has several important advantages over e-readers that I am loathe to see disappear.
It's only within the past few years that our gadgets have advanced to the the point where it's even reasonable to consider devices like the iPad and other e-readers as viable replacements for the traditional paper book. As fast as technology moves, it's important to remember that previous changes in reading technology took literally centuries to spread. This current change is happening much more rapidly, and we need to think just as rapidly about its repercussions.
So while much of the coverage of yesterday's announcement focuses on the exciting new ways that e-readers enable students to interact with texts, we should also be sure to give paper books their due. This isn't a Luddite rant about how gadgets are destroying our inherent humanity and it's not an ode to the wonderful smell and feel of an old book: it's a clear-eyed look at how well paper technology has served us for millennia and how we need to be careful in our headlong rush to replace it.Wojciech Szczesny is expected to avoid sanction for the obscene gesture he made as he left the Emirates Stadium pitch on Wednesday after being sent off against Bayern Munich. The referee, Nicola Rizzoli, is understood not to have included the incident in his report of Wednesday's Champions League match, meaning Uefa is unlikely to take further action against the Arsenal goalkeeper.
Szczesny will serve a one-match ban in the second leg of the last-16 tie in Bavaria for the red card that he received for clattering into Arjen Robben inside the area. He faced the prospect of an extra game if Uefa had looked into the gesture which he made on the touchline.
Goals from Toni Kroos and Thomas Müller left Arsenal with the difficult task of attempting to overturn a 2-0 deficit when they travel to the Allianz Arena on 11 March.Andy from Big Brother 15 hasn't won many competitions.
Andy has switched alliances and worked with multiple alliances at one time.
Is Big Brother 15's Andy a "floater"?
The word "floater" is a less than desirable term for Big Brother players.
A Big Brother floater is someone who isn't loyal, moves from alliance to alliance, and let's other players make big moves and win competitions while they "float" to the end.
I don't think Andy's a floater. At least not in the traditional sense.
It's true that Andy hasn't won much, sometimes intentionally losing, but I think for the most part Andy has been trying to win but just hasn't been good enough.
I guess that's a bit of a backhanded compliment.
It's also true that Andy has been playing with multiple sides of the house at once, but he has always had one true loyalty. That separates him from traditional floaters. Traditional floaters might have an alliance or two or three, but they never have any real loyalty. Andy does...usually.
A couple of weeks ago Andy was loyal to the "3AM" alliance, but that changed after Aaryn went home. He is now loyal to his new alliance "The Exterminators". Andy remains in what's left of "3AM", but his loyalty is with The Exterminators.
That's the difference between Andy and a floater. Traditional Big Brother floaters never have any real loyalty, their loyalty changes week-to-week or even day-to-day. Andy is still working with multiple sides of the house, but he is loyal to The Exterminators.
It's clear that Andy is a big fan of Big Brother and aware of the fact that he is perceived by some as being a floater. He is upset by all of the floater talk, leaving the door wide open for the other houseguests to make fun.
When Andy found himself up for eviction last week and talked about how weird it was going to be to not vote, Judd dubbed those issues, "floater problems".
After Andy fell into the pool while chasing a moth, Amanda asked him if he "floated" in the water. For the record, he didn't float and he didn't grab a life vest.
Even Zingbot got in on the action! Zingbot said:
I think there's a ghost in the Big Brother house. It has a high-pitched wail, it's pasty white, and it loves to float. Oh wait. That's just, Andy!
Andy works with multiple sides of the house, but uses the information he gathers to benefit only one alliance. Whichever alliance he is truly loyal to. The strategy has worked very well for him, just ask Helen.
Andy is more of a rat than he is a floater. Oddly, I mean that as a compliment.
Follow Big Brother fan Matt Milhouse on Facebook and Twitter. Listen to 100.5 The River weekdays, 10am – 3pm.COLUMBUS, Ohio — Tea party leader Ted Stevenot has filed initial paperwork to challenge Gov. John Kasich in the Republican gubernatorial primary, according to the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office.
Stevenot, the president of the Ohio Liberty Coalition and co-founder of the Clermont County tea party, submitted a designation of treasurer form on Monday with the secretary of state – the first formal step toward running for governor.
Despite the filing, Stevenot still hasn’t finalized a campaign against Kasich, according to multiple tea party leaders. Tom Zawistowski, Stevenot’s predecessor as head of the Ohio Liberty Coalition, said it’s a “50/50” chance that Stevenot would run.
But tea party leaders have talked for months of finding someone to run against the governor, whose support of Medicaid expansion has angered many conservatives in the state.
“You want people to have a choice. And the problem is the [Republican] Party wants nobody to run – they want the governor to have a clear pass,” Zawistowski said.
Stevenot’s running mate would be Brenda Mack, the former president of the Ohio Black Republicans Association, according to several tea party sources.
Stevenot didn’t return a phone call seeking comment Tuesday. Mack declined comment and told a reporter to call back next week.
A Kasich spokesman referred comment to the Ohio Republican Party, which didn't return a phone call Tuesday.
Ohio State University political science professor Paul Beck said while Kasich will almost certainly win the GOP primary, a tea-party primary rival could force him to talk about Medicaid expansion and other issues that he would prefer not to discuss.
"It might put Kasich in the position where he has to make a hard choice between trying to cater to his (political) base or trying to run a broader general election campaign," Beck said.
Kasich's sensitive about alienating his base, having been elected in 2010 with less than 50 percent of the vote in a Republican-friendly year, Beck said.
For the 2014 election, many conservatives disillusioned with Kasich are already looking at backing Libertarian Charlie Earl for governor, though a newly passed ballot-access law has set up a number of roadblocks for his campaign.
With Earl possibly waiting in the wings, Beck said, "The tea party candidacy in the (Republican) primary could, in some ways, set the stage for the same issues to kind of come to the fore in the general election."I’ve been reading numerous articles on the wholesale, meat axe spending cuts in the House funding bills and similar apparently indiscriminate slashing of state budgets, such as Wisconsin’s. But what looks like indiscriminate slashing is actually concealing a more calculated agenda.
There is a scene in the original Star Wars where Luke and Obi wan encounter a disabled Jawa transport, and all the little Jawas have been slaughtered. Luke suspects Sand People, but Obi wan says, “that is what we are meant to think.”
“These blast points are too precise to be Sand People. They were made by Imperial Storm Troopers”... with a deeper agenda than just slaughtering Jawas. They were after something else.
In the budget fights, we too are meant to believe there is universal consensus on the need for radical spending cuts to reduce the deficits, but the budget deficits and the manufactured hysteria around them are a pretext for something else. The Tea-GOPers, just like mindless Storm Troopers wiping out Jawas, can be told that everything must be slashed, and so they will mindlessly slash everything.
Without the slightest concern or even explanations, they are slashing programs that will harm millions of Americans, damage the economy, and cripple the nation’s future. But that doesn’t matter, because those who direct them are after other, more specific targets.
The real targets are the government programs and regulatory authorities that can check the extremes of unbridled wealth and pose a threat to corporate power. If you go through the budgets, you’ll realize the real targets are things like this:
1. Funding for the EPA and its authority to adopt regulations that might impact costs or profits by limiting toxic pollutants and emissions that harm public health and welfare;
2. Funding for the Department of Human/Health Services to enact rules that affect profits of health insurers by regulating how they treat their customers and patients;
3. Funding for the SEC, CFTC and other financial regulators to implement the dozens of regulations called for in the financial reform bill that might check reckless behavior and affect the banks’ bottom line;
4. Funding for legal enforcement activities that might check illegal corporate behavior, including labor and union protection, stopping tax evasion, anti-trust actions and the ability of victims to sue on their own behalf;
5. Funding for any agencies that can independently test, research, publicize or limit the environmental hazards or health risks of the petro-chemical/agra industry;
6. Funding for any community/social services groups that provide assistance to groups that traditionally vote more Democratic and who, if they were empowered, could fight back — such as the poor, legal services, or women who need family planning services, etc.
Those are the precise “blast points,” and the millions of Americans who get harmed with wholesale cuts everywhere else are just Jawas. They’re just expendable cover and collateral damage....
To be sure, there is always some other right wing social/values frame that can be used to justify specific targets to the mindless Tea-GOPers. They can vent their contempt for women just by attacking Planned Parenthood. But the people directing this don’t care a fig about the social/values issues.
If the corporate forces manipulating this destruction were honest, if they admitted that their cuts would jeopardize clean air and clean water and public health, or allow oil/gas/chemical companies and insurers and banks to behave irresponsibly or rip people off, the promoters couldn’t sell it. In a just society, they’d be arrested. So they had to change the framing.
By convincing a gullible media and the public of the ridiculous notion that deficits/debt are the greatest security threat facing the nation, so we need to slash everything, no matter how many people are harmed, they can incite the Storm Troopers to destroy their real targets, the government functions meant to restrain the oligarchs’ economic and political power.
That is why, as David Dayen’s reporting shows, all revenue/tax proposals must be ruled out. Because once you start thinking about trade offs between spending cuts and more revenues, you lose the powerful simplicity of “we have to slash everything.” And they need that cover to go after all the things that try to check corporate power.
This is straight out class warfare, corporate power and their rich benefactors vs everyone else, using millions of Americans as fodder and Tea-GOPers as mindless Storm Troopers. You cannot be neutral in this fight.
A giant corporation like Koch Industries, already prominent in driving Wisconsin Gov. Walker’s union-busting, privatization agenda, is a perfect example of the Empire’s Regional Governors, but we could as easily be talking about major health insurers, BP and Chevron, Monsanto, and many others. They are Citizens United, and they’re now openly waging war against you for control of your country.
UPDATE: Video of Jane Hamsher debating Heidi Harris on Cenk Uygur’s show on MSNBC.FakeWatchBusta calls himself “The Horological Batman," a vigilante out there policing these internet streets keeping everyone safe from the scourge that is fake high-end timepieces (“Horology” = the study of watches and keeping time; it comes from the same Greek word from which we get “hour.”) Armed with only an eye for detail and a smartphone, FWB puts anyone flossing a replica watch on blast. He’s had his accounts canceled, legal threats, and a lot of pissed off ballers, but he will not be stopped!
Although his identity is a mystery, his email address is not. We caught up over the weekend.
[Note: I'd like to give a shout-out to @mister_aok on Twitter for hipping me to this account.]
Noisey: Who are you and where are you from?
FakeWatchBusta: I’m a dude in my 30’s from Europe. I don’t want to [say much more] since the threat of lawsuits are starting to pile up from the jewelers selling these fake watches. I get a cease and desist letter almost once a week. Instagram shut down my first account after I busted Carmelo Anthony with a fake Audemars Piguet and a fake Panerai. He is clean now but there was a lot of drama with his sponsors after I exposed his replicas.
Was the C&D from the jeweler or from Melo?
The C&D’s are from several jewelers, almost every time I bust one of these rappers they are linked to they freak out pretty bad. Threatening to sue if I don’t remove the pictures. They also want me to go out and say that the watches are really real. Never done that.
How do you know so much about watches?
I was a big record collector, mostly punk/hardcore and some indie related stuff, but almost every genre have always interested me. I freaked out when a friend got his record collection destroyed in a basement flood. Since records are so fragile I sold off all the valuable pressings and just kept the music.
I started to get into watches since they hold value really well, but I’m also very fascinated with the mechanical aspect of them. Hundreds of parts working together making a fine tuned machine that can be spot on day after day. I’m not that into them for the luxury aspect of it, I’m more of a watch geek and study the different kinds of movements and how they work. I also appreciate the good quality and workmanship involved. I know much about them from being an avid forum reader and a detail freak; even some of the real watches have details that are off sometimes and that irritated me. I started to study some of the quality control issues in the Swiss watch industry and this led me to know the real watches very well. When you then look at a replica it’s pretty easy to map out those small things that give you an off feeling.
So you’re entirely self-taught in terms of watches? No formal training, just intrinsic appreciation?
I’m not a watchmaker, I’m just a detail freak and It’s part of my obsession with watches, it’s a million details on a space of 4cm.
Why did you decide to start calling out people with fake watches?
I started calling out some regular accounts on Instagram for fun, you know, just a dude in his 20’s that is fronting like he bought a Rolex Submariner to his followers and tagging #Rolex #Millionaire #Money and that sort of thing. I thought the need to front like that was pretty pathetic, and when it’s a fake it’s both tragic and funny. I got like 1000 followers the first week and got an interview with Hodinkee, one of the best watch blogs in the world. There was a lot of drama in the comments from the start, especially when I tagged friends and people that had commented that the watch was nice in the original post. From there it started to go pretty fast and I was up to like 7000 followers when I busted Carmelo Anthony and was taken down. I also busted Ice-T and his son.
On the new account I have busted a lot of people, everyone from Rick Ross to Soulja Boy and Sean Kingston. I just busted Jadakiss and he responded that he didn’t buy no watch from that guy. But I found a video that I posted proving him to deal with him and he even had the fake watch on his wrist. It’s all on the account.
The lengths some of these people go to are pretty crazy, there was this classic one were a dude found a picture of someone that looked like a sales associate inside an Audemars Piguet Boutique and thanked him for the good service and stuff. The person in the picture was Ben Clymer who runs Hodinkee and it was just something he had found searching Google images. There are also some funny video busts and sometimes they will show the price and picture of a real one found online and show the fake like they bought that watch.
So this is as much about shady jewelers passing off replicas as it is about rappers trying to floss extra hard.
Yeah, I think the jewelers are taking advantage. But if [the rappers] wanted the real deal from, say, Ben Baller it would be twice the price. I don’t think they care about the watch part – it’s the diamonds and shit that’s important to them. I think it’s more jewelery than watches for most of them.
I mean Soulja Boy’s watch is a bad Audemars Piguet quartz fake and the battery has run out so it shows the same time in all his pictures. It’s 10:25 all day, every day. It’s pretty funny.
Are there more fake watches than there used to be?
Replica watches are actually on the decline. Searches for them on the web have gone down in the last few years and I think regular people are getting more into buying something real. I have so much respect for those that just go and buy a Seiko, Casio, Tissot or whatever because they just want a watch for their budget. You can even get mechanical watches down in like $100-$200 and those are nice watches.
One of the reasons for doing this, it’s mostly for the laughs you know, but I don’t like the replica industry at all. No one loses any sleep over some Swiss million dollar companies getting hurt, but all the research I’ve done comes down to terrible conditions, use of hazardous materials and child labor. I mean there is bad shit like this in legitimate production also, but remember that the replica industry including fake bags, watches, sunglasses and shit is a major global economical player without any form of regulation at all. At the prices they sell this for it’s not possible to [make these watches] in an ethical way and the working conditions must be some of the worst there is. Just buy a goddamn Seiko.
But the laws are getting stricter, especially at airports. In Italy for example you can go to jail if you are stopped with fake junk in your baggage.
Who are the rappers with the best real watch collections?
Meek Mill is genuine, 50 Cent is genuine, Eminem got one Rolex, and it’s real. Jay-Z is the one with the nicest watches. He is not into all the bling, he got some real quality high-end watches. He also has his own models from both Audemars Piguet and Hublot.
The most awesome thing would be if a rapper with genuine watches would use me as a diss towards one of these fakers. Macklemore just started following the account, I hope he likes it.
Macklemore gonna rap about buying a Timex joint at a thrift store for $2 then come out with a rare Macklemore x Timex x Supreme version that sells for $1000.
Haha, if Macklemore releases the $1000 Timex I would be into it! At least it would be a genuine watch.
What kind of watch do you have?
I have a small watch collection that is constantly changing. Since they hold value really well it’s possible to try out a lot of different things without losing any money. Recently I have owned an IWC Portuguese 7 days, a Jaeger-LeCoultre Master 8 days, a Panerai 312 and some other stuff. At this point I have a Rolex Submariner and a couple of Omega watches. I’m looking for my next buy at this point.
What kind of watch do you wish you had?
My dream watch is a Patek Philippe Nautilus 5711 or 5712. Just a clean classic watch designed by one of the greatest designers in the watch business. I’m also a sucker for the A Lange & Söhne Zeitwerk. You can never go wrong with Rolex. Never. A lot of people think Rolex is the ultimate bling brand, but fact is that they have pushed the mechanical wrist watch forward more than any brand when it comes to diving and temperature/magnetic issues. They created the first watch with a date and they have created the watch that [has survived the deepest dive]. James Cameron put that watch outside his submarine. [Rolex] has a very interesting history when it comes to their sport watches.
Would you ever rock a pocket watch?
I have a pocket watch, I wear it once a year on a special occasion with some weird clothes.
Skinny Friedman doesn't own a watch, just a Beats Pill that he duct tapes to his wrist. He's on Twitter - @skinny412
Want more Instagram? Here are the greatest and best blunts on Instagram, an exploration of Tyga's awe-inspiring account, and the story of that time the one guy Young Thug follows on Instagram tried to fly us to Dubai in exchange for sex.Nazara Profile Blog Joined May 2014 United Kingdom 235 Posts Last Edited: 2015-11-05 20:58:51 #1
+ Show Spoiler +
Poll: Would you like to change anything to Macro Boosters?
(Vote): Complete removal
(Vote): Make them not necessary but still beneficial (nerf)
(Vote): Back to HotS values (buff)
(Vote): No change at all
Poll: Would you like Overkill Protection / Smart Firing removed?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): Maybe, if we get to test it first
(Vote): No
Poll: Would you like Smart Cast removed?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): Yes, if spellcasters are rebalanced as well
(Vote): No
Poll: Would you like High Ground Advantage mechanic introduced?
(Vote): Yes, a random miss chance based
(Vote): Yes, a damage % reducing one
(Vote): Yes, a range based one
(Vote): Yes, but something else (please explain in post)
(Vote): No
Poll: Do you agree that air styles are too strong?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): No
Poll: What economy model do you prefer?
(Vote): WoL/HotS
(Vote): LotV half patches
(Vote): DH
(Vote): HMH
(Vote): Other (please specify)
Poll: Remove MSC and PO for shorter build times for Gateway units?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): Maybe, need testing first, but probably yes
(Vote): Maybe, need testing first, but probably no
(Vote): No
Poll: Make Force Field destructible?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): No
Poll: Bring back Khaydarin Amulet / High Templar energy upgrade?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): No
Poll: Do you like idea of Mech redesign?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): Yes, but not the Hellion/Hellbat/Widow Mine changes
(Vote): I like other idea of buffing Mech, not the one in OP
(Vote): No, but some tweaks to Siege Tank/Cyclone are necessary
(Vote): No, Mech is fine
Poll: High Templar's Feedback need a nerf?
(Vote): Yes, increase energy cost
(Vote): Yes, but other way of nerfing
(Vote): No, Feedback is fine
Poll: Do you like the Ghost redesign?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): Yes, but not the stat/cost changes
(Vote): Yes, but not the ability/spell changes
(Vote): No, I have seen a better idea somewhere else
(Vote): No, Ghost and its Steady Targeting is fine
Poll: Do you like Viper redesign?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): Only some of it
(Vote): No
Poll: Do you like Infestor's Fungal Growth immobilize redesign?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): Yes, but with slower attack rate instead of damage
(Vote): No, Fungal Growth is fine
Poll: Do you like Ultralisk changes?
(Vote): Yes, make it faster and smaller
(Vote): Yes, but only make it faster
(Vote): Don't change the speed/size, but nerf +4 armor upgrade back to +2
(Vote): Leave Ultralisk alone
Poll: Do you agree with Lurker redesign?
(Vote): Yes, make it faster with shorter range
(Vote): Some other tweaks are required
(Vote): Lurker is fine as it is
Poll: Is harassment in general getting out of control?
(Vote): Yes
(Vote): Hard to tell
(Vote): No
Poll: If WoL/HotS never had Multiple Building Selection and no Macro Boosts:
(Vote): I would still play SC2 regardless
(Vote): I would still try it at some point anyway
(Vote): I would spent more time deciding if the game is worth picking up
(Vote): Probably I wouldn't try the game
(Vote): I wouldn't play the game at all
Poll: If WoL/HotS had limited unit selection instead of unlimited:
(Vote): I would play the game regardless
(Vote): I would play the game if the limit was between 20-30 for comfort
(Vote): I would play the game as long as the limit is no lower then 12
(Vote): I would most likely not play SC2
(Vote): I would refuse to play without unlimited unit selection
Poll: What do you think about the OP?
(Vote): Great thread! Agree on most things!
(Vote): Good analysis on design flaws, but bad suggestions for improvement
(Vote): Interesting read at least
(Vote): I disagree on many points in the post
(Vote): Go away, don't you dare saying anything wrong about Blizzard
Introduction
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As we all know, there are/were numerous balance and design issues with Starcraft II throughout its life. Broodlord/Infestor, Blink all-ins, 4 Gate PvPs, Swarm Hosts etc... there were plenty of things that could have been prevented if only Blizzard acted in time, some may say. But to me it seems like all this crap could have been stopped long before it reached ladder: with internal testing and spending some more time thinking how a things work and why they work that way. In this thread I would like to discuss design and balance, along with rules that in my opinion should be followed when intoducing new units to the game and rebalancing the old ones. Before I start, I think it is in good manner to introduce myself.
I'm a 26 year old who focused most of his life playing computer games in his spare time. Be it RTS like Age of Empires II, Warcraft series, SC:BW, Dune, Command and Conquer games. Turn based strategies like HoM&M series or Age of Wonders II. Hack 'n' Slashes like Diablo 2, Torchlight. 4x games like Galactic Civilizations II and Civilizations. Also RPGs, be it Final Fantasies, Witchers, Elder Scrolls or D&D based games.
I'm a hardcore gamer, completionist, min-maxer, powergamer, but even more then gamer, I am a designer and a modder. I used to make my own maps, campaigns, mods, classes and balance tweaks to games I play. Working with numbers, as well as analyzing and understanding the game brings me sometimes more joy then playing it. My latest finished project was Community Based Update for Galactic Civilizations II on which I worked on as a part of a small team of passionate gamers. I know a bit on how the balance works.
Having said that, I never achieved anything in SC2. I played through campaigns and only some 1v1s and 2v2s on my friends key. I wasn't Masters. Not even Diamond. I was at most Gold/Platinum when I played SC2, as I could stand my own quite alright playing vs other Platinums. I never played more then 50-60 games - so I didn't have time to improve and get to Masters to satisfy people who are going to call on my low rank. But I have been watching games and lurking on the forums for almost 5 years.
Some may say that if I don't have Master/Grandmaster in SC2 I should not try to balance the game as I lack game knowledge. I disagree. Skill should have nothing to do with balance and design, I do not believe that a Coach needs to be better then the Player. A 60 year old football coach who can hardly run can still be a great coach.
I play Brood War occasionally. Around 20-30 games every season or two on iCCup. I don't mass games. My mechanics are bad - as a Zerg I average 70-85 APM per game. And yet I could hit easily C- if I played more then 60-70 games and was serious about it. Some of you probably laugh. C- or C is a noobland and nothing to be proud of. Well... most people of my level have 150-200 APM. Even in D+ almost noone has less then 120 APM, and if they do, they're Protoss, not Zerg lol. But back to me: I'm 2-3x slower then my opponents and I still beat them, so yeah, I'm proud of myself. For my mechanical lazyness and weak Macro I make up with game sense, strategy, tactics and mind-games. I'm a much better player then most people with the same speed as me (even people in D- show more the 85 APM). Mechanics in Brood War matter but not as much as peple think. Some people overestimate mechanics - Savior was known for his low APM, yet he used to be the best Zerg around.
But that's enough about mechanics and my credentials.
LoTV is going to be released soon. Many people jump on bandwagon flaming Blizzard. Some for the right reasons, some not - I didn't come to blame or defend anyone, but to present my thoughts on game balance and design, on what went wrong and what should have been done differentely. I believe it is too late to fix some core issues without upsetting the balance so late into Beta, we don't have the time before game is released. The time in the beta was spent on simple balance patches, while the only big changes were 12 worker start and "half patches".
Starcraft 2 was and still is in need of drastic changes. We had a chance when we had gone from WoL to HotS, but apart from new units and some balance patches, core of the game had the same flaws, and some other flaws were only amplified. Some of the design choices and omissions left us with engine that cannot perform basic things that SHOULD have been in Starcraft 2 from the start, like moving shot for air and maybe some ground units, or things as dead simple as turret tracking for the Siege Tank.
In here, I want to present my thoughts on the state of the game, provide alternative solutions to common problems, or simply highlight problems for the Blizzard/Starcraft community to see.
There is a lot to talk about, and I spent couple (5-8) of weeks now (25/10 at the time of writing) writing this down. Lately I'm a busy family man, and I do not have as much time as I would like to have for this project. If there are things that have been fixed in later patches, and I ramble on about something long gone, please forgive me. I will proof-read everything once I decide it is the time to post, but there is always a chance that something will slip.
Overkill Protection and its effects on gameplay/balance with slow firing units
+ Show Spoiler +
First I would like to talk about Overkill Protection / Smart Fire (SF). SF prevents units from firing if total damage of units within range is greater then their targets HP. In other words, if you have 10 Siege Tanks within range of a damaged (10 HP) Zergling, only one of them will fire at it. If you had 20 Marines, only 2 (enough to 1 shot it) would fire. SF works only for units dealing instanteneous and ray damage like Marine, Siege Tank, Thor's and Viking's ground attack, Void Ray, Immortal etc.. It doesn't work with projectile based units. Smart Fire prevents the loss of effectiveness of units in larger groups - you can compare our SC2 10 HP Zergling being dropped on line of Siege Tanks - only one will fire at it, the rest will wait for other targets to get inside their range. In Brood War this feature didn't exist, and all the units would fire simultaneously, wasting damage, or simply, overkilling.
Logic dictates that the longer the cooldown of unit's attack is, the more it benefits from Overkill Protection. Imagine if Siege Tank had 100 damage but every 3 seconds - every wasted shot hurts. Single wasted shot is not as hurtfull if it deals 16 damage every 0.5 second.
Why overkilling is a good thing in a control oriented game like Starcraft 2? It does 3 important things for us:
- Reduces effectiveness of Deathballs by reducing damage increase per every added unit. Adding 1 more tank to a group of 5 increases damage potential of a single tank more then adding 1 tank to a group of 20. Removing Smart Fire discourages Deathballs by a small degree.
- Some shots are wasted and by that overall DPS is reduced. With less damage, units die slower, there is more time to micro and position your units during the engagement. Many complain about fights in SC2 ending in a matter of seconds - even as removal of SF would probably not increase average time of a fight by more then 10%, 6.5 seconds is still better then 6.
- Also, new unit interactions and micro can arise. Zealots/Zerglings dropped on top of sieged up Tanks or even sending single units to force overkill and protect your main army, or sending a ling to retreat a Lurker burrowed in Siege Tanks range etc.
Removal of SF is not a cure to Deathball play or game ending fights lasting less then 5 seconds, but it helps slightly with these problems.
Notice that so far I spoke almost only about Siege Tank, it is because I want to come back to some of those points later when I touch its subject, but the general idea applies to the rest of the units with Smart Fire, but it is easier to visualize it on Siege Tank model.
tl:dr
Overkill / Smart Fire makes deathballs more efficient and contribute to deathballing.
Warp Gate>Gateway, Chronoboost and bandaids as their consequence.
+ Show Spoiler +
Force Fields were hated since their introduction. Formerly to help Protoss in their early game, so Protoss wouldn't die to rush tactics, but also to split enemy army effectively halving DPS of Zerg/Terran and winning the game for Protoss. Blizzard tried some bandaids for it - increasing burrow speed, making Massive units destroy FF, and lastly, designing a unit with a sole purpose of fighting FF (the unit in question now is being redesigned as a Liberator/Tank/Lurker siege stopper which I think is silly). Lets not to forget about Photon Overcharge and lately Pylon Overcharge, which don't just help with defence - PO simply shuts down any kind of early game pressure/harassment. Implementation of a hero unit - Mothership Core (MSC) - is also a widely debated.
But why does Protoss need early game protection, if most units in the game have same or similiar stats as they had back in Brood War, where Protoss was fine or even was the primary agressor? Because Warp Gate (WG). Let me explain - Protoss production is centered around Warp Gate and that is the "standard" Protoss production rate of units required to keep up with Terran and Zerg. Someone thought that Gateway is not enough, that P needs a new fancy way of making units - and that is fine by itself. Now, Warp Gate produces units faster then Gateway and can spawn units anywhere on the map. Spawning units on the map is fine as an upgrade, but Gateway being so inferior to WG is a bad design. There is no benefit of choosing |
ged that, quote, could have sold the information to Russia and China but chose not to because it’s public data. And because another state would take advantage of the information and try to get some edge.”
How, then, did the government conclude that Manning’s behavior amounted to “aiding the enemy”? By making two inane arguments: that the world includes our enemies, and that they use the Internet.
According to the prosecution—and these are all quotes from the trial transcript, courtesy of the Freedom of the Press Foundation—“WikiLeaks was merely the platform which Pfc. Manning used to ensure all the information was available for the world, including the enemies of the United States.” He knew WikiLeaks “would release it for the world to access, and he knew the world included the enemies of the United States.” Where did Manning learn this shocking fact? In high-level military training. “The public included the enemy, and he knew that, Your Honor, as an intelligence analyst,” said the prosecution. He “knew the entire world included the enemy, from his training.”
By the government’s reasoning, this meant treason. “Worldwide distribution, that was his goal. Worldwide includes the enemy—Article 104.” Manning “was a traitor” who delivered intelligence to the enemy by taking “deliberate steps to ensure they, along with the world, received all of it.” He wanted “the whole world, including al-Qaida and al-Qaida of the Arabian Peninsula, to see everything he compromised, and he knew they would. That, Your Honor, is the general evil intent, and that is aiding the enemy by giving intelligence.”
But our enemies don’t merely exist. They also use the Internet. In their closing arguments, prosecutors cited “an overwhelming amount of evidence that Pfc. Manning knew that the enemy uses the Internet to gather intelligence.” In “Advanced Individual Training,” he received “lessons that the enemy used the internet.” He also learned from “intelligence products of the enemy, including AQAP … that terrorists use the Internet.” He released national secrets to WikiLeaks, “all this while knowing, Your Honor, that our enemies, the terrorists, are using the Internet.”
You could argue that Manning had nothing to do with the latter half of this process: terrorists downloading what’s publicly available. But that would just expose your naivete about how the Internet works. It’s subtle and pernicious. According to the government, “Pfc. Manning knew the information’s existence on the Internet would actively encourage our nation’s enemy to gather and data-mine the information.” Public disclosure is active encouragement.
This rationale wouldn’t just apply to al-Qaida. It would define any disclosure, at any time, as aiding the enemy, so long as enemies exist. The United States “faces enemies worldwide and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan,” prosecutors argued. “Pfc. Manning provided any enemy of the United States, worldwide, this data.” He knew “that disclosure of the information on the Internet must be avoided … because there are many enemies, and it’s a free and open society.”
The government’s case, in short, was that disclosure of classified information by a soldier who explicitly aims to inform the whole world, to an agency that explicitly aims to inform the whole world, in a medium that is accessed by the whole world, amounts to aiding the enemy, a crime punishable by death. I can think of many countries that would enthusiastically enforce such a policy. Let’s not be one of them.
William Saletan’s latest short takes on the news, via Twitter:NEW DELHI: A selfie in front of an aircraft at Mumbai airport proved to be unlucky for a criminal who was capturing his moment of his first flight. The picture posted on Facebook landed him jail.Police tracked down Raju Sonkar — accused in robbery cases — using the aircraft number through which they mapped the route he had flown.Police found that Sonkar had deboarded at IGI airport and was staying in Delhi to evade arrest after committing a spate of robberies in Mumbai. He told the police that he came to Delhi after every two robberies to avoid suspicion.Sonkar, a resident of Gonda in Uttar Pradesh, had been working as a salesman in Mumbai for the past 10 years. He confessed to a crime committed in Mumbai’s Khar area, where he along with his four friends robbed an elderly couple’s house.Sonkar got to know about the couple from his cousin who worked there as a cook. Considering the couple to be an easy target, Sonkar along with his accomplices, Hasim, Shivnath, Kallu and Santosh ransacked their house when the woman was alone at home and fled with Rs 25 lakh in cash and jewellery worth Rs 8 lakh.A case under Sections 381 (theft by clerk or servant of property in possession of master), 341 (Punishment for wrongful restraint), 452 (house-trespass after preparation for hurt, assault or wrongful restraint), 397 (robbery, or dacoity, with attempt to cause death or grievous hurt) and 34 (Acts done by several persons in furtherance of common intention) of the IPC was registered and teams were formed to nab the accused.After Mumbai police got clues about Sonkar being in Delhi, they informed the officials here. “A team was formed and we started investigating into the matter,” said Jatin Narwal, deputy commissioner of police (north).Police said Sonkar came to Delhi on Friday and started living with his relative in Daryaganj. They have recovered Rs 7.52 lakh cash and gold jewellery from him.The 44th president of the United States, author and the most popular person in the world, Barack Hussein Obama II, has an estimated net worth of $40 million, excluding the $1.4 million in Nobel Prize money he donated to charity and his primary home.
His historic run for the presidency helped him sell millions of copies of his two books, Dreams of My Father and The Audacity of Hope, during the campaign. He sold another 100,000 copies the week following his election. In 2009, the president earned an advance for an abridged version of Dreams for young adults; the deal made him the first sitting president in recent memory to receive a book advance while in office. The real money will be made years from now: Obama could certainly earn tens of millions of dollars a year giving speeches full time.
As president, Barack Obama’s base salary was $400,000 a year. He also had access to a $150,000 expense account as well as a $100,000 tax-free travel account and $20,000 entertainment budget.
Some of the achievements during his term as president of the United States includes the Affordable Care Act also known as Obamacare, which he signed on March 23, 2010, and the passage of the America Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. His term as president ended on January 20, 2017.
Obama served three terms in the Illinois Senate and is the first African-American President of the United States. Obama was born August 4, 1961 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School.
In June 1989, he met Michelle Robinson while working as a summer associate for Sidney Austin's Chicago law firm. Three years later, they got married and has two daughters, Malia Ann and Natasha.Ultra Music Festival bans most rave gear including totems, backpacks, glow sticks, masks and more
Ultra Music Festival just got a lot less raver friendly. After coming under fire last year after a string of unfortunate incidents, the world’s pre-eminent dance music festival raised its age restriction to 18+ and has now instituted a long list of banned items that will send ravers reeling. Among the list of usual banned items, like drugs and deadly weapons, Ultra has banned backpacks, bags, and purses — but not Camelbaks. The list goes on to ban totems, facial masks, pacifiers, glowsticks, stuffed animals — all the usual accessories for a majority of UMF attendees. View the full list of banned items below and visit Ultra’s website for additional information.
PROHIBITED ITEMS
No Illegal or illicit substances, drugs, or drug paraphernalia
No weapons of any kind including, but not limited to, pocket knives or self defense sprays
No flammable items or liquids including aerosols and fireworks
No markers, pens or spray paint
No backpacks, purses, or bags allowed except bags made of clear plastic, clear vinyl, or clear PVC not exceeding 13”x17”
No stuffed animals
No facial masks
No outside food or beverage including alcohol
No bottles, cans, canteens, flasks, or coolers
No opened over the counter medication or eye drops
No opened packs of cigarettes or tampons
No pacifiers, glow sticks
No balloons, balls, inflatable balls, Frisbees or flying disks
No umbrellas, chairs, blankets, sleeping bags or tents
No bicycles, skateboards, scooters, or personal motorized vehicles
No animals except for service animals assisting an individual with a disability
No large chains, chained wallets or spiked jewelry
No laser pens, laser pointers, or similar focused light devices
No water guns, squirt guns, spray bottles or misters
No musical instruments, noisemakers or air horns
No whistles
No professional cameras, flash cameras or video and audio recording equipment, or camera poles
No poles, sticks, or “totems”
Categories: NewsDebunked conspiracy theory about alleged child sex ring
"Pizzagate" redirects here. For the pizza-throwing incident at a 2004 association football match, see Battle of the Buffet § "Pizzagate"
Pizzagate is a debunked[2][3][4] conspiracy theory that went viral during the 2016 United States presidential election cycle. The conspiracy theory has been extensively discredited and debunked by a wide array of organizations, including the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia.[3][4][5]
In the fall of 2016, the personal email account of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, was hacked in a spear-phishing attack, and his emails were subsequently made public by WikiLeaks. Proponents of the Pizzagate conspiracy theory falsely claimed that the emails contained coded messages referring to human trafficking and connecting several U.S. restaurants and high-ranking officials of the Democratic Party with an alleged child sex ring involving the Washington, D.C. restaurant Comet Ping Pong.[6][7]
Members of the alt-right and other opponents of Clinton's presidential campaign spread the conspiracy theory on social media outlets such as 4chan and Twitter.[8] A man from North Carolina traveled to Comet Ping Pong to investigate this conspiracy, during which he fired a rifle inside the restaurant.[9] In addition, the restaurant owner and staff received death threats.[10]
Origins
Genesis
David Goldberg via Twitter @DavidGoldbergNY Rumors stirring in the NYPD that Huma's emails point to a pedophila ring and @HillaryClinton is at the center. #GoHillary #PodestaEmails23 https://pic.twitter.com/gkEH5oL269[dead link] October 30, 2016[11]
This conspiracy theory emerged near the end of the 2016 United States presidential election cycle. On October 30, 2016, a white supremacist Twitter account that presented itself as belonging to a Jewish lawyer in New York included a display of a claim that the New York City Police Department, which was searching emails found on Anthony Weiner's laptop as part of an investigation into his sexting scandals, had discovered the existence of a pedophilia ring linked to members of the Democratic Party.[12][3] Internet users reading John Podesta's emails released by WikiLeaks in early November 2016 speculated that some words in Podesta's emails were code words for pedophilia and human trafficking.[2][13] Proponents also claimed that the ring was a meeting ground for Satanic ritual abuse.[14]
The theory was then posted on the message board Godlike Productions. The following day, the story was repeated on Your News Wire citing a 4chan post from earlier that year.[12] The Your News Wire article was then spread by pro-Trump websites, including SubjectPolitics.com, which falsely claimed the New York Police Department had raided Hillary Clinton's property.[12] The website Conservative Daily Post ran a headline falsely stating that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had confirmed that story.[15]
Spread on social media
Users on Twitter and 4chan searched the leaked emails of John Podesta for food-related "code words" that supposedly revealed the existence of a sex trafficking operation.[12] For example, The New York Times reported that the phrase "cheese pizza" was thought by a poster to 4chan to be a code word for child pornography since they had the same initials.[2] According to the BBC, the allegations spread to "the mainstream internet" several days before the 2016 U.S. presidential election, after a Reddit user posted a Pizzagate "evidence" document.[8] The original Reddit post, since removed some time between November 4 and 21, alleged the involvement of the Washington, D.C., business Comet Ping Pong:
Everyone associated with the business is making semi-overt, semi-tongue-in-cheek, and semi-sarcastic inferences towards sex with minors. The artists that work for and with the business also generate nothing but cultish imagery of disembodiment, blood, beheadings, sex, and of course pizza.[4]
The story was picked up by fake-news websites such as Infowars.com, Planet Free Will[10] and the Vigilant Citizen,[16][17] and has been promoted by alt-right activists such as Mike Cernovich, Brittany Pettibone, and Jack Posobiec.[8][18] Other promoters included David Seaman, former writer for TheStreet.com,[19] CBS46 anchor Ben Swann,[20] basketball player Andrew Bogut,[21] and Minecraft creator Markus Persson.[22] On December 30, as Bogut recovered from a knee injury, members of /r/The Donald community on Reddit promoted the false theory that his injury was connected to mild support for Pizzagate.[23][24] Jonathan Albright, an assistant professor of media analytics at Elon University, said that a disproportionate number of tweets about Pizzagate came from the Czech Republic, Cyprus, and Vietnam, and that some of the most frequent retweeters were bots.[18]
Members of the Reddit community /r/The_Donald created the /r/pizzagate subreddit to further develop the conspiracy theory.[10] The sub was banned on November 23, 2016, for violating Reddit's anti-doxing policy with Reddit posting a notice that "We don't want witchhunts on our site".[8] Users had posted personal details of people connected to the alleged conspiracy.[25] After the ban on Reddit, the discussion was moved to the v/pizzagate sub on Voat, a website similar to Reddit.[26]
Some of Pizzagate's proponents, including David Seaman and Michael G. Flynn (Michael Flynn's son), have evolved the conspiracy into a broader government conspiracy called "Pedogate". According to this theory, a "satanic cabal of elites" of the New World Order operate international child sex trafficking rings.[27]
Turkish press reports
In Turkey, the allegations were reported by pro-government newspapers (i.e., those supportive of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan), such as Sabah, A Haber, Yeni Şafak, Akşam and Star. The story appeared on Turkey's Ekşi Sözlük and on the viral news network HaberSelf, where anyone can post content. These forums reposted images and allegations directly from the since-deleted subreddit, which were reprinted in full on the state-controlled press.[8][28] Efe Sozeri, a columnist for The Daily Dot, suggested government sources were pushing this story in order to distract attraction from a child abuse scandal in March 2016.[28]
Harassment of restaurant owners and employees
[29] The pizzeria, Comet Ping Pong, was threatened by hundreds of people who believed in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory.
As Pizzagate spread, Comet Ping Pong received hundreds of threats from the theory's believers.[29] The restaurant's owner, James Alefantis, told The New York Times: "From this insane, fabricated conspiracy theory, we've come under constant assault. I've done nothing for days but try to clean this up and protect my staff and friends from being terrorized."[10]
Some adherents identified the Instagram account of Alefantis and pointed to some of the photos posted there as evidence of the conspiracy. Many of the images shown were friends and family who had liked Comet Ping Pong's page on Facebook. In some cases, imagery was taken from unrelated websites and claimed to be Alefantis' own.[4] The restaurant's owners and staff were harassed and threatened on social media websites, and the owner received death threats.[10] The restaurant's Yelp page was locked by the operators of the site citing reviews that were "motivated more by the news coverage itself than the reviewer's personal consumer experience".[4]
Several bands who had performed at the pizzeria also faced harassment. For example, Amanda Kleinman of Heavy Breathing deleted her Twitter account after receiving negative comments connecting her and her band to the conspiracy theory.[10] Another band, Sex Stains, had closed the comments of their YouTube videos and addressed the controversy in the description of their videos.[30] The artist Arrington de Dionyso, whose murals are frequently displayed at the pizzeria, described the campaign of harassment against him in detail,[31] and averred of the attacks in general, "I think it's a very deliberate assault, which will eventually be a coordinated assault on all forms of free expression." The affair has drawn comparisons with the Gamergate controversy.[32][33]
Pizzagate-related harassment of businesses extended beyond Comet Ping Pong to include other nearby D.C. businesses such as Besta Pizza, three doors down from Comet; Little Red Fox; the popular bookstore Politics and Prose; and the French bistro Terasol.[34][35] The businesses received a high volume of threatening and menacing telephone calls, including death threats, and also experienced online harassment.[35] The co-owners of Little Red Fox and Terasol filed police reports.[35]
Brooklyn restaurant Roberta's was also pulled into the hoax, receiving harassing phone calls, including a call from an unidentified person telling an employee that she was "going to bleed and be tortured".[26][36] The restaurant became involved after a since-removed YouTube video used images from their social media accounts to imply they were a part of the hoax sex ring. Others then spread the accusations on social media, claiming the "Clinton family loves Roberta's".[37]
East Side Pies, in Austin, Texas, saw one of its delivery trucks vandalized with an epithet, and was the target of online harassment related to their supposed involvement in Pizzagate, alleged connections to the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Illuminati.[38][39]
The Federal Bureau of Investigation investigated Pizzagate-related threats in March 2017 as part of a probe into possible Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections.[40]
Criminal responses
On December 4, 2016, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, fired three shots in the restaurant with an AR-15-style rifle, striking walls, a desk, and a door.[41][42][43] Welch later told police that he had planned to "self-investigate" the conspiracy theory.[44] Welch saw himself as the potential hero of the story—a rescuer of children.[45] He surrendered after officers surrounded the restaurant and was arrested without incident.[46] No one was injured.[47]
Welch told police he had read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves and that he wanted to see for himself if they were there.[9] In an interview with The New York Times, Welch later said that he regretted how he had handled the situation but did not dismiss the conspiracy theory, and rejected the description of it as "fake news".[48][49][50] Some conspiracy theorists speculated that the shooting was a staged attempt to discredit their investigations.[51]
On December 13, 2016, Welch was charged with one count of "interstate transportation of a firearm with intent to commit an offense" (a federal crime).[52] According to court documents, Welch attempted to recruit friends three days before the attack by urging them to watch a YouTube video about the conspiracy.[53] He was subsequently charged with two additional offenses, with the grand jury returning an indictment charging Welch with assault with a dangerous weapon and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime.[54][55]
On March 24, 2017, following a plea agreement with prosecutors, Welch pleaded guilty to the federal charge of interstate transport of firearms and the local District of Columbia charge of assault with a dangerous weapon. Welch also agreed to pay $5,744.33 for damages to the restaurant. U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson sentenced Welch to four years in prison on June 22, 2017; at the sentencing hearing, Welch apologized for his conduct and said that he had been "foolish and reckless."[43][56][57]
On January 12, 2017, Yusif Lee Jones, a 52-year-old man from Shreveport, Louisiana, pleaded guilty in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana to making a threatening phone call three days after Welch's attack, to Besta Pizza, another pizzeria on the same block as Comet Ping Pong. He said that he threatened Besta to "save the kids" and "finish what the other guy didn't."[58][59]
On January 25, 2019, the Comet Ping Pong site suffered an arson attack when a suspect started a fire in one of its backrooms. Employees quickly snuffed the blaze and nobody was injured. [60]
Debunking
The conspiracy theory has been widely discredited and debunked. It has been judged to be false after detailed investigation by the fact-checking website Snopes.com and The New York Times,[47][61][62] and numerous news organizations have debunked it as a conspiracy theory, including the New York Observer,[63] The Washington Post,[64] The Independent in London,[65] The Huffington Post,[66] The Washington Times,[67] the Los Angeles Times,[68] Fox News,[69] CNN,[70] and the Miami Herald.[5] The Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia characterized the matter as "fictitious".[5]
Much of the purported evidence cited by the conspiracy theory's proponents had been taken from entirely different sources and made to appear as if they supported the conspiracy.[4] Images of children of family and friends of the pizzeria's staff were taken from social media sites such as Instagram and claimed to be photos of victims.[61] The Charlotte Observer noted the diverse group of sources that had debunked the conspiracy theory, pointing out this included the Fox News Channel in addition to The New York Times.[41]
On December 10, 2016, The New York Times published an article that analyzed the claims that the theory proposed.[2] They emphasized that:
Theorists linked the conspiracy to Comet Ping Pong, through similarities between company logos and symbols related to Satanism and pedophilia. However, The Times noted that similarities were also found in the logos of a number of unrelated companies, such as AOL, Time Warner, and MSN. [2]
noted that similarities were also found in the logos of a number of unrelated companies, such as AOL, Time Warner, and MSN. Theorists claimed an underground network beneath Comet Ping Pong; however, the restaurant actually has no basement, and the picture used to support this claim was taken from another facility. [2]
Theorists claimed to have a picture of restaurant owner Alefantis wearing a T-shirt endorsing pedophilia. However, the image was of another person, and the shirt, which read "J' ❤ L'Enfant," was actually a reference to the L'Enfant Cafe-Bar in DC, whose owner was pictured in the image, and which itself is named after Pierre Charles L'Enfant, designer of much of the layout of Washington, D.C. [2]
Theorists claimed John and Tony Podesta kidnapped Madeleine McCann using police sketches that were, in fact, two sketches of the same suspect taken from the descriptions of two eyewitnesses.[2]
No alleged victims have come forward and no physical evidence has been found.[71]
Responses
Community messages in front of Comet Ping Pong following the shooting
In an interview with NPR on November 27, 2016, Comet Ping Pong owner James Alefantis referred to the conspiracy theory as "an insanely complicated, made-up, fictional lie-based story" and a "coordinated political attack".[72] Syndicated columnist Daniel Ruth wrote that the conspiracy theorists' assertions were "dangerous and damaging false allegations" and that they were "repeatedly debunked, disproved and dismissed".[73]
Despite the conspiracy theory being debunked, it continued to spread on social media, with over one million messages using hashtag #Pizzagate on Twitter in November 2016.[41] Stefanie MacWilliams, who wrote an article promoting the conspiracy on Planet Free Will, was subsequently reported by the Toronto Star as saying, "I really have no regrets and it's honestly really grown our audience." Pizzagate, she said, is "two worlds clashing. People don't trust the mainstream media anymore, but it's true that people shouldn't take the alternative media as truth, either."[74]
On December 8, Hillary Clinton responded to the conspiracy theory, speaking about the dangers of fake news websites. She said, "The epidemic of malicious fake news and fake propaganda that flooded social media over the past year, it's now clear that so-called fake news can have real-world consequences."[75]
Public opinion
A poll conducted by Public Policy Polling on December 6–7, 2016, asked 1,224 U.S. registered voters if they thought Hillary Clinton was "connected to a child sex ring being run out of a pizzeria in Washington DC?" The poll showed that 9% said that they did believe she was connected, 72% said they did not, and 19% were not sure.[76][77][78]
A poll of voters conducted on December 17–20 by The Economist/YouGov asked voters if they believed that, "Leaked e-mails from the Clinton campaign talked about pedophilia and human trafficking - 'Pizzagate'." The results showed that 17% of Clinton voters responded "true" while 82% responded "not true"; and 46% of Trump voters responded "true" while 53% responded "not true".[79][80][81]
Alex Jones and InfoWars
After the Comet Ping Pong shooting, Alex Jones backed off from the idea that the D.C. pizzeria was the center of the conspiracy.[51] On December 4, Infowars.com uploaded a YouTube video that linked Pizzagate to the November 13 death of a sex-worker-rights activist. The video falsely claimed that she had been investigating a link between the Clinton Foundation and human trafficking in Haiti and it speculated that she had been murdered in connection with her investigation. According to the activist's former employer, her family and her friends, her death was in fact a suicide and she was not investigating the Clinton Foundation.[82] By December 14, Infowars had removed two out of three of its Pizzagate-related videos.[83]
In February 2017, Alefantis' lawyers sent Jones a letter demanding an apology and retraction. Under Texas law, Jones was given a month to comply or be subject to a libel suit.[84] In March 2017, Alex Jones apologized to Alefantis for promulgating the conspiracy theory, saying "To my knowledge today, neither Mr. Alefantis, nor his restaurant Comet Ping Pong, were involved in any human trafficking as was part of the theories about Pizzagate that were being written about in many media outlets and which we commented upon."[85]
Michael T. Flynn and Michael Flynn Jr.
In November 2016, Michael T. Flynn, then on President-Elect Donald Trump's transition team and Trump's designate for National Security Advisor, posted multiple tweets on Twitter containing conspiratorial material regarding Hillary Clinton alleging that Clinton's campaign manager, John Podesta, drank the blood and bodily fluids of other humans in Satanic rituals, which Politico says "soon morphed into the '#pizzagate' conspiracy theory involving Comet Ping Pong".[86] On November 2, 2016, Flynn tweeted a link to a story with unfounded accusations and wrote, "U decide - NYPD Blows Whistle on New Hillary Emails: Money Laundering, Sex Crimes w Children, etc... MUST READ!" The tweet was shared by over 9,000 people, but was deleted from Flynn's account sometime between December 12–13, 2016.[83]
After the shooting incident at Comet Ping Pong, Michael Flynn Jr., Michael T. Flynn's son and also a member of Trump's transition team, tweeted; "Until #Pizzagate proven to be false, it'll remain a story. The left seems to forget #PodestaEmails and the many 'coincidences' tied to it."[87][88][89] On December 6, 2016, Flynn Jr. was forced out of Trump's transition team.[90] Spokesman Jason Miller did not identify the reason for Flynn Jr.'s dismissal; however, The New York Times reported that other officials had confirmed it was related to the tweet.[91]
See also
ReferencesStory highlights The thieves removed the safe containing the jewels from a hotel room, police say
The stolen jewelry was worth more than $1 million, police say
The Cannes Film Festival brings together the rich and famous from around the world
The stolen jewels were from the Swiss firm Chopard, an official sponsor of the festival
Jewels worth more than $1 million were stolen from a hotel in Cannes, France, police in the nearby city of Nice said Friday.
The theft of the jewels, from the Swiss firm Chopard, came Thursday night, on the second day of the renowned Cannes Film Festival, which opened Wednesday and runs through May 26.
The annual Cannes festival brings together the rich and famous from around the world for movie screenings and glittering parties.
Commandant Bernard Mascarelli, of the Nice police, said the jewelry was stolen from a safe in the Suite Novotel hotel on Boulevard Carnot in Cannes.
A Chopard employee was staying in the room but left it to go to dinner from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. local time, he said. She returned to discover the safe containing the jewels was missing.
JUST WATCHED Who stole jewels from Cannes? Replay More Videos... MUST WATCH Who stole jewels from Cannes? 02:10
The whole safe had been unscrewed from the inside of the hotel room and carried out, Mascarelli said.
Police are now scouring security camera footage from the streets around the hotel and citywide for clues, he said.
No detailed description has yet been given of the stolen jewels.
Chopard, which is an official sponsor of the festival, has provided the Palme d'Or trophy awarded to the director of the best feature film for the past 15 years. The trophy features a 24-carat gold palm attached to a piece of cut crystal.
The firm is promoting its Red Carpet Collection 2013 at this year's festival, with a number of actresses sporting its gems.
The collection is "a world of unparalleled glamour and craftsmanship, where originality, creativity, and technical mastery are pushed to their ultimate limits," according to Chopard's Facebook page.
By coincidence, the theft occurred on the same day as the screening in Cannes of Sofia Coppola's "The Bling Ring," which stars Harry Potter actress Emma Watson as a member of a thieving group of teens who steal from the famous.
The movie isn't in competition but was selected to open the "Un Certain Regard" portion of the film festival.[van id=”us/2014/08/20/tsr-lemon-officer-threatens-protestors.cnn”]
(CNN) — An officer who pointed a semi-automatic assault rifle at a Ferguson, Missouri, protester and threatened to kill him — a tense episode caught on video and posted online — is off the job, at least for now.
The St. Louis County Police Department announced Wednesday that a police officer from St. Ann, Missouri, “has been relieved of duty and suspended indefinitely” over the incident.
“On Tuesday, August 19, 2014, shortly before midnight, an incident occurred wherein a St. Ann Police Officer pointed a semi-automatic assault rifle at a peaceful protestor after a verbal exchange. It was at this time a St. Louis County Police Sergeant walked over and immediately took action, forcing the officer to lower the weapon, and escorting him away from the area. The unified command strongly feel these actions are inappropriate and not indicative of the officers who have worked daily, to keep the peace. The St. Ann Police Officer involved in the incident has been relieved of duty and suspended indefinitely,” St. Louis County Police Department said in a statement.
St. Ann, like Ferguson, is a suburb of St. Louis.
This is not the first time unarmed protesters in Ferguson have accused police of pointing guns at them. CNN staffers have seen some such incidents first-hand that weren’t caught on tape.
Warning: The videos below contain graphic language and may not be suitable for all viewers.Many things drive me crazy about creationists but a major one is how they pretend to be great advocates of scientific inquiry and learning when in reality, those are the farthest things from their minds.
Consider Sen. Dennis Kruse of the Indiana legislature, who last year proposed a bill that would have mandated the teaching of “creation science” alongside evolution in public schools. Kruse’s bill passed the state Senate but faltered in the House of Representatives after some lawmakers, in a rare bout with lucidity, pointed out that it was blatantly unconstitutional and would get the state sued back into the Stone Age. (That probably didn’t bother creationists, since they don’t believe there was a Stone Age.)
Kruse is back with a new proposal, a bill that he says will promote critical inquiry in the classroom. The Indianapolis Star reported that Kruse described the bill like this: “If a student thinks something isn’t true, then they can question the teacher and the teacher would have to come up with some kind of research to support that what they are teaching is true or not true.”
At first glance, that sounds harmless. After all, we want to encourage youngsters to be inquisitive in the classroom. But Micah Clark, executive director of American Family Association of Indiana, blew the lid off what’s really going on here, telling the Star that he interprets the bill as a form of protection for teachers who want to discuss creationism and intelligent design.
Bills like this have popped up in other states recently. They are designed to give legal protection to public school science teachers – and unfortunately there are some of them out there – who want to elevate biblical fundamentalism over science in the classroom. Additionally, these measures are a vehicle for students to disrupt classroom instruction about evolution and instill doubt about the validity of that concept.
A quick-witted science teacher would know how to handle a challenge like this in the classroom. (Handing a dissenting student a copy of On The Origin of Species would be a good start.) But Kruse’s law doesn’t seek to help good teachers. It is designed to create the impression that evolution is somehow controversial or in doubt, and thus special laws are needed so that it can be challenged. The idea is to encourage teachers to water down such instruction or not offer it at all.
Unfortunately, the creationists have been pretty successful with these gambits. Their attempts to mandate instruction in creationism alongside evolution have failed, but they have managed to create a climate of intimidation and fear in many classrooms. In a country where public education is decentralized and often subject to local control, it can be difficult to get an accurate national snapshot, but we know from experience that some public schools do a lousy job teaching evolution.
Gerry Wheeler, executive director of the National Science Teachers Association, put it well: “It’s fine for a child to have religion; it’s fine for a child to believe whatever he or she wants to believe,” he said. “But within the science classroom, if we’re going to produce the strong workforce we need for this country, we have to stick to science and we have to stick to the evidence behind science.”
Wheeler is exactly right. Kruse’s proposal is a distraction from real education. It deserves to be rejected.
Thankfully, the bill may face tough sledding in the Indiana legislature. Rep. Bob Behning, (R-Indianapolis) chairs the House Education Committee and says he’s not inclined to bring it up.
“I don’t want to do something that’s going to burden schools to the point where they’re going to spend their lives trying to validate what is assumed to be true,” Behning said.
That’s good to know. But it’s also possible that the situation may change, so Americans United intends to remain on the alert. We have to watch the creationists constantly. Their strategies are, ironically, always evolving.
P.S. Americans United’s Legislative Department is expecting a raft of dangerous legislation in the states next year, touching on issues like religion in public schools, private school vouchers, government endorsement of religious symbols and others. Stay alert and keep informed.— It wouldn't take Chanti Carter-Rene long to figure out what to do with an extra $3,500 in her bank account. The 29-year-old would put down money for a security deposit on an apartment, instead of moving in with her father. But when the East Orange woman saw a wad of $100 bills sticking out of a Citibank envelope on a Morristown sidewalk last week, she just couldn't keep it. "The guilt would kill me," she said. "I'm gonna feel guilty whenever I see it." Two days before Christmas, Chris Gagnon, 50, withdrew $3,500 in cash from Citibank in downtown Morristown to pay off a bill. He slipped the envelope of money into his inside jacket pocket, without realizing it had a hole in it. But when he returned to his home in Mendham about 15 minutes later, he realized the money had disappeared, he said. “I’m in a panic," he recalled. "I'm calling the bank, I'm calling everyone.” But the bank told him they hadn't seen the money, and Gagnon was beginning to lose hope of getting it back. “I thought it was gone forever," said Gagnon. "I had literally written it off in my |
this kind of mistrust?” Clinton hemmed and hawed a little and then got right down to it. “I am not a natural politician like my husband or President Obama,” she said. “So I have a view that I just have to do the best I can, get the results I can, make a difference in people's lives, and hope that people see that I'm fighting for them.” In some respects, Clinton sold herself short here. It takes a certain kind of political genius to get yourself elected to a US Senate seat in a state where you’ve never lived. And it took real political skills to essentially clear the 2016 field of any rivals who’d be acceptable to the leadership of the Democratic Party. But down in the trenches with Sanders — and later in the trenches with Donald Trump, and eight years earlier in her run against Barack Obama — Clinton did show that she is genuinely not a very impressive performer on the stump. Her speeches aren’t inspiring like Obama’s or eerily intimate like Bill’s. If Democrats wanted to pick a nominee who would give better speeches, they could have. More broadly, if Democrats wanted to pick a nominee whose biography and skills were maximized to winning the 2016 election, they could have. The cliché is that you campaign in poetry — and Clinton is, frankly, a lousy poet.
The rest of the story was about how you govern in prose; building elite coalitions and thinking about political viability is very important. Having a lot of experience would be very helpful. And the thesis of the piece was that precisely because Clinton was in many ways such an uninspiring candidate — a consummate insider who never promised people that she would dramatically overhaul the political system or make all our fondest policy dreams come true — she was likely to end up surprising people on the upside.
Most presidents end up disappointing their supporters by being less transformative than they promised. We’re already talking about how Donald Trump is utterly failing to “drain the swamp” in Washington. But all Clinton ever really promised was to plug away on boring policy stuff — and she would have done that, taking advantage of a steadily improving economic situation and chipping away at a few big problems.
But of course that was all based on the idea that she would win. Instead she lost. It turns out that to have a chance to govern well you need to win elections first, and nominating candidates who are good at electioneering is an important part of the process.
Post-election takes have confused policies and candidates
Since Election Day, I’ve heard this point of view — that Clinton is relatively weak at electioneering that this explains a lot about why she lost the election — primarily from people who supported Bernie Sanders in the primary.
And that makes a certain amount of sense. Clinton’s supporters argued early in the primary that she was the more electable candidate, and this was an important part of several major liberal interest groups’ stated rationale for endorsing her early. About midway through the primary, Sanders’s supporters began mounting their own electability argument based on him faring better in head-to-head polling matchups. So arguing that Clinton was, in fact, a weak candidate rather than a strong one continues an argument that was important to Sanders supporters back in February and March.
Conversely, passionate Clinton supporters are feeling wounded and defensive and disinclined to hear anything bad about a candidate they truly admired.
All that said, on a forward-looking basis there is something confused about this.
If the big problem with Hillary Clinton’s campaign was that she was a veteran politician in a country that likes fresh faces, a Washington insider in a country that likes outsiders, and a subpar orator in a country that prizes charisma, then there’s no particular reason to think that Democrats need to revise their policy agenda in any particular way. They just need a standard-bearer who is ideologically similar to Clinton but better at electioneering and prudent enough to avoid doing buckraking speeches in the lead-up to a presidential campaign.
Not coincidentally, Barack Obama — who ran on a nearly identical agenda to that of Clinton — remains incredibly popular.
The Democratic Party narrowed the field way too much
Sanders supporters will, obviously, go to their graves believing that their candidate would have beaten Donald Trump. Given the narrowness of the result and the idiosyncratic nature of Clinton’s email troubles, they may be right. (But given the difficulties of selling a carbon tax and middle-class income tax hikes in the Midwest, they may also be wrong.)
But Democratic Party leaders — elected officials, but also major donors and interest groups heads and other people involved in party-affiliated work — ought to think harder about how and why the choices came to be so narrowly circumscribed.
Back in 2008, congressional leaders aware of Clinton’s flaws encouraged Barack Obama to challenge her in the primary. In the 2016 cycle, it was clear that Joe Biden was interested in running but nobody encouraged him. Nobody tried to push a longshot Latino contender into the field. Feminist organizations whipped support for Clinton rather than offering encouragement to other women who might have been interested in stepping forward. And when former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley did insist on running as a mainstream Democratic alternative to Clinton, he was immediately frozen out.
Not only did this not produce a particularly strong nominee, it even failed at the basic objective of avoiding a bitter, divisive primary. Elbowing other possible contenders out of the race was in part a display of Clinton’s genuine political savvy. As Vox’s Ezra Klein wrote way back in 2006, she’d have made an excellent leader of the Democratic Senate caucus, where the job is more about wrangling elite supporters than communicating with the mass public. And in fact she was a very effective junior senator, a classic case of a “workhorse” member of Congress who sweats the details and does the dull work of legislative coalition building, rather than the kind of “showhorse” who gives some great speeches but doesn’t make a big difference legislatively.
But other party leaders ought to take responsibility for their own actions as well. Especially when the already-wealthy Clinton insisted on doing paid corporate speaking gigs that her own staff regarded as ill-advised after stepping down as secretary of state, key leaders swallowed doubts when they should have been raising them.
Clinton’s biggest supporters and allies say that talk of a flawed candidate is misleading. She was, they say, in truth the victim of a relentlessly hostile media. I think this is fundamentally true and wrote about it frequently. But it was also knowable from a long way off. Jon Allen’s story on “Clinton Rules” reporting appeared in July of 2015, and Clinton loyalists have been complaining, with some justice, about Clinton’s rough treatment by the press for a decade or more.
But unfair as this may be to Hillary Clinton, practical politics isn’t about fairness, and media relations are a legitimate aspect of the craft of politics. Putting forward a standard-bearer who has a legendarily bad relationship with the press is a dubious tactical move for a political party. And to the extent that Democrats feel it did Clinton in, that should be further cause for introspection.
Micro-targeting has gone too far
The further I get from Election Day, the more struck I am by the extent to which the lingo of a certain kind of technical campaign operative has come to permeate a much broader realm of political discourse. Everyone who writes and thinks and talks about politics is now achingly familiar with mobilizing the base, with the gap between college educated and non-college whites, Latino turnout and black turnout, “millennials,” and all the rest.
There’s a time and a place for that, and obviously it would be ridiculous to suggest that campaigns should stop making demographically based models of the electorate.
But it’s also possible to take obsession with this kind of thing too far. In the key five Rust Belt states that Trump stole away from Obama’s coalition, he picked up a modest number of extra votes and Clinton simply lost a ton of Obama’s voters.
Those losses, in the end, cut across racial lines even though Trump had waged a campaign soaked in racial rhetoric and was powered to the GOP nomination in the first place largely by white racial resentment. Better candidates with stronger campaign messages and more favorable circumstances just tend to do better across the board.
“Nominate a black guy from Chicago next time” did not particularly solve any weaknesses revealed by John Kerry’s 2004 campaign, but it happened that a black guy from Chicago was very talented at casting core progressive aspirations in an appealing light pitched at a wide range of voters. Democrats are finally mustering some meaningful ethnic diversity in their Senate caucus as Cory Booker and Bob Menendez will be joined next year by Tammy Duckworth, Catherine Cortez Masto, and Kamala Harris. I suspect that, somewhat paradoxically, continuing to put forward candidates of color may be crucial to speaking more compellingly to white voters since they can speak credibly about a cross-racial politics without sounding like they are trying to sideline nonwhite people’s concerns.
But the proof of that theory will ultimately have to be in the pudding. The party needs less fear of primaries, less centralized control of House races from the DCCC, and overall more openness to the idea that it’s going to take a range of approaches for a diverse party to win in a diverse nation across a problematic political geography.
The good news for Democrats is that having an opponent to run against is less stressful. Either he does an okay job and gets reelected regardless of what you say (as four out of our last five presidents were) or he fails and you run against his failure. It frees you up to say what you really think. I know perfectly well why Clinton’s campaign thought it was smart to make ads that heavily focused on Donald Trump mocking Megyn Kelly and Serge Kovaleski. But I don’t for a minute think that’s why Clinton or anyone else who poured their blood, sweat, and tears into her campaign think a Trump White House will be disastrous for America.
When in doubt, you can do worse than saying what you really think. And as long as you’re at it, you probably want to elevate your most compelling and credible public-facing messengers to deliver it.
On the morning of Election Day, I thought President Clinton would end up pleasantly surprising a public that grudging accepted her as an alternate to a flagrantly unfit Trump — and I still think that’s true. In terms of the substantive work of presidenting, she was a very solid choice.
But you really do need to win the election first.The text message was sent in the aftermath of a parting of the ways, and it was meant as an apology. Eden Hazard had been receiving treatment for that infamous hip injury on the day José Mourinho’s second spell as Chelsea manager was curtailed back in December, the Belgian still absent a few days later as Stamford Bridge’s collective grief gave way to fury aimed at an underachieving team and a board whose patience had snapped. The buzzwords in the stands were “snake” and “rat”, echoed soundbites of the departed’s heightened paranoia over the last months of his tenure. Hazard was neither of those. Nor was he entirely blameless.
The word is not volunteered, but the suggestion is that text had Hazard admitting he felt ashamed of his own efforts. “I sent him the message to say I was sorry he had gone and … well … just that I was sorry,” says the Belgian. “We’d enjoyed all that success together last season, but this time round we hadn’t. I felt a little bit guilty because I’d been player of the year. I’d been one of the most decisive players, and this year I’d performed less well.
“I hadn’t been at the same level. So I sent that text to José and he came back to me, wishing me all the best for the future. For a team of champions to go through what we have this year even I can’t explain. Things have been better recently, but we’re still not winning games quite as we used to. No one can put his finger on what’s happened at Chelsea.”
We're still not winning games as we used to. No one can put his finger on what's happened
So much about the champions’ title defence has been baffling. The team’s form had flummoxed Mourinho as, too often, perennial winners were reduced to broken men. Hazard, refreshingly honest when he reflects on a campaign of anticlimax, came to personify their toils. The irrepressible force who had illuminated a title pursuit, breathing life into a flagging side as they staggered towards the finish line, has endured the first prolonged lull of a nine-year senior career. There have been niggling injuries and missed opportunities, fluffed penalties and shots cannoning back from the woodwork to leave even him smiling ruefully at just how brutally his luck had turned. His influence had diminished just as his team needed him most of all. For a player who prides himself on being a key part in a collective, his inability to live up to his billing has been a source of exasperation.
Social media timelines were littered with memes reminding followers what life had been like back on 3 May 2015 “when Hazard last scored for Chelsea”. The numbers, once a rolling tally of assists, goals and trophies, had become rather more sinister: 30 fruitless games, 273 days and 2,357 minutes stuck on his Chelsea tally of 49. Then, last Sunday, Darren Potter clumsily sent the 25-year-old sprawling in the MK Dons’ penalty area and Chelsea’s No10 stroked in the resultant spot-kick. His previous goal had claimed his club the Premier League title and prompted an outpouring of joyous relief after a plod of a run-in. At Stadium MK, where FA Cup progress had already felt assured, the visitors’ outfield players mobbed him in such a frenzy of delight that the celebrations told their own story.
Chelsea’s Guus Hiddink says door not closed for ‘perfect’ John Terry Read more
Hazard, his corner hopefully turned, can only offer theories as to why his form had stagnated at club level while he continued to thrive for Belgium. “I’d played some very good games, at Manchester United, at Tottenham Hotspur, but they’d lacked a goal. There’ve been times when I could have scored myself, but I’ve played a pass to a team-mate instead. It never became an obsession for me to score at all costs. I’ve always said that I’m not a big scorer, I’m a worker. But you can’t escape you’ve not scored and it’s already January, so last Sunday was a bit of a relief.
“I don’t think my morale was down, but it plays on your mind a bit. Everything went so well in the past. This year, not so much. But you have to tell yourself that football is like that. I’ve had more ups than downs in my career. All you can do is keep working. You still have to take enjoyment out of what you’re doing and things will turn, and my smile has always been there. In good moments and bad. I’m somebody who can laugh even at myself. That happens now and again, when I’ve made a mess of really simple things. I say to the other guys in the dressing-room: ‘Bloody hell, did you see what I did then?’”
Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eden Hazard has remained in contact with Didier Drogba, a ‘big brother’ figure who has helped raise his spirits. Photograph: Adrian Dennis/AFP/Getty Images
Didier Drogba, who had become a mentor last season when the pair were club-mates, was readily available to offer advice and support from his new base in Montreal. “He’s always backed me,” says Hazard. “I’m not sure whether he’d ever experienced periods like that in his career, but I’ve always considered him a bit like a big brother. He’s there for me, whether it’s a text message or a phone call, and he’s helped raise my spirits. But I’ve never doubted myself.
“This is the first time this has happened to me, but it was always going to happen at some stage. You have to learn from it. I’m a human being, not a machine. I’ve been a professional since I was 16, so maybe that has had an influence too.” By the time Hazard turned 25 last month he had already played 446 senior games for clubs and country. Lionel Messi had 431 to his name at that age, and Cristiano Ronaldo 407. When the Belgian limped off with a groin strain at Crystal Palace four days before his birthday, he had mustered 186 appearances in three years. His workload has been onerous.
There is also the theory that the accolades thrust upon him for last year’s blistering performances had weighed unexpectedly heavily and made him even more of a marked man, if that was possible for the Premier League’s most fouled player of 2014–15. “But pressure has been there for five years because I’m always the man people look at. Maybe this season a bit more than last year, given last season was exceptional. We knew Chelsea would be the team to beat this year. That made life harder, but it doesn’t explain everything. Personally, it’s nice to have a good season, but to follow it up again is even better still.
I've always considered Drogba like a big brother. He's there for me … he's helped raise my spirirts
“This is my fourth year in English football so, maybe, a spell like this was always on the cards. Maybe I should have seen it coming. It’s been an accumulation of things: a bit of tiredness, a bit of this, a bit of that. I’m not looking for excuses. And it’s been an important period in my development. I’ve learned from it. Like with the injuries. I’ve been used to the kicks, they’re normal. I know how to protect myself. I’ve learned that over the years, but I’d hardly experienced this number of little injuries before, and it’s about learning if you are rushing back too early, or if you’re properly fit and ready to come back.”
The first of those knocks, which saw him floored in stoppage time on the campaign’s opening day against Swansea, is not up for discussion given the on-going legal proceedings around Dr Eva Carneiro and her obligation to enter the field of play to treat the stricken player. Yet the drip-feed of niggles since has clearly blunted Hazard’s impact, with events at Leicester City in what proved to be Mourinho’s last match in charge casting a shadow. It was Jamie Vardy who kicked the Chelsea player on his hip, the Belgian eventually retreating from the turf and down the tunnel for treatment while his manager, a man sensing mutiny all around by then, chuntered on the touchline. The Portuguese subsequently suggested the player “must have a serious injury” which, in the context of all that “palpable discord” at the time, was perceived as Mourinho casting doubt on commitment.
Hazard is well aware of the theories, but treats them with the disdain they merit. “They were ridiculous,” he says. “Actually, if you look at what happened it wasn’t a particularly hefty kick, but my body was tired. In that situation it only takes a little kick to put you out, and it’s not normal to take one on the hip. I tried to come back on to the pitch, but with my first sprint I knew I couldn’t move properly. If I can’t play at 100%, I give up my place to someone who can. The pain was there for a few days afterwards and I couldn’t play.” Did Mourinho doubt that? “No, I don’t think so. But you’ll have to ask him.”
The impression is that Hazard retains a deep respect for the man who harnessed the work ethic in his game, and under whom he celebrated a second domestic championship to add to the Ligue 1 title claimed with Lille in 2011. The interim manager, Guus Hiddink, – “He has given us a bit more freedom and the confidence to raise our game” – has been denied the Belgian’s regular involvement as yet, but fitness and, judging by the 17-minute cameo at Watford in midweek, confidence have now been restored. Manchester United will be braced for an awkward afternoon in south-west London on Sunday even if Chelsea’s hopes of finishing in the top four may already be dashed.
Radamel Falcao left out of Chelsea’s Champions League squad Read more
The prospect of missing out on the Champions League next term would normally be abhorrent, particularly for a player whose decision to reject other suitors and move to Stamford Bridge four years ago was sealed when Roberto di Matteo’s sixth-placed side claimed the trophy in Munich and guaranteed further involvement. But, when you languish 16 points off the top four with 14 games to play, reality kicks in. So could he cope with a season-long absence from the competition now? “When you’re used to playing every year in the Champions League, then yes. Even if missing out for a year, for for the club, would be difficult. Financially.
“Playing in the Champions League was important to me. So, if Chelsea hadn’t won it, I doubt I would have signed. But, this year, we’ll be where we deserve to be. If we’re not in the Champions League, we’ll not have deserved to be in it. We’ll not have done enough to make the top four. You can eat away at 10 or 11 points very quickly, but it’s easier if you still have 30 matches to play. We only have 14 so I think the Premier League is finished. So we’ll have to win [the European Cup] to qualify. Why not? Look at 2012. That’s why I always say we have to target the Champions League.”
Paris Saint-Germain, for the third year in succession, await in the knockout phase a week on Tuesday. Laurent Blanc’s side are 24 points clear at the top of Ligue 1 and enjoying weekly domestic dominance that might normally dull their edge. “But, because they’ve already nearly won the French title, their only remaining objective is the Champions League. They’re one of the best teams in the world, though Chelsea are on a different level to some of the teams they play in France and our ambition remains to win the Champions League. It will be a tight tie, like it was the last two years.”
It is one Hazard intends to influence. A quiet, unassuming figure off the pitch – happiest spending time with his three boys at the family home in sleepy Cobham than seeking out the bright lights of London, watching his beloved New York Knicks from afar or playing the dice game Yahtzee with César Azpilicueta on away trips – wants to remind the world that he can be an inspiration on it.
“I’ve never been one to deliver speeches in the dressing room, like a John Terry, Frank Lampard or Drogba, but I’ve always tried to lead in my own way on the field: demanding the ball, trying to make a difference. The day I’m 100% again, I’m convinced Chelsea will perform better too. It’s up to me to raise my level again.”If you’re in your 20s and trying to lose weight, new research may inspire you to get started: American scientists say that people who are overweight in their 20s and become obese later in life are three times more likely to develop esophagus and stomach cancer.
It could be because of decades of acid reflux problems, heartburn and tampering with hormones as youth put on excess weight. The findings come out of the U.S. National Cancer Institute – it’s the latest findings pointing to obesity as a key factor in cancer risk.
READ MORE: There’s ‘strong evidence’ obesity is tied to 11 types of cancer, study warns
“Carrying excess weight can trigger long-term reflux problems and heartburn that can lead to cancer. It can also change the levels of sex hormones, such as estrogen and testosterone, cause levels of insulin to rise, and lead to inflammation, all of which are factors that have been associated with increased cancer risk,” the study’s lead author, Dr. Jessica Petrick, said. “The study highlights how weight gain over the course of our lives can increase the risk of developing these two cancer types, both of which are factors that have extremely poor survival,” Petrick warned.
Petrick came to her conclusions after scouring the health data of more than 400,000 people. She considered their height and weight at ages 20, 50, and at the time they initially joined the study. Her team followed up with the study participants to see which people developed cancer as the years went on.
Turns out, people who initially reported being overweight at age 20 were around 60 to 80 per cent more likely to develop these cancers in later life compared to their peers who kept a healthy weight as the decades went on.
People who put on more than 20 kilograms – or 44 pounds – in adulthood were also twice as likely to develop esophageal cancer compared to people whose weight didn’t fluctuate.
READ MORE: Alcohol ‘directly causes’ seven forms of cancer, scientist suggests
Medical literature has been inundated in the past few years with research on how weight gain increases the risk of many chronic diseases from cancer to heart disease, Type 2 diabetes and even dementia.
Earlier this month, Imperial College London doctors out of the U.K. warned that there is “strong evidence” that obesity is linked to 11 different cancers.
The association between excess body weight and the disease is “significant,” they suggested.
The 11 cancers tied to obesity are:
Colon (in men)
Rectal (in men)
Pancreatic
Ovary
Kidney
Endometrium
Postmenopausal breast cancer (when HRT – or hormone replacement therapy wasn’t used)
Biliary tract
Multiple myeloma
Esophageal
Bone marrow
READ MORE: Trying to lose weight? Study links excess weight, obesity to at least 8 cancers
In that case, the study was a review, combing over 204 studies from 49 publications that looked at obesity measurements, from body mass index to waist circumference, and 36 different types of cancer.
Last August, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) warned that excess weight is tied to at least eight types of cancer:
Stomach
Liver
Gall bladder
Pancreas
Ovary
Thyroid
Blood (multiple myeloma)
Meningioma (a type of brain tumour)
READ MORE: Bacon, booze and obesity are increasing your risk of stomach cancer, study warns
“The burden of cancer due to being overweight or obese is more extensive than what has been assumed. Many of the newly identified cancers linked to excess weight haven’t been on people’s radar,” Dr. Graham Colditz, a Washington University School of Medicine professor and chair of the IARC’s working group, said.
The latest findings have global reach: an estimated 640 million adults and 110 million children are categorized as obese. In Canada, one in four Canadian adults is clinically obese, according to the Canadian Obesity Network.
There are about 14 million obese or overweight adults in the country, along with another 500,000 kids grappling with weight gain, according to Statistics Canada.
Read the National Cancer Institute’s latest findings in the British Journal of Cancer.
carmen.chai@globalnews.ca
Follow @Carmen_ChaiThe Commission des Sciences et des Arts (Commission of the Sciences and Arts) was a French scientific and artistic institute. Established on 16 March 1798, it consisted of 167 members, of which all but 16 joined Napoleon Bonaparte's conquest of Egypt and produced the Description de l'Égypte. More than half were engineers and technicians, including 21 mathematicians, 3 astronomers, 17 civil engineers, 13 naturalists and mining engineers, geographers, 3 gunpowder engineers, 4 architects, 8 artists, 10 mechanical artists, 1 sculptor, 15 interpreters, 10 men of letters, 22 printers in Latin, Greek and Arabic characters. Bonaparte organised his scientific 'corps' like an army, dividing its members into 5 categories and assigning to each member a military rank and a defined military role (supply, billeting) beyond his scientific function.
Members [ edit ]
Some members - like Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Monge, or Vivant Denon - are universally remembered but most have been all but forgotten. Some became members of the Institut d'Egypte.Yuki Asuna from the anime Sword Art Online is one fantastic character, being able to battle against any and all beasts and goblins within the world they live in. She began her story when she bet Kirito, she climbed the ranks and became one of the strongest members of Sword Art Online, able to climb floors alongside Kirito. This magnificent fan art shows her other side, her more beautiful side.
This featured image was actually created by CGlas who I actually met during one of his Twitch Streams while he was working on a Hinata and Mirajane fan art. I think you might actually like him, so check him out, he has some awesome work based of other anime as well as League of Legends champions. If you like this work, be sure to share this artwork.Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, told Breitbart News that Attorney General Eric Holder’s claims that amnesty for illegal immigrants is a civil rights issue “profoundly ahistorical.”
“If you take a look at the basis of the civil rights movement, it was to have blacks treated in all respects the same as whites or everybody else,” Kirsanow (pictured) said in a phone interview. “What amnesty is doing is setting aside a special class of individuals who are going to put forward and treated more favorably than others. In other words, they’ve already broken the law and are being given amnesty.
“In terms of immigration policy… it would severely affect the rights of blacks generally and all low-income Americans. What it is going to do is displace those individuals from the labor market.”
The U.S. Civil Rights Commission, Kirsanow said, has held extensive hearings in recent years detailing how amnesty would economically impact American workers, especially the black community.
“We had a hearing before the Civil Rights Commission on the effects of illegal immigration on black employment levels, both wage levels and unemployment rates,” Kirsanow said. “What we had were a number of experts from just about every sphere you can think of: business, academia and immigration experts in general. They spanned the ideological spectrum. We had individuals from the far left, individuals in the middle, individuals on the right.
“They disagreed in some respects about certain policy prescriptions but they were unanimous in their conclusion, backed by copious amounts of data,” he recalled, “that illegal immigration had a deleterious effect on the wage and employment levels of black Americans. And it’s not a small effect. It’s a clearly sizable effect.”
Kirsanow and some of his fellow U.S. Commission on Civil Rights members have pushed for members of Congress and key political figures in the national immigration debate like President Barack Obama himself to address these issues, but they have ignored the calls thus far.
“What’s interesting is those who have described themselves as the champions of civil rights are doing enormous damage to the ranks of black Americans by supporting and shepherding through comprehensive immigration reform that does nothing to control the borders, that grants amnesty and is going to create a legal population of individuals who are going to undercut the employment and wage prospects for low income Americans, generally, and specifically black Americans and more specifically black males,” he asserted.
Kirsanow questions who the lawmakers in Washington, D.C., on both sides of the political aisle are really representing, given that they have not substantively discussed the issue in their legislative deliberations. “I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee back in April on immigration reform on the same thing that we’re talking about right now,” he stated. “What was amazing is the number of senators who were either cavalier about it or they gave grudging acknowledgment to the fact that ‘yeah, there’s a possibility that there might be some dislocation to American workers as a result of illegal immigration’ and then just kind of moved on.
“The question I have is: Who do they represent? They are United States Senators. They represent Americans, presumably. Yet, what they’re proposing is they’re going to have a decided negative effect on Americans. What reason? What? Who do they represent? Do they represent illegal immigrants? Or do they represent lawful Americans? And that’s a question that needs to be posed to them.”
Kirsanow was originally one of only three witnesses who were going to be called to testify on the immigration situation before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He; GOP establishment figure Doug Holtz-Eakin of American Action Forum (AAF), a group advocating in favor of amnesty; and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano were going to be the only ones who testified were it not for public outcry about the rushed process.
Originally, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT) and Senate Democratic Party leadership were not even going to call any hearings. “On a matter this large, it is an insult to the American people that only three people were going to testify regardless of how knowledgeable they may be about the subject matter,” Kirsanow said. “This is such a complex matter that they needed perspectives from so many different places. What we had was a bill that was gigantic. It was almost the size of Obamacare and yet it was released barely 36 hours before our testimony.
“In other words, we were testifying in an information vacuum on a momentous piece of legislation. Only after there was a bit of hue and cry did Senate leadership understand that they needed to open up the testimony to more witnesses.”
Kirsanow and others members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission have written letters on this matter to President Obama and to Congressional Black Caucus chairwoman Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-OH), among other lawmakers, and they have received no response. Similarly, advocates opposed to amnesty like Leah Durant have written letters to members like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), the chairman of the House Budget Committee, raising these same concerns–which have gone ignored, as well.
Kirsanow said that while there are likely a number of reasons why members of the Congressional Black Caucus have ignored this real threat to their constituents, he thinks the most prevailing is that President Barack Obama, America’s first black president, is pushing the policy so they have no ability to stand up to him politically.
“I have asked them why they are not standing up for the needs of their constituents,” Kirsanow said. “We’ve sent these letters to Marcia Fudge. We’ve sent them to members of the Congressional Black Caucus. Radio silence. Complete radio silence.”
“I wish reporters asked members of the Congressional Black Caucus what the heck they’re thinking,” he said. “They’ve not been challenged on this. One of the dynamics at play is the fact that we have the first black president who is in support of this. If he is in support of it, a lot of black Americans will reasonably presume that he is looking out for their best interests. So, the Congressional Black Caucus can use that as cover.
“If President Obama supports amnesty, and therefore 90 percent of the Congressional Black Caucus’ constituents will believe it’s in their best interests, those members of the Congressional Black Caucus are unlikely to be questioned by their constituents about whether it’s a good idea on that because they will have believed ‘Barack Obama looks out for my interests, it must be a good idea.'”
Kirsanow said the president is not sticking up for the black community and argued it might be because of special interests and potential future voter pools. “You know that old line, when you want to figure out why something is being done, follow the money? Well, in politics, you not only follow the money, but you follow the votes or potential votes,” he explained. “I think what a lot of sides see, both on the Republican side and the Democratic side, is this vast untapped pool of votes that they expect are going to materialize as a result of amnesty.
“Republicans don’t want to be seen as being anti-Hispanic, Democrats see this as a giant new constituency group and, so, what you’ve got I think, and I don’t know if this pertains to President Obama, but you’ve got a political class looking out for their interests. ‘I want more votes,’ as opposed to current interests of their constituents.
“I don’t necessarily want to ascribe that motive to them, but it’s as plausible and probably more rationale than anything else because I can’t figure out why it is representatives of the United States of America are doing something that is harmful to their constituents.”
While Kirsanow argues members of the political class in the black community like members of Congress and leaders of black groups like the NAACP and others do not stick up for their rank and file on this issue, he said he does get the impression many ordinary black citizens are aware of this threat to their economic well-being.
“A lot of folks do,” Kirsanow, who lives in inner-city Cleveland and used to serve as a member of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), said. “I was in Washington, D.C., and I also appear of black radio shows from time to time, and other radio shows, and what you get without question and what you used to get for quite some time was whenever the issue of illegal immigration came up, black callers were outraged because they feel the effects,” he declared.
“They see it with their own eyes. You get calls from people who have been displaced by illegal immigrants, people who can’t find jobs because they can’t compete against low wages offered to illegal immigrants and it’s fairly vigorous.”Build an embedded Linux distro from scratch
Before you start
Objectives
This tutorial shows you how to install Linux on a target system. Not a prebuilt Linux distribution, but your own, built from scratch. While the details of the procedure necessarily vary from one target to another, the same general principles apply.
The result of this tutorial (if you have a suitable target) is a functional Linux system you can get a shell prompt on.
About this tutorial
The tutorial begins with a discussion of cross-compilation issues, then discusses what the components of a Linux system are and how they are put together. Both the building and the installation and configuration of the target system are covered.
The specific target discussed, a Technologic Systems TS-7800, imposes its own default boot and bring-up behaviors; other systems will have other mechanics, and this tutorial does not go into great detail about every possible boot loader.
Prerequisites and system requirements
Developers who are interested in targeting embedded systems, or who just want to learn more about what Linux systems are like under the hood, will get the most out of this tutorial.
The host environment used is Ubuntu, but other systems work as well. Users are assumed to have basic familiarity with UNIX® or Linux system administration issues. The tutorial assumes root access to a host system.
This tutorial |
McCusker acknowledges that the Armdale Roundabout is unique.
"Armdale has up to three lanes in the circle and that's really not characteristic of a standard roundabout design," he said.
Traffic officials in the city have hired an expert on roundabouts to do a safety audit.
"To see if there is a pattern that can be addressed through minor changes to signage or line painting or the way that the approaches operate," said McCusker.
The cost of the safety audit is expected to be about $10,000.Don Mattingly is excited about his team. In fact, rather than enjoy his dwindling days off, he is jumping into work starting next week.
The Dodgers manager has a couple of stops on his itinerary. First, he's visiting Houston to spend some face time with outfielder Carl Crawford. Then, he's swinging by Arizona to catch the end of the Dodgers' mini-camp for 13 of their top minor-league prospects.
The Dodgers remain optimistic Crawford will be ready by Opening Day, about 10 months after he underwent ligament-replacement surgery on his left elbow. Mattingly said he has been checking in with Crawford periodically this winter via text message, but wanted to meet face-to-face before spring training gets underway Feb. 12.
"It's all positive, nothing negative," Mattingly said. "His throwing will probably be a little behind at first, but as I recall, he wasn't a guy who had a cannon to begin with. He can go get the ball and he's a good defender, but his defense isn't really built around having a good arm."
Mattingly will catch the tail end of next week's winter development mini-camp, which includes top pitching prospect Zack Lee and top position player prospects Joc Pederson and Yasiel Puig.In London, King Charles I is beheaded for treason on January 30, 1649.
Charles ascended to the English throne in 1625 following the death of his father, King James I. In the first year of his reign, Charles offended his Protestant subjects by marrying Henrietta Maria, a Catholic French princess. He later responded to political opposition to his rule by dissolving Parliament on several occasions and in 1629 decided to rule entirely without Parliament. In 1642, the bitter struggle between king and Parliament for supremacy led to the outbreak of the first English civil war.
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The Parliamentarians were led by Oliver Cromwell, whose formidable Ironsides force won an important victory against the king’s Royalist forces at Marston Moor in 1644 and at Naseby in 1645. As a leader of the New Model Army in the second English civil war, Cromwell helped repel the Royalist invasion of Scotland, and in 1646 Charles surrendered to a Scottish army. In 1648, Charles was forced to appear before a high court controlled by his enemies, where he was convicted of treason and sentenced to death. Early in the next year, he was beheaded.
The monarchy was abolished, and Cromwell assumed control of the new English Commonwealth. In 1658, Cromwell died and was succeeded by his eldest son, Richard, who was forced to flee to France in the next year with the restoration of the monarchy and the crowning of Charles II, the son of Charles I. Oliver Cromwell was posthumously convicted of treason, and his body was disinterred from its tomb in Westminster Abbey and hanged from the gallows at Tyburn.
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Nik Stauskas spent two seasons shining with the Michigan Wolverines, and now he will do his best to carry that momentum forward into the NBA after being selected eighth overall by the Sacramento Kings in the 2014 NBA draft.
The reigning Big Ten Player of the Year made a name for himself as a freshman member of Michigan's national runner-up squad by showcasing his three-point shooting ability. While that strength continued on in the 2013-14 season, Stauskas also flashed a more complete game in taking on more of a leadership role.
After Stauskas weighed in at 6'6" and 211 pounds at the predraft combine, per MLive.com, The Big Lead's Jason McIntyre felt Stauskas was making a case for himself to go in the draft lottery at that point:
Stauskas has the versatility to play either guard position, as he showed a knack for being a savvy distributor in dishing out 3.3 assists per contest as a sophomore along with an average of 17.5 points. He described his enviable skill set in a report by CSNPhilly.com's Dei Lynam on May 17:
I can be a guy who immediately stretches the floor and make shots. That is something I have always been able to do. But I think teams are going to be surprised when I have the ball in my hands, the plays that I can make for myself and others. I just feel I am a guy with a high IQ. I really like to make the right play out there.
Putting someone with Stauskas' length to run the point could create matchup problems in certain situations, and he is excellent at working off the ball and screens. Should he add just a bit more muscle to his frame, defending Stauskas will be difficult for the rest of the NBA in the years to come.
But defense has always been Stauskas' chief shortcoming, and it's a weakness that could be accentuated as he prepares to adjust to an even higher level of competition. The energy and sharpshooting he brings to the offensive end of the court is undeniable, but he lacks conviction as a perimeter defender.
It will take quite an effort to get that lacking part of his game up to par with the NBA, but Stauskas showed marked improvement as a sophomore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Thus, he appears to have the requisite work ethic to make the necessary adjustments. Although he possesses deceptive athleticism, Stauskas doesn't have the elite physical tools to make up for lacking defensive fundamentals and technique.
The immediate future for Stauskas in the Association should see him fill in for Sacramento as a strong bench contributor at the very least. Bringing in instant offense is something the Kings or any squad could always use, but Stauskas is well rounded enough to hold his own on the court. That suggests he could play a bigger role than that of an offensive spark, but he likely will have to prove his worth as an NBA-caliber defender to become a surefire starter.
Sacramento is getting a player whose passion for the game is evident, and Stauskas should thrive, with the upside to become a borderline All-Star.Recently, a WWII-era B-17G bomber (a restoration effort of The Liberty Foundation) visited Rocky Mountain Metropolitan Airport in Broomfield, Colorado. I wasn't aware of the visit until I was doing yardwork and heard the deep rumble of four Wright Cyclone engines over the lawnmower. I saw the shiny aluminum bomber as it flew over my house and a quick Google search told me that the aircraft was on display - and flying paying passengers - ten minutes away. I dropped everything and headed over there for the full afternoon and then again early the next morning with my camera. The B-17G is such an iconic aircraft: streamlined, shiny, bristling with defensive weapons, and able to take a lot of damage and keep flying. The history of the aircraft and the stories of the men who served aboard them are fascinating.
I was pretty motivated to make photographs of the aircraft that were unique and captivating. In retrospect, I wish I would have brought along some of my old film cameras to photograph this airplane - some are older than this aircraft! I hope you enjoy these.
[Some of these images (and more) will be made available for sale shortly on this web site and at The Walnut Gallery. Some of the proceeds for any sales of these photographs will be donated to The Liberty Foundation to support the further maintenance and operation of this aircraft.]Texan musicians sing about their home state more than musicians from pretty much anywhere else, perhaps excepting Scotland and Ireland. Seriously. Texas is one of those rare places where teary-eyed folks will emote in song about how they wished they were back home in Texas, even if they are, in fact, smack-dab between the Red and Rio Grande.
Looking through our iTunes and reflecting back on a life in music, I was able to populate a Google map with about a hundred songs about specific places in Texas.
That's aside from songs that just mention Texas, of which there are so many we chose to ignore them. Besides, what exactly is meant when someone sings about a place so vast and varied as Texas? Port Arthur refineries of mile-high west Texas mountains? Arid big-sky Panhandle flatlands or whispering East Texas pines?
At any rate, after exhausting our own catalogue and memory bank, net and library research and Facebook crowd-sourcing led us to many, many more of the types of songs we were looking for: to wit, tunes about specific towns, buildings, rivers, streets, specific geographical regions and the like.
Then we Google-mapped them as close as we could to their sources, and now, though there are hundreds mapped already, we know that many, many more are still out there.
So feel free to add your favorites in the comments, and let's make traveling Texas more musically specific for everyone! And check back from time to time for new additions and facts about and editorial opinions on these tunes.
Click on over to the map, and happy trails!Apple Inc.'s agreement with iPhone developers contains several "troubling" clauses that paint the company as a "jealous and arbitrary feudal lord," the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said yesterday.
The nonprofit digital rights advocacy group on Tuesday published a January 2010 version of the iPhone Developer License Agreement obtained from NASA through a Freedom of Information Act request.
"It's only because Apple still 'owns' the customer, long after each iPhone (and soon, iPad) is sold, that it is able to push these contractual terms on the entire universe of software developers for the platform," said Fred von Lohmann, an EFF senior staff attorney, in a message on the organization's site that accompanied the license.
The EFF has criticized Apple before for the strict control it maintains over the iPhone's hardware and the software it allows on the smartphone. Last year, for example, the group blasted Apple for claiming that "jailbreaking" an iPhone was illegal. The term jailbreaking refers to modifying an iPhone so that unauthorized software can be installed. The EFF has asked the U.S. Copyright Office to rule that installing non-Apple software on an iPhone is not a violation of copyright laws; Apple has asked the agency to deny the request.
Apple can call the shots, including inserting "troubling" sections in the developer license, because of its control over all aspects of the iPhone -- and the soon-to-be-released iPad, which will use the same software distribution model -- said von Lohmann.
The EFF questioned a number of the sections in the agreement, starting with the secrecy Apple demands of developers. The contract prohibits "public statements regarding this Agreement, its terms and conditions, or the relationship of the parties without Apple's express prior written approval, which may be withheld at Apple's discretion."
Von Lohmann called that clause "particularly strange" because the license agreement itself is not confidential as defined by Apple. "So the terms are not confidential, but developers are contractually forbidden from speaking 'publicly' about them," he said.
The license also bars developers from distributing software created with the iPhone SDK, or software developer kit, via any avenue other than the App Store; bans them from jailbreaking an iPhone or helping others do so; and lets Apple yank a program from the App Store at any time.
"Apple may cease distribution of Your Licensed Application(s) and/or Licensed Application Information or revoke the digital certificate of any of Your Applications at any time," the agreement states.
Apple also can be as arbitrary as it wants in deciding what goes into the App Store, a charge developers have leveled at the company. "Apple may, in its sole discretion... reject Your Application for distribution for any reason, even if Your Application meets the Documentation and Program Requirements," reads the contract.
"If Apple's mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition than the PC era that came before," von Lohmann argued. "If Apple wants to be a real leader, it should be fostering innovation and competition, rather than acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord. Developers should demand better terms, and customers who love their iPhones should back them."
Apple did not respond to a request for comment late Tuesday.
The license agreement can be downloaded from the EFF Web site (download PDF).
Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news for Computerworld. Follow Gregg on Twitter at @gkeizer or subscribe to Gregg's RSS feed. His e-mail address is gkeizer@ix.netcom.com.Some luck of the Irish was bestowed on Irish Eyes Pub and Restaurant and Angler’s Marina in Lewes, Aug. 17, when a helicopter hovered over the gravel parking lot dropping cash.
Irish Eyes server Tina Chaippini said she heard the helicopter getting closer and worried it might crash into the parking lot. “And then I saw people running,” she said.
Chaippini said people were running towards the helicopter and returning with fistfuls of money.
Server Billy Anderson said it was a busy Saturday afternoon, and he suddenly noticed customers pointing at the sky. “I’m hearing, ‘Crash, crash.’ What they’re saying is, ‘Cash, cash,’” Anderson said.
He said people took off running toward the marina. “A helicopter swooped down and literally threw cash,” he said.
Anderson said everyone who came back with money had $20 and $50 bills.
Irish Eyes bar-back Anthony Guzzetti said he sprinted for the cash with about 50 other people. “I was like, ‘Is this happening?’” he said. “It was so weird.”
Guzzetti said he collected about $100. He also said he saw people swimming in the Lewes Rehoboth Canal to grab bills that had landed in the water.
Irish Eyes Manager Kara Miele said she was upstairs when she saw the helicopter swoop down; she said she thought it was planning to land. “It was just getting lower and lower and circling and circling, and then it started dropping money,” she said.
Miele said she picked up $170.
Del Walsh, son of Angler’s Marina owner James B. Walsh, said Leonard Maull was behind the stunt. Maull, who died about a year ago, owned a home in Lewes and operated Henlopen Bait and Tackle on Savannah Road.
“I’ve known him my whole life,” Walsh said.
Maull's trustee, Rehoboth Beach certified public accountant Bill Berry, said Maull left the request in his trust.
According to Berry, Maull ordered $10,000 in equal denominations of $5, $10, $20 and $50 bills be dropped from an airplane flying over the marina one year after his death on a Saturday during the summer.
"It was his money, and I figured he could do what he wanted to do with it," Berry said.
Walsh said Maull docked his own boat at Angler’s and visited the marina at least once a day. He said he does not know what motivated Maull to include the request in his will. “I would’ve never thought Leonard would do anything like this,” he said.
Walsh, who found $40 in the nearby marsh Aug. 18, said there is still money to be found. “If you can get to it, there’s cash in those woods,” he said.
“The craziest thing I ever saw,” said Irish Eyes bartender Jon Siddons. “Money was floating everywhere.” Siddons said the Pirates of Lewes Expedition had docked shortly before the helicopter showed up. “A couple little kids got a couple hundred dollars,” he said.
Food-runner Mark Tappan said, “I was eating chicken wings and watching money fall from the clouds.”
(Editor's note: This version replaces comments by a acquaintance of Leonard Maull with those of an accountant who is trustee for Maull.)2oth Century Fox is apologizing in the wake of wide criticism over an outdoor ad for X-Men: Apocalypse that depicted a violent act against a woman. The ad, which appeared in Los Angeles and other big cities like New York, showed the movie’s villain Apocalypse grabbing Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) by the throat. It was a bit shocking to see — so much so that actress Rose McGowan took to social media to ask others to also raise their voices against this kind of violent imagery against women being shown publicly.
In a statement, Fox said: “In our enthusiasm to show the villainy of the character Apocalypse, we didn’t immediately recognize the upsetting connotation of this image in print form. Once we realized how insensitive it was, we quickly took steps to remove those materials. We apologize for our actions and would never condone violence against women.“
The ad was taken down after the uproar, but the image of a woman being choked was said to have been approved by a top female executive at Fox before it went out. (So much for sensitivity to women’s issues.)
McGowan also garnered criticism for speaking up but wrote recently on her Facebook page: “Someone has to, may as well be me. My favorite thing is when someone says I’m not qualified to speak on such things. If I’m not, who is? I toiled in the bowels of Hollywood since age 15. If I’m not qualified, who is? F*ck em, f*ck em hard.”
The flap is reminiscent of the 2014 outdoor campaign for FX’s The Strain, which used an equally controversial image (albeit offensive for another reason): a graphic of a worm crawling out of a human eye. That also was pulled in some locations — but because it was grossing people out. Showrunner Carlton Cruse said at the time he saw nothing wrong with putting that kind of imagery into the public, saying, “I think that the ad was bold and imaginative and clearly not for everyone.” Which then begged the question of why push the image out publicly for everyone to see?Divide your life up into chapters. Usually when I hear sad sacks of shit whine about how much their life sucks, they’ll say something like “I’ve always been an introvert or I’ve always been in bad shape, etc…” One way to snap out of that is to pick some arbitrary point and make that a “new chapter” in your life. David Brooks of the New York Times did an informal survey of old people to determine what made people happy and/or sad, and he noticed that one of the differences between happy and sad people was that sad people saw their life as one unbroken thing and happy people saw their life as different “chapters.” What I like to do is pick some arbitrary date (my birthday, the New Year, coming back from a vacation, etc…) and I decide that on that day a new “chapter” in my life will start. I rearrange my apartment, redecorate, delete some negative people out of my phone, sacrifice a small animal, immerse myself in holy water, and then start a afresh!
Engage in “practices.” Basing his work on Aristotle, the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre basically has said that the key to happiness is engaging in “practices.” A practice is basically an activity with standards of success that you can get better at. Basketball and chess, (or even PUA), are practices. Watching TV and masturbating are not practices. Success in practices boosts your confidence because you overcame some challenges and also because now you have some skills you previously didn’t have. True happiness is when you engage in a practice for its internal reward (i.e., those specific to the practice) rather than external rewards (fame, money, etc…). Basically, getting immersed in a practice teaches you to become outcome independent.
Meditate – When I say meditate, I don’t necessarily mean Buddhist meditation. By “meditate” I mean engage in some kind of activity (preferably a practice) that requires all of your thoughts and emotions and forces you to completely focus on one thing. It’s hard to find anything truly meditative, but once you do it, you feel great because it flushes out all the other worries and anxieties you have and makes you feel like you have purpose and confidence. If you’re ever in the pits of oneitis (or any kind of depression), meditation is basically your only way out.
Do something creative. Creativity is a great release for your emotions and girls love guys that do anything artistic (as long as you don’t become a pretentious douche about it). The main reason I would guess that people don’t do something creative, even though everybody wants to, is that they are afraid they will suck. Well, who cares? You are doing it for yourself – not for anybody else. Just as your supposed to be outcome independent with girls, be outcome independent with your art. Just work on it by yourself and don’t show anybody until you are proud of it. I’m a lawyer who also does art on the side and I can honestly tell you that girls are much more interested in my art than my job (and most of them end up never even seeing my art anyway unless we get very close). Also, please keep in mind that art is more about hard work than talent. Most of you guys are dudes in your early 20s. Think about it: if you spent a few hours a week working on your art after 3-4 years you will be legitimately good!
Put one foot in front of the other. Here is my problem with self improvement and it probably applies to a lot of other people: I see a movie or read a thing on the internet that gets me motivated and pumped to do something and then when I actually start doing it I run into a snag or I realize its harder than I thought it would be and I lose my momentum. The solution to this issue is to just take each step at a time and realize its going to be a long process. Here is where outcome independence comes into play again – you can’t see a bodybuilder in a magazine or a famous guitarist and expect to become like them overnight. Everybody has different challenges and a different timeline. Don’t freak yourself out if you’re not on “pace” to meet your goals: remember: everybody is different and you can’t make it to the top of the mountain without going over every rock. One of the nice things about self improvement is that there are no requirements to achieve anything by any date, so you can do it all on your own pace.
Practice being nice to random people. In fact, I would suggest this: randomly message 5 girls you know on facebook and just say something nice: “Hey I haven’t talked to you in a while. Just saying hi! Hope everything is well for you!” No ulterior motive, no weirdness, just a nice introduction. Also, resist the temptation to ask them to hang out if they respond. This is just to build your confidence as a genuinely NICE PERSON. There is nothing more irresistible to women than a guy who is just seriously honestly nice with no ulterior motives whatsoever. 99% of “nice guys” are not like that at all – everybody can tell that they want something.
Read some books on spirituality. I know reddit hates religion/spirituality, but the world is a crazy fucked up place and by engaging in PUA you’re going to be putting your emotions (BTW, the strongest emotions human beings have) through the ringer. You need some kind of spirituality to ground yourself, be it meditation, prayer, or just philosophical contemplation. Also, you need to have some spiritual knowledge because that is a great topic to discuss with girls.
Get interested in some particular aspect of art or literature. For example, 19th century Russian literature is fucking amazing and I would recommend it to anybody. I have personally found that focusing on one particular era is more satisfying and enriching than reading a bunch of random shit from all over the place. Also, I know this sounds douchey and pretentious, but it is more impressive to girls to know about one particular thing in depth rather than a bunch of random shit in a shallow way. There is nothing more embarrassing than bringing up Shakespeare in a conversation and then running out of shit to say about him.
AdvertisementsGive this pig a pardon!
A 180-pound, domesticated porker named Wilbur is set to be seized by the city and “disposed of” on Tuesday — despite being an emotional support animal for a family on Staten Island, his owner says.
“We need Wilbur now more than ever,” Cristy Matteo, 46, of Great Kills, told The Post on Monday night.
Her father, Thomas Matteo, 76, recently found out that he has cancer again — and the only way he’s been able to deal with the stress and anxiety of treatment, she says, is by spending time with Wilbur.
“He’s a very loving, compassionate pet,” Matteo said of the Staten Island swine. “I’m just praying the mayor will give him a pardon, or at least a stay or something like that. It would devastate me and break our hearts if we lost him.”
According to Matteo, the city has ordered her to get rid of Wilbur by midnight on Jan. 31. If she doesn’t, they told her they would “seize him and dispose of him the way they want.”
“He’s domesticated,” Matteo said of Wilbur, who is officially listed as an ESA on the National Service Animal Registry. “He doesn’t know how to be outside. He’s been brought up in a house his whole life.”
Owning pigs is illegal under New York City law, and it was reportedly the Department of Health that ordered Wilbur’s removal. The only way he can be saved, Matteo said, is if Mayor Bill de Blasio personally steps in and does something.
“I’m still praying,” she explained.
Matteo told The Post that if she could speak to the mayor herself, she would tell him of all the times Wilbur has helped her and her dad get through things emotionally, since coming into their lives five years ago.
“I would just ask him for some compassion for me and my father and to allow him to stay,” she said. “To stay where he belongs — in my home.”
Describing the situation as “heartbreaking,” Matteo recalled how she spent the past several months forming petitions and getting help from local politicians, to no avail.
“I’ve had every congressman and every senator write me letters,” she said. “In fact, I even got a letter from my dad’s oncologist, saying Wilbur had provided so much happiness for him, that he was able to take less anxiety medication for the radiation.”
One of the ways Wilbur helps out most, Matteo said, was in the way he greets her father when he returns home from treatment.
“The minute my dad walks through the door, Wilbur will go lay down in front of his chair, before he can even sit down,” she explained. “He’ll roll over and just be laying there, waiting for him to scratch his belly. That alone brings his stress levels down tremendously.”
Since being told to get rid of Wilbur, Matteo has teamed up with Sen. Tony Avella, a city mayoral candidate, to propose a new law legalizing the ownership of pigs under 200 pounds.
“Even after this, regardless of the outcome, I am going to help Avella because he’s trying to change the law,” Matteo said. “I am going to continue to fight this.”FORMER Top Gear star Richard Hammond has broken his silence after surviving a horrific car accident in the Swiss mountains.
Hammond, 47, was filming his Amazon TV show The Grand Tour when his electric supercar left a mountain road in St Gallen in northeastern Switzerland and burst into flames.
He was airlifted to hospital but tests showed he had escaped the high-speed crash and ensuing fireball with only a fractured knee.
Hammond reassured fans with a video appearance from his hospital bed on Sunday.
The video was broadcast by Drive Tribe under the jokey title: “I’m not dead.”
In the video Mr Hammond confirmed he would require knee surgery.
“I would like to thank all of the medical professionals who got me by air ambulance from the crash to the hospital and who have dealt with me ever since,” he said. Hammond also apologised to his wife and two daughters.
Co-star Jeremy Clarkson tweeted about the accident, saying: “It was the biggest crash I have ever seen and the most frightening but incredibly and thankfully, Richard seems to be mostly okay.’’
In an article on the DriveTribe website, Clarkson confirmed that Hammond had been driving the car for four days prior to the accident.
“He knew the car well, he knew how fast it was, and he knew how to handle it in the bends,” he said.
The former Top Gear presenter revealed he thought Hammond was dead when he arrived at the scene shortly after the accident.
“It was obvious from the skid marks what had happened. He’d lost it somehow on the final bend after the finishing line and had plummeted down one bank onto a road lower down the hill, which had caused his car to flip.”
Clarkson said he stood with his knees “turning to jelly” until a member of the show’s security detail revealed that Hammond was ok - by winking at him.
“For all the rest, all the details, and who knows, another book; well I’ll leave that up to Hammond when the lucky sod feels up to it,” Clarkson stated.
Video from @richardhammond direct from his hospital bed: https://t.co/lAHxpFnQTP — The Grand Tour (@thegrandtour) June 11, 2017
Photographs showed a burned-out wreck of a car resting on its roof.
Hammond was critically injured in a high-speed crash back in 2006 which left him in a coma for several weeks but recovered and went on to build an international following with Top Gear before following Clarkson when he was sacked from the show in 2015.
The accident is thought to have happened on Saturday afternoon.
REVEALED: Batman star Adam West dead at 88
St Gallen police spokesman Gian Andrea Rezzoli told Swiss newspaper 20 Minuten that the driver of the car was taken by air ambulance to hospital and the fire was extinguished by firefighters.
Hammond was conscious and got himself out of the car before it was engulfed in flames.
The Grand Tour confirmed Hammond was completing the Hemburg Hill Climb in Switzerland in a Romac Concept One, an electric supercar built in Croatia, when the accident happened.
“Richard was conscious and talking and climbed out of the vehicle himself before it burst into flames,’’ the show said in a statement.
“No-one else was in the car …and we’d like to thank the paramedics on site for their swift response.”
“The cause of the crash is unknown and is being investigated.’’
A spokesman for the Hemberg race organisers, Marco Moser, said the demonstration runs are intended to showcase unusual vehicles and offer spectators “something special”.
“No accident is nice for us,” Moser said.
“But accidents do happen in high-risk sports. Of course when a car goes up in flames, then there’s quite a bit more adrenaline.”
“We’re happy that Richard Hammond is doing well, under the circumstances,” he added.WASHINGTON -- North Carolina House Republicans are pushing legislation that would restrict abortion access, attaching the measure to an unrelated motorcycle safety bill on Wednesday and giving neither the public nor Democratic legislators any advance notice.
On Wednesday morning, state Rep. Joe Sam Queen (D) wrote on Twitter, "New abortion bill being heard in the committee I am on. The public didn't know. I didn't even know."
"I wish I had more time to look at this new bill before I had to ask questions about it or debate it," he added.
The bill then passed the state House Judiciary Committee in a 10-5 party-line vote.
The stealth maneuver came after North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory (R) threatened to veto a similar Senate bill on Wednesday morning. The Senate legislation would require abortion providers to meet strict licensing standards and would mandate that a doctor is present for the entire procedure.
The state's top health official has called for lawmakers to slow down on the abortion legislation, and in his 2012 campaign, McCrory pledged not to sign any legislation that would further restrict abortion access.
House Republicans tweaked the Senate legislation: A doctor would have to be present when the first drug in an abortion procedure is administered -- rather than for the entire procedure -- and clinics would not have to meet the same standards as ambulatory surgical centers.
According to the Raleigh News and Observer, Rep. Paul "Skip" Stam (R), who has been leading the House push, believes the bill addresses McCrory's concerns. The paper added that "McCrory’s lobbyist appeared to work with the bill's chief supporters before the meeting, but it’s still unclear how McCrory would act on the amended bill."
When asked for reaction to the House bill, McCrory spokesman Ryan Tronovitch said the governor had no additional comment at this time.
In an email to The Huffington Post, Judiciary Committee co-chair state Rep. Chuck McGrady (R) said that Stam and state Rep. Ruth Samuelson (R) led the process for the legislation.
"I played no role in deciding how to move the bill," he said.
State Rep. Rick Glazier (D), who spoke out aggressively against the bill, said that despite the changes, the intent of the legislation was still the same.
The Senate had also stuck its abortion legislation onto an unrelated measure that would ban Sharia law, drawing a rebuke from McCrory. On Wednesday, House Democrats denounced the process surrounding the House bill as a "sham" and "as bad as the Senate."
“It is a disgrace to North Carolina that legislators have again resorted to sneak attacks to move their anti-women’s health agenda forward,” said Planned Parenthood Health Systems' Melissa Reid, in a statement. "Once again there was no public notice that this bill would be heard. The public and even many legislators on the committee only learned this was a possibility at 9:57 a.m. -- three minutes before the committee was to meet -- when a political reporter was tipped off and posted it on Twitter. This is outrageous and not how the people’s business should be conducted."Si vis pacem, para bellum!
(Ako želiš mir – spremaj oružje!)
PRIJE par dana predsjednica Republike, Kolinda Grabar Kitarović, izjavila je kako je ponovno uvođenje vojnog roka za sve vojno sposobne muškarce njena "politička zamisao". Također je dodala kako je "posljednja Strategija nacionalne sigurnosti izrađena još 2002. te da su se u međuvremenu okolnosti promijenile".
Morati ćemo dakle ovdje pitati – što se to toliko kod predsjednice u načinu razmišljanja promijenilo, kada je upravo Kolinda Grabar Kitarović bila među onima koji su obveznu vojsku – ukinuli!
Za one nestrpljive (jer priča je malo složenija) – obvezni vojni rok neće biti uveden. U pitanju je samo jeftina politička priča. Za one druge, koje zanima cijela štorija, idemo od početka...
Dugoročni plan razvoja oružanih snaga Republike Hrvatske 2006. – 2015.
Moramo prvo ispraviti predsjednicu, Strategija nacionalne sigurnosti Republike Hrvatske jest iz 2002. godine, no za ovo pitanje, služenja vojnog roka bitno je relevantniji Dugoročni plan razvoja oružanih snaga republike hrvatske 2006. – 2015., a kojega je Hrvatski Sabor donio na sjednici 7. srpnja 2006. Koga zanima, ovdje je: http://narodne-novine.nn.hr/clanci/sluzbeni/2006_07_81_1936.html
Ovaj dokument dostavila je Vlada Republike Hrvatske aktom od 28. lipnja 2006. godine. Dana 28. lipnja 2006. godine, predsjednik Vlade bio je dr. sc. Ivo Sanader, ministar obrane Berislav Rončević, a ministrica vanjskih poslova i europskih integracija upravo – mr. sc. Kolinda Grabar Kitarović!
U tom planu iz 2006. navodi se odmah u uvodnom dijelu: "veličina OS RH koja neće prelaziti 16 000 djelatnih vojnih osoba, 2 000 civilnog osoblja, 2 000 dragovoljnih ročnika (ukupni godišnji kontingent) i do 6 000 pripadnika ugovorne pričuve“. Predviđena je i nerazvrstana pričuva: „Postrojbe popunjene pripadnicima nerazvrstane pričuve bit će ustrojavane, opremane i uvježbavane tek u situacijama kada Republika Hrvatska bude ugrožena potencijalnom agresijom. Raspoloživo vrijeme za njihovo ustrojavanje i obuku iznosit će 120 do 360 dana. Za pripadnike nerazvrstane pričuve (oko 40 000 pripadnika) vodit će se evidencija i čuvati dio pješačkog i topničkog naoružanja i potrebne opreme".
Naglašavamo i sljedeće: "Cilj je do 2010. postojeći kombinirani vojni sastav u potpunosti pretvoriti u dragovoljni". Dakle, Kolinda Grabar Kitarović je tada sjedila u tijelu koje je Saboru predložilo upravo – ukidanje obveznog vojnog roka!
Vlada inače ima Pravilnik koji definira gl |
be tempted to turn away from these things, our charge as awakening individuals is in part to transmute or transform these dark deeds into beacons of light.
For example, 9/11 was one of the great tragedies of our times, and it helped usher in an era of even more tyranny and suffering for humanity. But it also stands as one of the great catalyzers of consciousness; for millions of people became aware of the greater truth through it. And those who woke up began sharing it with their fellows. Less than 20-years later, more people believe that the official story is a lie, a testament to the power of consciousness and it's ability to transform a seemingly negative situation into a positive one.
In this way, every act of chaos—an attempt to traumatize humanity—can be transformed into an agency of greater collective change and awakening. But if we who know the truth do nothing, then these dark deeds will continue to ravage the unaware masses.
Knowing the truth can set us free, and sharing it helps others to do the same. For an illusionist's trick—which is what a false flag is—can only work if one does not see past the illusions for the greater truth. An illusion of deception requires ignorance to work properly. As such I suggest we become beacons of light within our own spheres of influence, sharing the truth in the form and measure in which it can be received. This will help prevent others from being traumatized or manipulated by false flags or dark deeds in the future.
Do not let these two days of great occult significance create a storm of fear within you, for that is part of the goal of the dark occultists. Instead, expand your knowledge into the fullness of the whole truth, and in the process transcend fear with empowerment.
- Justin
May Day & Beltaine
This perception of what is considered evil and good is an age old concept of duality. We see it in our views, politics, religions, right down to our sexes of the male or female. Rituals do not have to be of any “negative” purpose. What we view in the world is what it is. Wisdom and knowledge are simply such. But, it is how you view them, which determine the dimensional characteristics of either aspect of duality. Energy, in a simplistic form, awareness or consciousness, is not “bad”; it is how you use the information. If you choose to use nuclear energy to light a city, as opposed to dropping a nuclear weapon on that same city, you can realize that how you use such technology will greatly alter how it is viewed.
It is also important to know that dates and numbers are extremely important to many people. The Occult calendar from April 19th – May 1st – exactly 13 days – the number of regeneration – is, to some, to contain a blood sacrifice to the “beast”. April 19th is also believed to be a day requiring a Fire sacrifice, which is appropriate relating to the Fire/Sun gods of Molech, Beltane, Enlil, Odin, Osiris, Indra, Marduk, Bel, Votan, Nimrod, Wotan, Saturn, Ba’al, etc.
Related 13 Days of Preparation | Occult Significance of May Day and the 13 days of April 19th - May 1st It is also important to know that dates and numbers are extremely important to many people. The Occult calendar from April 19th – May 1st – exactly 13 days – the number of regeneration – is, to some, to contain a blood sacrifice to the “beast”. April 19th is also believed to be a day requiring a Fire sacrifice, which is appropriate relating to the Fire/Sun gods of Molech, Beltane, Enlil, Odin, Osiris, Indra, Marduk, Bel, Votan, Nimrod, Wotan, Saturn, Ba’al, etc.
Related (Updated) The Temple of Baal (Bel) Coming to London and Later to New York (Occult Analysis) | The Resurrection of Ba'al (Moloch, The Golden Calf) Ritual
The origins of the Beltane festival can be traced back to the celebration of the Sumerian God Enlil – who is known to us as Baal. The name Beltane (“B’yal-t’n”) is said to originate from the word Baal. Celebrations of the Beltane festival are very similar to ancient rituals celebrating the ancient god. The mysterious similarities between these seemingly distant cultures could be the subject of an entire article. One thing is for sure: Ba’al is an important figure in Illuminati lore.
“In Middle-Eastern lore, Baal was killed and descended into the underworld, whereupon he was returned to life by the powers of his sister-lover, Anat. Baal is thus associated with the seasonal cycles and the coming of spring and crops.”
April 30th – May 1st is also known as the Beltaine Festival or Walpurgis Night. The festivals of Hades or Pluto, God of the Underworld, also take place around this time. Occultists perform the ritual of Walpurgis to the goddess of Walpurgisnacht or “May Day Eve.” She was a powerful deity in many locations and cultures. In Germany she is known as May Queen and Walpurga. She is so popular that even the Christians took her in under the name of “Saint” Walpurga. Walpurg is also part of an old Teutonic name for the “Earth Mother”. Other names for this goddess include Isis, El, Diana, Persephone, Phrygia, Artemis, Astarte, Hathor, Demeter, Ninkharsag, Semerimus, Columba, Kali, Barati, Mary, May, Hectate, Lilith, Eve, Cybele, Venus, Columbo, Titania, Aphrodite, etc. The origins of the Beltane festival can be traced back to the celebration of the Sumerian God Enlil – who is known to us as Baal. The name Beltane (“B’yal-t’n”) is said to originate from the word Baal. Celebrations of the Beltane festival are very similar to ancient rituals celebrating the ancient god. The mysterious similarities between these seemingly distant cultures could be the subject of an entire article. One thing is for sure: Ba’al is an important figure in Illuminati lore.“In Middle-Eastern lore, Baal was killed and descended into the underworld, whereupon he was returned to life by the powers of his sister-lover, Anat. Baal is thus associated with the seasonal cycles and the coming of spring and crops.”April 30th – May 1st is also known as the Beltaine Festival or Walpurgis Night. The festivals of Hades or Pluto, God of the Underworld, also take place around this time. Occultists perform the ritual of Walpurgis to the goddess of Walpurgisnacht or “May Day Eve.” She was a powerful deity in many locations and cultures. In Germany she is known as May Queen and Walpurga. She is so popular that even the Christians took her in under the name of “Saint” Walpurga. Walpurg is also part of an old Teutonic name for the “Earth Mother”. Other names for this goddess include Isis, El, Diana, Persephone, Phrygia, Artemis, Astarte, Hathor, Demeter, Ninkharsag, Semerimus, Columba, Kali, Barati, Mary, May, Hectate, Lilith, Eve, Cybele, Venus, Columbo, Titania, Aphrodite, etc.
Related The Symbolic Meaning of ISIS And The Statue of Liberty (Isis) | Mother of Wisdom, Numerology, Kabbalah, Freemasonry and Occult Meanings
The night of April 30 is one of the most significant times on the Druidic Witch’s Calendar. This is a time when many believe that a human sacrifice is required. Since the celebration of Beltaine was started the night before the 1st of May, many occultists celebrate Beltaine as a two-day ceremony.
TIMEOUT: Adolf Hitler was supposed to have killed himself on April 30th at 3:30pm.
In Europe, it is called the Beltane festival, an ancient Gaelic celebration of sexuality, fertility and blood sacrifices.
“Supposedly, animal sacrifices would be made each Beltane to ensure the fertility of their crops, however, every five years the Highland Celts would sacrifice humans, the numbers being made up of convicted criminals and prisoners of war.”
During this time, April 30th, bonfires are lit in order to welcome the Earth, Mother Goddess. Participates hoped that they would gain a blessing from the Goddess by participating in the welcoming festival. This is similar to how in the ancient celebration of Easter/Ishtar, also relates to the Mother Goddess. Early worship or Mass was held to symbolically hasten the arrival of the Goddess from “heaven”, who would arrive inside of an egg. This symbolized being reborn, as the springtime was a period when the days began to get longer, and the sun was said to conquer the darkness; the Earth was being reborn or resurrected like Jesus (Sun). When she arrived in an egg, whoever could find her first would have a blessing bestowed upon them (Easter egg hunts). The night of April 30 is one of the most significant times on the Druidic Witch’s Calendar. This is a time when many believe that a human sacrifice is required. Since the celebration of Beltaine was started the night before the 1st of May, many occultists celebrate Beltaine as a two-day ceremony.: Adolf Hitler was supposed to have killed himself on April 30th at 3:30pm.In Europe, it is called the Beltane festival, an ancient Gaelic celebration of sexuality, fertility and blood sacrifices.“Supposedly, animal sacrifices would be made each Beltane to ensure the fertility of their crops, however, every five years the Highland Celts would sacrifice humans, the numbers being made up of convicted criminals and prisoners of war.”During this time, April 30th, bonfires are lit in order to welcome the Earth, Mother Goddess. Participates hoped that they would gain a blessing from the Goddess by participating in the welcoming festival. This is similar to how in the ancient celebration of Easter/Ishtar, also relates to the Mother Goddess. Early worship or Mass was held to symbolically hasten the arrival of the Goddess from “heaven”, who would arrive inside of an egg. This symbolized being reborn, as the springtime was a period when the days began to get longer, and the sun was said to conquer the darkness; the Earth was being reborn or resurrected like Jesus (Sun). When she arrived in an egg, whoever could find her first would have a blessing bestowed upon them (Easter egg hunts).
Related Origins and Occult Symbolism of Easter | A Celebration of the Spring Equinox: Biblical Connections, Christian and Babylonian Traces
TIMEOUT: According to “America’s Occult Holidays” by Doc Marquis, PG. 30: The Royal House of Windsor lights a Beltaine “Belefire” every year.
Later accounts of Beltane festivities refer to a Beltane Cake, which are baked with eggs. Referred to as the Beltane Carline, this spelt symbolic doom to whoever was unlucky enough to receive it. Once selected, the person with the Beltane Carline would have others who would attempt to throw them on the fire. The rest of the festivalgoers would prevent this from happening, however. The unlucky person would then be considered a symbolic sacrifice and referred as being dead for the rest of the evening.
TIMEOUT: Do not forget that real animals and people are sacrificed though.
The “Maypole” originated from the celebration of Beltaine as well. Fertility and rebirth are the main themes and this “Maypole” represents the phallic symbol. The pole is placed in the ground and dance is done, in a circle, around the pole to represent the female sex organ.
Image Source.
Image Source.
In most celebrations, four 6ft red and white ribbons were attached to the pole. Woman would dance clockwise (to the left representing the femanine archetype) and men counterclockwise (to the right representing the masculine archetype). This union of connected ribbons symbolized the act of copulation. If you were to look at this from an ariel view, the point in the middle of a circle, is again, an ancient and modern symbol for the Sun. : According to “America’s Occult Holidays” by Doc Marquis, PG. 30: The Royal House of Windsor lights a Beltaine “Belefire” every year.Later accounts of Beltane festivities refer to a Beltane Cake, which are baked with eggs. Referred to as the Beltane Carline, this spelt symbolic doom to whoever was unlucky enough to receive it. Once selected, the person with the Beltane Carline would have others who would attempt to throw them on the fire. The rest of the festivalgoers would prevent this from happening, however. The unlucky person would then be considered a symbolic sacrifice and referred as being dead for the rest of the evening.: Do not forget that real animals and people are sacrificed though.The “Maypole” originated from the celebration of Beltaine as well. Fertility and rebirth are the main themes and this “Maypole” represents the phallic symbol. The pole is placed in the ground and dance is done, in a circle, around the pole to represent the female sex organ.In most celebrations, four 6ft red and white ribbons were attached to the pole. Woman would dance clockwise (to the left representing the femanine archetype) and men counterclockwise (to the right representing the masculine archetype). This union of connected ribbons symbolized the act of copulation. If you were to look at this from an ariel view, the point in the middle of a circle, is again, an ancient and modern symbol for the Sun.
https://youtu.be/2uJq4BSkkG8
The days leading up to Beltaine or May Days Eve, on the 30th of April, and May day on the 1st, are filled with historical blood shed and significant dates, which with enough research can be seen to paint a clearer picture of the world around us. Some of these, it seems, are simply a way to bring people’s attention to the date. Perhaps, this has something to do with energy. Here are just some of the significant dates, I will add more as I discover them. Or comment at the bottom with your own sources.
Related 42 Government ADMITTED False Flag Attacks
April 15th, 2013 – Boston marathon bombing – 3 dead and hundreds injured – 1 child
April 16th, 2007 – Virginia Tech – 32 students died
April 18th, 2013 – Texas Waco Fertilizer Plant Explosion – at least 5-15 dead & hundreds injured. The plant was 20 miles North of Waco.
April 19th, 1775 – The battle of Lexington & Concord, which made the Revolutionary War inevitable.
April 19th, 1993 – Government troops, tanks, and other military equipment stormed the compound of David Koresh and his followers at Waco, Texas. – 25 Children died
April 19th, 1995 – Oklahoma City Bombing – 19 Children died
April 20th, 2010 – A major explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, operating in the Gulf of Mexico, near the coast of Louisiana. The fire was reported at 10 P.M CST. AT a press conference on April 30th, 10 days later and on “May Days Eve”, BP announced that it did not know the cause of the explosion. As a result of this incident, 11 people died. 11 days from the 20th of April places us exactly on May 1st.
April 20th, 1999 – The Columbine (venus columba, the dove, queen sumerimus) massacre at Columbine High School Colorado where 12 students (twelve month cycle?) and 1 teacher (the beginning of the next cycle, or regenerative month) were killed, bringing the total to 13. (21 were injured – see Iraq)
April 30th, 1945 – Adolf Hitler was “claimed” to be dead. He was also born on April 20th.
May 1st, 1776 – The Bavarian Illuminati was spawned. Their “official goal” was to infiltrate freemasonry and all positions of government and power. These are not the same “Illuminati” that you are probably used to hearing about. That society is one that was driven underground by the Catholic Church and thus began operating in secret.
May 1st, 2003 – George W. Bush gives the so-called “Mission Accomplished” speech on board the US Abraham Lincoln. This was the speech in which “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”. However guerrilla warfare in Iraq spread very quickly and made things much worse.
May 1st, 2003 – The invasion of Iraq, under the name “Iraqi Freedom” (took 21 days to “overthrow” Saddam.)
May 1st, 2011 – The announcement that the United States had conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, though he had died years prior. The days leading up to Beltaine or May Days Eve, on the 30th of April, and May day on the 1st, are filled with historical blood shed and significant dates, which with enough research can be seen to paint a clearer picture of the world around us. Some of these, it seems, are simply a way to bring people’s attention to the date. Perhaps, this has something to do with energy. Here are just some of the significant dates, I will add more as I discover them. Or comment at the bottom with your own sources.– Boston marathon bombing – 3 dead and hundreds injured – 1 child– Virginia Tech – 32 students died– Texas Waco Fertilizer Plant Explosion – at least 5-15 dead & hundreds injured. The plant was 20 miles North of Waco.– The battle of Lexington & Concord, which made the Revolutionary War inevitable.– Government troops, tanks, and other military equipment stormed the compound of David Koresh and his followers at Waco, Texas. – 25 Children died– Oklahoma City Bombing – 19 Children died– A major explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig, operating in the Gulf of Mexico, near the coast of Louisiana. The fire was reported at 10 P.M CST. AT a press conference on April 30th, 10 days later and on “May Days Eve”, BP announced that it did not know the cause of the explosion. As a result of this incident, 11 people died. 11 days from the 20th of April places us exactly on May 1st.– The Columbine (venus columba, the dove, queen sumerimus) massacre at Columbine High School Colorado where 12 students (twelve month cycle?) and 1 teacher (the beginning of the next cycle, or regenerative month) were killed, bringing the total to 13. (21 were injured – see Iraq)– Adolf Hitler was “claimed” to be dead. He was also born on April 20th.– The Bavarian Illuminati was spawned. Their “official goal” was to infiltrate freemasonry and all positions of government and power. These are not the same “Illuminati” that you are probably used to hearing about. That society is one that was driven underground by the Catholic Church and thus began operating in secret.– George W. Bush gives the so-called “Mission Accomplished” speech on board the US Abraham Lincoln. This was the speech in which “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”. However guerrilla warfare in Iraq spread very quickly and made things much worse.– The invasion of Iraq, under the name “Iraqi Freedom” (took 21 days to “overthrow” Saddam.)– The announcement that the United States had conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, though he had died years prior. This perception of what is considered evil and good is an age old concept of duality. We see it in our views, politics, religions, right down to our sexes of the male or female. Rituals do not have to be of any “negative” purpose. What we view in the world is what it is. Wisdom and knowledge are simply such. But, it is how you view them, which determine the dimensional characteristics of either aspect of duality. Energy, in a simplistic form, awareness or consciousness, is not “bad”; it is how you use the information. If you choose to use nuclear energy to light a city, as opposed to dropping a nuclear weapon on that same city, you can realize that how you use such technology will greatly alter how it is viewed.
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The timeline surrounding, and leading up to May 1st, is filled with fire, ritual, blood and symbology. But also, energy, spirit, misunderstanding and a significant date within the wheel of the year._________________________Google Inc.’s investment in Kenya’s Lake Turkana Wind Power Project is its largest on the African continent to date, but it almost certainly won’t be the last.
The California internet giant has shown a growing interest in sub-Saharan Africa since it made its first cash outlay three years ago—a $12 million investment in the Jasper Solar Power Project in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province.
The 96-megawatt photovoltaic project, completed in 2014, was built by U.S.-based SolarReserve LLC and is capable of powering roughly 80,000 South African homes.
The Lake Turkana deal, whose financial terms were not disclosed, calls for Google to acquire 12.5 percent of the nearly $700 million project from Vestas Wind Systems A/S of Denmark after the wind farm is completed next year.
“We are investing in clean energy projects like Lake Turkana because they make business sense and can help accelerate the deployment of renewable energy,” a Google spokesperson said in an email to E&E News.
She added that the company sees “a large opportunity in fast-growing markets with rich renewable energy resources, where both the need and the potential are great.”
The ownership group includes lead developers Aldwych International Ltd. of Great Britain and KP&P Africa BV of the Netherlands, with additional financial support from international development funds in Norway, Finland and Denmark.
As with Jasper in South Africa, Google said its wind power investment “will help bring much needed capacity and stability to Kenya’s energy supply, reducing reliance on fossil fuels and emergency diesel generation while providing some of the most cost effective power in the country.”
In total, Google has committed more than $2.5 billion to 22 renewable energy projects around the world, mostly through power purchase agreements and direct ownership of wind and solar farms, officials said. Much of its purchased power goes to support massive Google data centers in the United States and Europe.
But the company sees a future in the developing world, where millions of new internet users are coming online annually.
Part of an African investment boom?
Experts have noted that sub-Saharan Africa is one of the largest untapped markets for advanced telecommunications and digital networks, and Google has already taken steps to build its presence across the continent, both physically and digitally.
For example, Google has invested millions of dollars to construct fiber optic networks in the capital cities of Kampala, Uganda, and Accra, Ghana, where internet speeds and wireless connectivity were previously limited by old or nonexistent infrastructure.
The effort, called Project Link, also created one of Africa’s most extensive high-speed Wi-Fi networks across Kampala, allowing mobile phone users to access the internet from 120 sites in the city.
By purchasing a multimillion-dollar stake in the Lake Turkana project, Google will become the first U.S. firm to invest in a major sub-Saharan wind energy project (General Electric Co. has committed to provide turbines to at least one other Kenyan wind farm still in the planning phases).
It will also establish Google in the vanguard among private investors in Africa’s fast-growing clean energy market, which experts believe could become one of the world’s strongest by the mid-21st century.
“lf you look at where Africa was five or 10 years ago, basically it was nowhere,” said Achim Steiner, former executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme and U.N. undersecretary-general, who now leads the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University.
“Now we’re seeing billions of dollars of investment going in,” he added, in part thanks to firms like Google that have responded to “a very strong signal from African leaders” that the continent has both the capacity and the will to develop clean energy at scale.
Steiner noted that even before Google’s involvement, primary investors showed courage in moving ahead with Lake Turkana after the World Bank declined to provide loan guarantees to the project in 2012.
Instead, developers relied on backing from the European Investment Bank, the African Development Bank and the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corp. (OPIC), which in 2014 committed $250 million in underwriting for Lake Turkana as part of its partnership with the Obama administration’s Power Africa initiative.
A spokeswoman for OPIC declined to comment on the project, saying in an email that the agency had not financially closed the deal.
Google also isn’t saying much about its aspirations for Lake Turkana, though the spokesperson made clear that the company intends to meet the terms of its purchase agreement with Vestas.
Google also noted that Lake Turkana serves as an anchor project for additional energy development in Kenya, including a more than 250-mile-long power transmission line that should link the wind farm to the Kenyan electricity grid and provide a conduit for another energy development in the Great Rift Valley, including thousands of megawatts of geothermal energy capacity.
Once it finalizes the purchase agreement next year, Google “will work collaboratively with our co-investors to ensure the success of the Lake Turkana project,” the spokesperson said. But she clarified that the company will have little involvement in the day-to-day operations of the wind farm and has not determined whether it will participate in broader decisions as part of an ownership group.
Google will earn a return on its investments through a share in profits earned from the sale of electricity to the national utility, Kenya Electricity Generating Co.
Reprinted from ClimateWire with permission from Environment & Energy Publishing, LLC. E&E provides daily coverage of essential energy and environmental news at www.eenews.net. Click here for the original story.A MAN has taken his love of trains to the extreme, spending 2500 hours over four-and-a-half years building a full-size replica train carriage in his own home in painstaking detail.
Jason Shron, 37, who owns a model train company in Canada, finally finished the epic project last month. It cost $10,000.
Shron said he knew it was unreasonable to ask his family to live in one, so he opted for the next best thing.
The project took a long time as it was challenging to make the train appear authentic, with Shron scrapping everything and starting from scratch three times.
Another challenge: parts were hard to find. Shron was eventually able to take apart a real train carriage.
He said it was all worth it.
"I've always wanted to have a VIA train in my basement since I was a kid," Mr Shron said.
"In fact, when me and my wife were looking to buy a house I would say 'no' if the basement wasn't big enough for me to build it.
"I even have a letter from VIA Rail Canada telling me that they can't sell me any seats from their trains. It was 1987 and I was 12."
The railway carriage was used across Canada from 1954 to the 1990s. It was built as it appeared in 1980.
The attention to detail is evident, with genuine seat numbers, chairs, timetable racks, welcome signs, coat hooks and 1970s carpet.
"Everything is accurate down to the carpets and baseboards, but I did replace the bathroom with a place for my records and turntable."
Most of the time it plays a soundtrack of a train clicking along the track.
Shron said there's been huge interest in the train, which is fast turning into an attraction for those in the area.
A video showing the construction of the train has received more than 180,000 views.Mr Nicholson added that disabled people should wait longer for a new car under the Motability Scheme. The billions of pound saved should be re-invested in getting young people back into work.
The provocative remarks were made last month, weeks before Mr Nicholson was appointed to advise Mr Davey, the Energy and Climate Change secretary.
Writing on the Conservativehome.com website, Mr Nicholson complained that “much of our tax and welfare system favours the old at the expense of the young. It is time we redressed the balance”.
He said: “It makes no sense that winter fuel allowances and free bus travel start at age 60. They should be raised immediately to 65 and then rise in line with the state retirement age.
“These benefits and free TV licences for the over 75s should be strictly means tested and should not be available for those pensioners who receive enough income to pay tax.
“Latest DWP figures show that around half of all pensioners receive in excess of the income tax threshold.
“By restricting the winter fuel allowance, free bus travel and free TV licences to those below the threshold, a saving to the Exchequer of around £1.4 billion per annum could be generated.”
At the time of the remarks, Mr Nicholson ran the Lib Dem thinktank CentreForum. He was also the Lib Dem Parlimentary candidate for Streatham, Clapham and Brixton at the last election.
Its website boasts an endorsement from Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg on its front page: "CentreForum is a think tank that has become ever more important over the past few years."
Mr Nicholson said cuts to child benefit for “the relatively well off… should just be the start”.
He added: “We should be looking to tackle other aspects of benefits for the rich. Currently the government spends over £2 billion per annum on statutory maternity pay (SMP).
“For the first six weeks after birth a mother receives 90 per cent of their average gross weekly earnings income whether they earn £100,000 or £10,000.
“That makes no sense. It should be capped at £800 per week (roughly the income level of those who pay higher rate tax of 40 per cent).”
Mr Nicholson said disabled people who lease cars through the Motability scheme should get a new vehicle very six years, rather than every three years, saving over £500million.
He also suggested that higher rate taxpayers living in council houses should have to be pay the full market rent for their housing, bringing in an extra £100million a year.
He added: “In total, savings along these lines could generate in excess of £2 billion per annum, which could be re-invested in early years' provision and help to get the young unemployed into work.
“In more benign economic times we might not wish to make these choices but in these difficult circumstances we must invest in the future of our country – our young people.”
Geraldine Bedell, the editor of Gransnet, said: "If the Government really is considering taking away pensioners' fuel allowance, following on so soon from the debacle of the 'granny tax' then it is hard not to conclude that this government has it in for pensioners."
Last night, when contacted by The Daily Telegraph, Mr Nicholson declined to comment on his remarks. A spokesman for Mr Davey said: “All decisions about Government spending are made spending are made collectively by ministers.”In zoology, male lactation is production of milk (lactation) from a male mammal's mammary glands. It is well-documented in the Dayak fruit bat. The term male lactation is not used in human medicine. It has been used in popular literature, such as Louise Erdrich's The Antelope Wife, to describe the phenomenon of male galactorrhea, which is a well-documented condition in humans, unrelated to childbirth or nursing. Newborn babies of both sexes can occasionally produce milk; this is called neonatal milk (also known as "witch's milk") and not considered male lactation.
History [ edit ]
Male lactation was of some interest to Alexander von Humboldt, who reports in Voyage aux régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent of a citizen of the village Arenas (close to Cumana) who allegedly nurtured his son for three months when his wife was ill,[1] as well as Charles Darwin, who commented on it in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871):
It is well known that in the males of all mammals, including [hu]man[s], rudimentary mammae exist. These in several instances have become well developed, and have yielded a copious supply of milk. Their essential identity in the two sexes is likewise shown by their occasional sympathetic enlargement in both during an attack of the measles.[2]
Darwin later considered the nearly perfect function of male nipples in contrast to greatly reduced structures such as the vesicula prostatica, speculating that both sexes may have nursed young in early mammalian ancestors, and subsequently mammals evolved to inactivate them in males at an early age.[3]
Evolution and biology [ edit ]
Male mammals of many species have been observed to lactate under unusual or pathogenic conditions such as extreme stress, castration and exposure to phytoestrogens, or pituitary tumors. Therefore, it is hypothesized that, while most male mammals could easily develop the ability to lactate, there is no selective advantage to male lactation. While male mammals could, in theory, improve offspring's survival rate through the additional nourishment provided by lactation, most have developed other strategies to increase the number of surviving offspring, such as mating with additional partners. Presently, very few species are known where male lactation occurs and it is not well understood what evolutionary factors control the development of this trait.[4]
Nonhuman animal male lactation [ edit ]
The phenomenon of male lactation occurs in some species, notably the Dayak fruit bat (Dyacopterus spadiceus), and the lactating males may assist in the nursing of their infants. In addition, male goats are known to lactate on occasion.[5]
Human male lactation [ edit ]
Human male breastfeeding is possible, but production of the hormone prolactin is necessary to induce lactation, so male lactation does not occur under normal conditions.[6] Domperidone is a drug that can be used to increase lactation. Male lactation has also been seen during recovery from starvation. This may be because glands that produce hormones recover faster than the liver, which absorbs hormones, leading to high hormone levels.[7]
Spontaneous production of milk not associated with childbirth, known as galactorrhea, can occur in males and females.[8]
See also [ edit ]
References [ edit ]
General references [ edit ]You’re on the ground. You heard the noise — and so did everyone else nearby. They didn’t feel it though – that weird click/pop/shift that just happened. The strange and awful pain shooting down your leg. The instability. The fear of any and all movement. You know something bad just happened.
When you’re injured, a million things can go through your head. Not only the five typical stages of grief, but additional worries about how this affects your life, your friends, your team, your plans next weekend, your future, and your career as an athlete.
Does anyone even know that I’m hurt? Or care that I’m hurt? Are my teammates upset? Are they happy to get the extra playing time? Are they glad I’m not around?
Before you think too hard, focus on your body for a minute.
I’m definitely NOT a doctor. I’m not a therapist – physical or mental. I did, however, fully tear the ACL – and partially the LCL – in my left knee during a summer league game this past August and had the ACL reconstructed ten days later.
These are some of the thoughts and tools that I’ve collected over the course of my experience.
Talk about what |
from SXSW to Coachella have hit (or surpassed) capacity in recent years, becoming the domain of party and fashion culture and leaving the market open for more intimate musical experiences: Mumford & Sons' upcoming Gentlemen of the Road Stopover in Walla Walla, Washington, or Happy Valley's annual Pickathon Festival, which plays host to just a few thousand attendees, are testaments to that demand. Right now, Treefort is one of those experiences. It hopes to stay that way. "We're still turning away a lot of bands. It's a tricky balance," Gilbert said, mindful of keeping the event artist-driven while also keeping the lights on. The fest's top acts next week include TV on the Radio and Built to Spill -- not exactly Kanye West and Lady Gaga, which leaves more room for stumbling onto something fresh and crowds who aren't there just to drink and see a famous name. Until last year,
, convinced that no other festival could offer its level of range, serendipity and musical revelation as long as an attendee had an extensive spreadsheet and comfortable shoes. But 2014's crowds and the emphasis on marketing over music strained its infrastructure to the breaking point for even the smallest bands. One night, I found myself waiting in line at a dive bar for 20 minutes: that much I expected, but a second line inside, to get from one room to another to see talented but relatively unknown punk act Speedy Ortiz, made my jaw drop. That last straw came after days of delays, canceled shows, impossibly packed showcases and the shocking deaths of several attendees in a car crash: SXSW 2014 was barely a music festival. It was chaos. So, like seemingly every band in Portland, many of whom are also passing on Austin this year, I'm pinning my hopes on Treefort to get things right. At least we can count on an absence of a Doritos Stage or McDonalds McShowcase: Treefort has its share of sponsors, too, but aside from Alaska Airlines and Mailchimp, they're largely local -- including the city of Boise, which has recognized Treefort as its cultural ambassador this year. "We're... not necessarily taking the easy money and putting brands everywhere," Gilbert said. "It's booked from a perspective of growing the music scene and curating up-and-coming talent." Whoever Treefort draws, Gilbert hopes it helps an evolving Boise take its place on a national map as well as post-Austin tour routes. "Boise's in a really interesting place right now in general. There's a lot of talk about defining its future," Gilbert said. "It's a city that has yet to step into its golden age." --David Greenwald
503-294-7625;Chief Medaria Arradondo is proud to launch the MPD’s latest tool as the Department continues to make its data more accessible and easier for residents to categorize. The use of force dashboard features the same format as the recently released police stops, crime, and arrests dashboards. This new technological advancement directly correlates into the MPD’s vision of improving trust, accountability and professional service.
“I want to make it clear that our data is your data. Or I’d like to say, it’s the people’s data. Too often in policing, in our culture and in our history, we have shielded our communities from this data. They have a right to this data, and starting today, the MPD is going to make sure our communities have it,” Chief Arradondo explained at midday news conference.
Use of Force
If you are having trouble viewing the dashboard on your mobile device, click here.
Officer Involved Shooting
If you are having trouble viewing the dashboard on your mobile device, click here.CLOSE FLORIDA TODAY News Columnist John Torres provides update on Catherine Jones who was convicted in 1999 of killing her father's girlfriend and introduces you to our 2009 video with Catherine from prison. Posted Jan. 9, 2015.
Buy Photo Catherine Jones in a Viera courtroom. (Photo: FLORIDA TODAY File)Buy Photo
Editor's note: This story was originally published on Sunday, November 8, 2009. Curtis Jones was released from prisonon July 28, 2015, at age 29. Catherine Jones was released from prison on Aug. 1, 2015, at age 30.
Less than four months before 13-year-old Catherine Jones and her 12-year-old brother, Curtis, shot and killed their father's girlfriend in 1999, child welfare investigators found signs that they were being sexually abused by a family member.
A few years earlier, the state looked into claims that the same family member had molested them. That family member, convicted in 1993 of sexually assaulting his girlfriend's daughter, lived in the house in Port St. John with the children and even shared a room with the boy.
A third investigation occurred in 1996 when Curtis had a bruised and swollen eye.
After each investigation, officials did nothing, according to reports obtained by FLORIDA TODAY with the permission of Jones, now 24 and six years away from her scheduled release from prison. Documents included confidential findings from the agency later renamed the Department of Children and Families.
The girl and her brother originally were charged with first-degree murder in what started as a plot to kill the abuser, their father and his girlfriend. They pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in exchange for 18-year prison sentences followed by a lifetime of probation. Now, an attorney is helping in their fight for clemency -- forgiveness, at least, for the remainder of their sentences.
Lawyer and Florida State University professor Paolo Annino says the siblings had a violent family history and didn't understand what they were doing 10 years ago. Catherine, in a recent interview in a Homestead prison, said she even wonders if she isn't better off for having gone to jail instead of staying in that home.
"There are some times when I look back at it and wonder if this didn't happen, would we have healed to the point where we are?" she said. "Did it take something like this to happen or were there other things that could have been done? At 12 and 13, you don't know about anything else."
Annino, who trains law students in legal advocacy at the Public Interest Law Center, believes the brother and sister were treated unfairly.
"This is a case, in which all the systems failed these kids," Annino said from his Tallahassee office. "They were oblivious to all the red flags. DCF is who I ultimately blame. They totally failed to properly investigate the case. If they had done that, there would not have been a murder.
"Instead, you have two victims that are sent to prison for 18 years."
Police, attorneys and newspapers reported the children killed the girlfriend, 29-year-old Nicole Speights, because they were jealous of attention their father was giving her. However, documents, from DCF and the Brevard County Sheriff's Office, depict a family mired in violence.
Catherine Jones says she regrets taking a life, but at the time she was willing to do anything to escape the abuse.
"At one point I was just so happy to be away," she said of how she felt after her arrest. "I know that sounds, like, really messed up, but there was a point where I was just away from all that, and I was by myself and I was safe."
Their mother, Stacie Parks, said she fled the home because of domestic violence in 1989, when Catherine and Curtis were 4 and 3 and about 10 years before the killing. Parks said her husband made it clear she couldn't leave with the children.
She believes they may have been saved by taking another life.
"They were taken away from that environment and now they have a chance," Parks said by phone from her home in Kansas. "If this had not happened, I would hate to think where they would be right now."
MORE: Brevard's youngest murderer will soon be free
From the beginning
According to Parks, the violence started before Catherine was born.
Catherine's parents met in Palo Alto, Calif., when her mother, 17, served 23-year-old Curtis Jones at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant. They started dating despite her family's objections to a white girl having a relationship with a black man.
Parks became pregnant within six months.
"Curtis Jones started hitting me within a month of when we started dating," Parks wrote in a sworn affidavit prepared for Catherine's clemency petition. "He hit me while I was pregnant which caused me to have a tear in my uterus."
She blames that tear for Catherine's premature birth. The baby weighed in at 3 pounds, 11 ounces and was nicknamed "Munchie."
Less than a year later, on May 31, 1986, Parks gave birth to Curtis in Alabama, where the couple moved before settling in Brevard County.
The violence continued, and Parks said she left many times, but Jones would convince her to return.
They eventually married in 1989, only months before Parks would leave for good -- pawning a gold chain to pay for the one-way ticket to her mother's home in Kansas.
"My mom said I couldn't bring the kids because they were biracial," said Parks, who also said she feared her husband's revenge if she took Catherine and Curtis.
In 1993, Parks drove to Brevard and took them from school and to Kansas without permission. According to court records, she was arrested for third-degree felony of "interference with custody." The children were returned to Florida, and charges were dropped.
Parks said she is closer with Curtis than Catherine, but hopes to rebuild that relationship.
"I never asked why they did this," Parks said. "I figured I knew why. They had grown up with violence their whole life."
According to the Department of Corrections, Curtis Jones Sr., who still lives in Brevard, has visited his children regularly, though Catherine said the relationship can be strained. FLORIDA TODAY unsuccessfully tried to contact him for this report.
First investigation
A few months after Parks left in 1989, Curtis Jones Sr. was charged with attempted second-degree murder for shooting two men in a Titusville pool hall. Charges later were reduced to a misdemeanor when police decided the shooting was in self-defense.
The children stayed with his mother in Alabama while he worked out his legal issues.
About that time, a family member -- who once spent six years in prison in Alabama for strong-arm robbery -- settled in Titusville. In 1993, the family member was arrested and later convicted of having sex with a 14-year-old girl.
Less than a year later, 8-year-old Curtis, while visiting in Kansas, told his mother the family member molested him.
FLORIDA TODAY is not identifying the family member because he was never charged in connection with these alleged incidents.
According to investigative reports from the sheriff's office, Curtis said the family member shared his bed with him and "sometimes fondles him when they are in bed together."
MORE: Young killer has lots to learn upon release from prison
But when he came home, Curtis changed his story. According to the sheriff's documents, "Curtis stated that he lied in hopes that the relative would move out of the home or that he would be sent to stay with his mother in Kansas on a full-time basis."
DCF closed the case. That was the first of three times they investigated child abuse in the home.
Her story
On Sept. 22, 1998, 13-year-old Catherine ran away from home. According to DCF documents, about the same time, a teacher at Space Coast Middle School told child welfare workers she suspected Catherine was being sexually abused at home by the family member.
"He did everything but penetration," Catherine told FLORIDA TODAY. "It wasn't rape, but it was touching and fondling and oral sex, he would make me perform oral sex to the point where I would throw up."
State investigators reported finding "some indicators" of physical abuse and sexual molestation.
Catherine denied the molestation and returned home. Investigators closed the case after offering parenting and counseling services, which Catherine's father declined. She would say her father intimidated her into lying.
Investigators, however, warned her father that the family member she had accused shouldn't be in their house because he was a convicted pedophile.
"Their only avenue was to take the kids out of the household, but you can't tell a kid something like that, especially us," Catherine said in the FLORIDA TODAY interview. "One of our parents had already left."
Catherine said what hurt most was that her father ignored her claims.
"He didn't believe me at that time, and it felt like he was taking sides, like he chose his (relative) over me," she said. "I expected him to be at the point where he would want to kill him."
Officials with DCF wouldn't comment on the Jones case. They said recantations are common when it comes to sexual molestation, but that doesn't always end an investigation.
"The child is sometimes seeking to put an end to the crisis created by their disclosure," said spokeswoman Elizabeth Arenas.
No one believed her, Catherine said, except her 12-year-old brother. On their way to school one morning, Curtis admitted he was being abused, too.
The plot
Catherine said her plan to get herself and Curtis out of the abusive situation was to kill those who were allowing it. Their kill list included the relative they said was abusing them, their father and Speights, a teacher's assistant at Jefferson Junior High School on Merritt Island.
Looking back, Catherine said she is not sure why they felt the need to kill Speights. If she had thought more, "it wouldn't have been her," she told a psychologist. "It would have been (the relative)."
But any doubts the siblings had about the plan, Catherine said, were eliminated just a few days after DCF closed its investigation.
Catherine, 13, said she was in the shower when she heard the bathroom door open. The relative ripped the shower curtain and stared at her.
"He started masturbating while I was in the corner crying," Catherine said. When he was done, she said, he left 50 cents on top of the toilet seat.
Catherine withdrew. She stopped eating dinner with the family and stayed in her room.
"That's when I started writing in my journal I'm gonna kill everybody," she said. "That's how it happened."
According to interviews and court documents, when she told Curtis of her plot, he said he would help: They would use the 9mm semi-automatic their father kept in his bedroom.
Pulling the trigger
On Jan. 6, 1999, Speights was working a 500-piece jigsaw puzzle at the family home on Tope Street in Port St. John. The children were sitting at the dining table with her, Curtis holding their father's pistol in his lap.
"She happened to be there and my dad happened to leave, and we knew that (the relative) would be coming over later that night. She was at the other end of the table, and then (Curtis) shot her in the chest," Catherine said. "I can't say how many more times he fired the gun, but I know that maybe the last two bullets I shot."
Speights was hit by four of nine bullets fired.
Catherine said Curtis started shaking and crying. The children dragged the body to the bathtub, leaving behind a trail of blood. They poured bleach on the carpet and floor.
According to reports, they ran from one friend's house to another, saying they shot Speights by accident. When parents of their friends said they had to call the police, the children fled and hid in a wooded area near their house.
Police found them in the morning, and at first, they said the killing was an accident.
"It was obvious, though, there were some things that made this different than an accident," said Lt. Tod Goodyear of the Brevard County Sheriff's Office, who was the lead investigator. "There was some obvious cleaning. The victim had been moved from where it happened through the house to a bathroom area."
Shortly after the interview with police began, the children admitted to their plot to kill Speights. It was several years before they revealed their plan to kill the others.
Judicial outcome
Goodyear said he and other investigators knew DCF had been called to the house before. Deputies had accompanied child welfare workers there.
Goodyear, however, said he knew of no concrete evidence regarding sexual abuse.
Investigators also noted Catherine's apparent lack of remorse.
The grand jury rejected treating the children as juveniles and made the siblings the youngest charged with murder as adults at the time in the United States. If tried as juveniles, state law allowed no more than 36 months in jail.
Knowing a first-degree murder conviction would result in a life sentence, lawyers worked out a plea deal for second-degree murder. It was accepted on Aug. 16, 1999.
Attorney Kepler Funk, who represented Catherine, said previous abuse is not a defense for first-degree murder in Florida.
"The only way we could have presented this was if the kids had been in imminent danger and acted in self-defense," he said. "We felt Cathy was a kid who still had something to offer in her life and had nothing but bad things going on. She had a horrific start to her life."
Tony Hernandez, who represented both children briefly, said he had hoped for a manslaughter charge and a juvenile sentence. Then they could have served three years in prison and four on probation.
Hernandez said dealing with the young Curtis was heartbreaking. He remembers the child asking if he could have his Nintendo video game with him in prison.
"The sentence and outcome is something that has bothered me throughout my career," he said.
Hopes and dreams
Catherine said she looks forward to catching up on the things that have passed her by.
"Cell phones, the Internet, driving and, you know, I never went to high school," she said. "I never wore makeup at home or got my nails done or highlights or any of that good stuff. I think I miss food, too, more than anything."
Catherine also said she would have to learn to believe in people again.
"In here you can't trust people, everyone has a motive for everything," she said. "I don't really know how to relate to people. I was exposed to things that I never would have been exposed to at home... There is no way to grow into something different."
She said she would like to go to college and earn a law degree. She also wants to open a restaurant.
But all those dreams can wait, Catherine said, until she sees the brother she last saw nine years ago.
"We're best friends," she said. "Nobody understands what you go through in here except someone else that has been in here."
The two wrote until recently when they were prohibited from doing so by a warden, because the siblings are co-defendants.
Catherine said she wishes that a deeper psychological evaluation or investigation into the sexual abuse had been done before sentencing. She said she takes responsibility for what she's done, but adds that she is not a cold-blooded killer.
"I think the charges and the sentence was excessive," she said. "Taking our lives wasn't going to bring hers back."
Contact Torres at 242-3649 or jtorres@floridatoday.com.
About this report
It has been 10 years since Catherine and Curtis Jones killed their father's girlfriend and became the youngest in the country at the time charged with first-degree murder as adults.
FLORIDA TODAY reached out to them, hoping they would tell the story that was never heard in court because of a plea deal that sent them each to prison for 18 years.
Catherine Jones agreed. Her brother did not.
In addition to Catherine, reporter John A. Torres talked with her mother, attorneys and investigators involved in the case and others. He tried unsuccessfully to speak with her father, the victim's family and a relative whom the children said abused them.
Torres also reviewed all documents supporting a petition for release from prison.
What about clemency?
Florida State University College of Law Professor Paolo Annino has worked on a package asking for clemency for Catherine and Curtis Jones. Clemency is a pardon or shortening of the sentence.
While the decision rests with the governor, it is preceded by a panel investigation to determine whether requirements for clemency have been met.
Meanwhile, Annino is working to get the state Legislature to pass the Second Chance for Adolescent Offenders Act. It would allow parole for a select group of inmates sentenced as children.
Those eligible -- including Catherine and Curtis -- must have been 15 years or younger at the time of the offense with no prior criminal record. The sentence must have been longer than 10 years, and the children must have served eight years.
"The bill almost passed last session," Annino said. "It could certainly help either Catherine or Curtis."
MORE: Brevard County news from Florida Today
Read or Share this story: http://on.flatoday.com/1MIog0eOne in five young Australians would move if a person of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander descent sat next to them, a survey has found.
The statistic comes from a research paper commissioned by Beyond Blue into the levels of discrimination across Australia.
The study provides a snapshot of the awareness, attitudes, intentions and behaviours in relation to discrimination against indigenous Australians.
“The results were consistent with my experience,” said indigenous Australian actor, Greg Fryer.
The 47-year-old also said that while Australia has made progress since he was in his 20s, it still has a long way to go.
The study was based on the opinions of over 1000 participants aged between 25 and 44.
“This research shows that racism in Australia is still common and that many people engage in racist behaviour,” said the chairman of Beyond Blue, Jeff Kennett.
The former Victorian premier was concerned about the impact of racism upon the mental health of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
“Racism, like any form of discrimination, leads to distress, which in turn can lead to depression and anxiety,” he said.
The study found Western Australia had the highest levels of discriminatory attitudes towards indigenous Australians.
Mr Fryer said that the higher than average results from Western Australia (WA) did not surprise him.
“A lot of indigenous artists have left WA because they just couldn’t cope,” he said.
Mr Fryer experienced this first hand when on a flight back from Perth, he was the only one not offered an alcoholic drink. He believes this was due to his heritage.
The study also revealed that 42 per cent of participants believed that Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders are given an unfair advantage by the government.
While 37 per cent believed they were lazy.
Mr Fryer said that he had been experienced being called lazy because of his heritage.
But because he comes across as articulate and well-educated, many people would not consider him as an indigenous Australian.
“‘Well you’re not a real blackfella’, they’d say.”
The data also suggests that other Australians are suspicious of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders in shops and stores, with 21 per cent saying that they would keep and eye on an indigenous person while they were shopping.
Beyond Blue CEO, Georgie Harman said many people harbour an unconscious bias towards indigenous Australians.
“Unfortunately, many people don’t realise when they are discriminating against indigenous people and therefore, don’t understand the profound effect it has on how they feel about themselves,” she said.
This attitude was mirrored in the result for Australians attitudes towards changing discriminatory practices, with 28 per cent saying it wasn’t a priority.
On Tuesday, Beyond Blue launched the Invisible Discriminator campaign to show the psychological effect that subtle racism has on indigenous Australians.
Editor’s Note: The Australian government is now running the following ad on television.
Original Article
Share ThisImmortality: Trust us, you wouldn’t like it.
It’s a comforting message, in a sour-grapes sort of way. It sounds wise and mature, suggesting that we put aside childish dreams and accept once and for all that there can be no vital Veg-O-Matic that slices mortality and dices infirmity. Gerontologists like it, being particularly eager to put on a respectable front and escape the whiff of snake oil that clings to the field of life extension.
In 1946 the newly founded Gerontological Society of America cited, in the first article of the first issue of its Journal of Gerontology, the need to concern ourselves to add “not more years to life, but more life to years.” The dictum was famously sharpened 15 years later by Robert Kennedy when he told the delegates at the first White House Conference on Aging “We have added years to life; it is time to think about how we add life to years.” Political theorist and futurist Francis Fukuyama was particularly eloquent but hardly alone when he warned two decades ago that if we maintain our obsession with extending life at all costs, society may “increasingly come to resemble a giant nursing home.”
Robert Holland / Getty Images
Around the same time noted aging researchers S. Jay Olshansky and Bruce Carnes wrote in ominous tones that we were treading into the realm of “manufactured survival time,” warning that “this success has been accompanied by a rise in frailty and disability in the general population.1 This is a consequence that neither the medical community nor society was prepared for.” A celebrated article by epidemiologist E.M. Gruenberg in 1977 bemoaned the “failures of success”: “at the same time that persons suffering from chronic diseases are getting an extension of life, they are also getting an extension of disease and disability.”
This message is particularly dire if lifespans rise over extended periods of time—which they have done. In 1936 Louis Dublin, the chief actuary of Metropolitan Life teamed up with the esteemed mathematical demographer Alfred Lotka, to calculate the maximum life expectancy theoretically possible. They came up with a limit of 69.93 years. This limit was exceeded by women in Iceland five years later, by American women in 1949, and by American men in 1979. Life expectancies have been increasing at a steady rate of 3 months per year for the past 175 years, and on average, expert calculations of the maximum possible human lifespan have been exceeded an average of five years after being made. In some cases, they had already been overtaken by events somewhere in the world at the time they were issued.
Also in Mortality Why Aging Isn’t Inevitable By Josh Mitteldorf & Dorion Sagan Humans age gradually, but some animals do all their aging in a rush at the end of life, while others don’t age at all, and a few can even age backward. The variety of aging patterns in nature should be...READ MORE
But what if long lifespans don’t necessarily mean more years of disability? At the turn of the present century George C. Williams, celebrated evolutionary theorist of aging, attacked what he termed the “Tithonus error.” Tithonus, son of a nymph, lover of a goddess, was granted the boon of eternal life. But the further gift of eternal youth was unattainable. Frail, bent, and suffering he shriveled at last into a cricket. Williams’ argument was almost a trivial one, from the perspective of evolutionary biology: The very aged are rare, hence there is unlikely to have been any evolutionary pressure to shape the timing of the end of life, in the way that the timing of early development has been shaped. What we see as the “natural lifespan” is simply a balance between the wear of daily life and the limited ability of repair mechanisms to undo it fully. Shifting the balance, either by increasing the rate or efficiency of repair, or by reducing the rate of damage, must surely stretch out the whole process. Actually, it should do even better than that: The end stage, where most of our suffering is found, ought to be the least susceptible to extension, since it requires maintaining the function of an organism that is failing on multiple levels. This is consistent with the observation that, while mortality rates have been falling at all ages, the pace of progress has been slowest at advanced ages. Youth, according to this argument, should take up a greater portion of our lifespan over time. In 1980 the medical researcher James Fries called this process “compression of morbidity.”
Americans in 2010 could expect to live 80 percent of their lives without major disability, including well over half of their years after age 65.
The morbidity-compression concept—simultaneously a description, a prediction, and a target for future health policy—received a tremendous boost in the mid 1980s when the economic historian Robert Fogel discovered that a tremendous amount of it had already taken place without anyone having noticed. When he started examining the medical records of Union Army Civil War volunteers and veterans he found a staggering level of what we would now consider to be age-related degenerative disease—arthritis, heart disease, cancer—at ages when it would now be exceedingly rare. Of the recruits under age 20, nearly all volunteers, who were examined for service in the Union Army in 1861, 16 percent were rejected on medical grounds. This rose to nearly a quarter of those aged 20 to 25, and nearly half of those in their 30s.
By comparison, the generation of American men who fought in World War II and are now in their 90s lived, on average, about eight years longer than their great grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, once they reached adulthood. Those among the 19th-century men who did survive into what we now call middle age also spent more of their years suffering chronic, debilitating illnesses. Specifically, the average age of onset of arthritis was 64.7 years for the WWII veterans, but only 53.7 years for the Civil War veterans. Heart disease started nearly 10 years later, and chronic respiratory disease more than 11 years.
Comparing the Union Army results with late 20th-century health surveys has led to estimates of disability-rate declines of 0.6 percent per year, accelerating to 1.7 percent per year in the 1980s and 1990s.2 These trends have continued into the 21st century, at least according to some measures. According to the 1985 United States Health Interview Survey 23 percent of Americans aged 50 to 64 reported limitations on daily activities due to chronic illness; in 2014, this was down to 16 percent. At ages 65 and higher, the percentages were 39 percent and 33 percent.
Library of Congress; Monkey Business Images / Shutterstock
A recent study by University of Southern California gerontologist Eileen Crimmins and her colleagues looked at the change in disability-free life expectancy—the average number of years that we would expect someone to live free of major limitations due to long-term illness. From 1970 to 2010 American males gained about 7.7 years of life expectancy at birth, of which nearly half (3.2) could be expected to be disability free. Perhaps more immediately relevant, Americans aged 65 saw their remaining life expectancy increase from 15 to 19 years, with 2.5 of the 4 extra years being disability-free. (This averages the results for men and women; women gained fewer years overall than men, but the relative gains between disability-free and disabled years are similar.) The largest increase in healthy years after age 65 came in the last decade. Americans in 2010 could expect to live 80 percent of their lives without major disability, including well over half of their years after age 65.
Perhaps most striking, a new study has discovered that over the past two decades the incidence of new dementia cases has dropped by 20 percent.3 Men in the United Kingdom develop dementia today at the same rate as men five years younger in the 1990s; for women the improvements have been more modest.
Imagine, now, that the trend of the last century continues another hundred years: Our 50-year-old great-grandchildren may have an average of 50 years left to live, the same span as a 30-year-old today can expect. It is not implausible that they will be similarly spry and untouched by disability. Will they really think of themselves as young, in the same way that a 30-year-old today does? Will youth extended still be youth? It is not as absurd as it may seem. When the U.S. National Institutes of Health first founded its Aging Unit—later the National Institute on Aging—in 1940, it announced the goal of research in “the problems of aging,” particularly “the period between 40 and 60 years of age.”4
On the other hand, the story of morbidity compression could be about to change. That’s because the big drivers of compression have already acted. Medical technology will continue to advance, but, for all its marvels, it has played a smaller role in compression than basic improvements in nutrition and hygiene. It turns out that much of what might have been considered normal age-related decline is strongly accelerated by disease and malnutrition early in life, even before birth. Babies of malnourished mothers, even those who received adequate nutrition after birth, are found decades later to have substantially elevated incidences of coronary heart disease, stroke, and hypertension. Survivors of childhood smallpox and whooping cough have generally higher levels of mortality in old age.
It seems clear that the wealthy part of the world has achieved the peak of benefits to be gained from increased nutrition and basic hygiene—if we have not actually gone far past on both scores. The nexus between improved nutrition and improved adult and late-life health was marked, in the past, by increasing height: Final adult height summarizes the whole record of childhood health nutrition, and the past two centuries of increased lifespans consistently tracked increases in average height. These increases have plateaued, by and large, in Japan and Western Europe, though some laggards—in particular the U.S., which used to have one of the tallest populations in the world—clearly have some space to catch up.
The massive benefits from vaccination, the elimination of leaded gasoline, and reduction of smoking are still making their way through the aging population, of course, and will likely be stretching our healthy lifespans for some time to come. Tremendous progress could still be achieved by spreading the healthful environments of wealthy countries to the rest of the world, and the healthful lifestyles of the wealthy within those countries to the rest of the population.
But beyond these effects, and especially for Western countries, morbidity compression will not be what it once was. Perhaps the most optimistic scenario for the near future of healthy aging may be what demographer Kenneth Manton has called “dynamic equilibrium.” Manton suggested that disease would not be prevented or delayed, but managed and arrested at an early stage, so that an increasing portion of the population would be living with mild disease, while fewer would suffer severe disability.
An illustration of this may be found in a recent study of the timing of disability by health economists David Cutler, Kaushik Ghosh, and Mary Beth Landrum. By their measure, expected disability-free years after age 65 expanded from 8.8 to 10.4 and disabled years actually contracted, from 8.5 to 7.8, between 1992 and 2004—with the disabled years increasingly concentrated in the period immediately preceding death. The picture looked slightly different, though, when framed in terms of “disease-free” years. Disease-free life expectancy after age 65 barely increased, from 8.0 to 8.6, while years with disease increased from 9.5 to 9.7. More disease, then, but less disability.
Diabetes was transformed early in the 20th century from a killer to a manageable chronic disease; AIDS went this way in the early 21st century. The biggest killer of all in the developed world, cardiovascular disease, may also be making this transition. Eileen Crimmins, who has generally been cautious about claims of morbidity compression, has pointed out that most of the decline in CVD mortality in the 1950s and 1960s came from disease-preventing lifestyle changes, while the hardly less remarkable reductions over the last few decades—up to 70 percent reductions in mortality in western Europe and the U.S.—were largely due to medical treatment and disease management.5
Will the fit 90-year-olds of the future need to expend the strength they have maintained to lug around the contents of a large medicine cabinet to keep them going? A recent study found that while the fraction of elderly Americans (age 65 and over) who were taking five or more prescription medications had been increasing, it seems to have stabilized in recent years at just under 40 percent. Many of the most effective treatments for age-related conditions are set-it and forget-it—hip replacements, for instance, and cardiac pacemakers. Implantable drug pumps are already in use.
We long ago got used to thinking that a person can still be youthful and healthy even when needing spectacles to see clearly, or when their survival depends on an artificial supply of insulin. The spry 90-year-olds of the future may be no different, hearing through cochlear implants and running with leg and heart muscles rebuilt with stem-cell treatments. Whatever the future of aging is, there is no sign yet of any limit to our ability to expand each of the phases of our lives.
David Steinsaltz is an associate professor of statistics at the University of Oxford. He blogs at Common Infirmities.
References
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2. Costa, D.L. Understanding the twentieth-century decline in chronic conditions among older men. Demography 37, 53-72 (2000).
3. Matthews, F.E., et al. A two decade dementia incidence comparison from the Cognitive Function and Ageing Studies I and II. Nature Communications 7 (2016). Retrieved from DOI: 10.1038/ncomms11398
4. Gilleard, C. & Higgs, P. Aging without agency: Theorizing the fourth age. Aging & Mental Health 14, 121-128 (2010).
5. Crimmins, E.M., & Beltrán-Sánchez, H. (2010). Mortality and morbidity trends: Is there compression of morbidity? The Journals of Gerontology: Social Sciences 66B, 75-86 (2011).
The lead photocollage was created with images from Dorling Kindersley / Getty Image and Vvoe / Shutterstock
This article was originally published in our “Aging” issue in May, 2016.WASHINGTON — As the transgender bathroom debate picks up steam with a new Texas-led lawsuit,
“This is just another outrageous example of President Obama trying to act like he is essentially a dictator who doesn’t have to consult, much less collaborate, with local and state officials" and Congress, said Cornyn, the Senate’s No. 2 GOP leader, in a routine call with Texas reporters Wednesday.
The so-called transgender bathroom |
, and sociability. Adapting new methods, we reveal that virtually all individuals irrationally inflated their moral qualities, and the absolute and relative magnitude of this irrationality was greater than that in the other domains of positive self-evaluation. Inconsistent with prevailing theories of overly positive self-belief, irrational moral superiority was not associated with self-esteem. Taken together, these findings suggest that moral superiority is a uniquely strong and prevalent form of "positive illusion," but the underlying function remains unknown.Throughout his Dec. 16 news conference, President Obama came back to Russia's suspected role in the 2016 election, how the U.S. became vulnerable to that country's influence and what should be focused on going forward. (Reuters)
President Obama may hold additional availability events before leaving office on Jan. 20 and may deliver some sort of farewell address, but today's news conference offers him one of the last chances to lay out the case for what he's accomplished in office. Here's what he said:
OBAMA: All right, everybody. Good afternoon. This is the most wonderful press conference of the year. I have got a list of who has been naughty and nice to call on. But let me first make a couple of quick points and then I will take your questions.
Typically I use this year-end press conference to review how far we have come over the course of the year. Today, understandably, I'm going to talk a little bit about how far we have come over the past eight years.
As I was preparing to take office, the unemployment rate was on its way to 10 percent. Today it is at 4.6 percent, the lowest in nearly a decade. We've seen the longest streak of job growth on record, and wages have grown faster over the past few years than at any time in the past 40.
When I came into office, 44 million people were uninsured. Today we have covered more than 20 million of them. For the first time in our history, more than 90 percent of Americans are insured.
In fact, yesterday was the biggest day ever for health care.gov, more than 670,000 Americans signed up to get covered, and more are signing up by the day.
We've cut our dependence on foreign oil by more than half, doubled production of renewable energy, enacted the most sweeping reforms since FDR to protect consumers and prevent a crisis on Wall Street from punishing main street ever again.
None of these actions stifled growth as critics are predicted. Instead, the stock market has nearly tripled.
Since I signed Obamacare into law, our businesses have added more than 15 million new jobs, and the economy undoubtedly more durable than it was in the days when we relied on oil from unstable nations and banks took risky bets with your money.
Add it all up, and last year the poverty rate fell at the fastest rate in almost 50 years, while the median household income grew at the fastest rate on record. In fact, income gains were actually larger for households at the bottom and the middle than for those at the top.
And we have done all this while cutting our deficits by nearly two-thirds, and protecting vital investments that grow the middle class.
In foreign policy, when I came into office we were in the midst of two wars. Now nearly 180,000 troops are down to 15,000. Bin Laden, rather than being at large, has been taken off the battlefield, along with thousands of other terrorists.
Over the past eight years no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed an attack on our homeland that was directed from overseas. Through diplomacy, we have ensured Iran cannot obtain a nuclear weapon without going to war with Iran.
We opened up a new chapter with the people of Cuba. And we have brought nearly 200 nations together around a climate agreement that could very well save this planet for our kids.
And almost every country on Earth sees America as stronger and more respected today than they did eight years ago. In other words, by so many measures our country is stronger and more prosperous than it was when we started. It is a situation that I'm proud to leave for my successor. And it's thanks to the American people, to the hard work that you have put in, the sacrifices you have made for your families and your communities, the businesses that you started or invested in, and the way you looked out for one another. And I could not be prouder to be your president.
Of course, to tout this progress does not mean that we are not mindful of how much more there is to do. In this season in particular, we are reminded that there are people who are still hungry, people who are still homeless, people who still have trouble paying the bills or finding work after being laid off.
There are communities that are still mourning those who have been stolen from us by senseless gun violence, and parents who still are wondering how to protect their kids.
OBAMA: And after I leave office I intend to continue to work with organizations and citizens doing good across the country on these and other pressing issues to build on the progress that we have made.
Around the world as well, there are hotspots where disputes have been intractable, conflicts have flared up, and people, innocent people are suffering as result, and nowhere is this more terribly true than in the city of Aleppo. For years, we've worked to stop the civil war in Syria and alleviate human suffering. It has been one of the hardest issues that I've faced as president.
The world as we speak is united in horror at the savage assaults by the Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies on the city of Aleppo. We have seen a deliberate strategy of surrounding, besieging and starving innocent civilians. We've seen relentless targeting of humanitarian workers and medical personnel, entire and neighbors reduced to rubble and dust. There are continuing reports of civilians being executed. These are all horrific violations of international law.
Responsibility for this brutality lies in one place alone, with the Assad regime and its allies, Russia and Iran, and this blood and these atrocities are on their hands. We all know what needs to happen. There needs to be an impartial international observer force in Aleppo that can help coordinate an orderly evacuation through say corridors. There has to be full access for humanitarian aid, even as the United States continues to be the world's largest donor of humanitarian aid to the Syrian people. And beyond that, there needs to be a broader cease-fire that can serve as the basis for a political rather than a military solution.
That's what the United States is gonna continue to push for, both with our partners and through multilateral institutions like the U.N.
Regretfully, but unsurprisingly, Russia has repeatedly blocked the Security Council from taking action on these issues, so we're gonna keep pressing the Security Council to help improve the delivery of humanitarian aid to those who are in such desperate need and ensure accountability, including continuing to monitor any potential use of chemical weapons in Syria.
And we're gonna work in the U.N. General Assembly as well, both on accountability and to advance a political settlement because it should be clear that although you may achieve tactical victories, over the long-term, the Assad regime cannot slaughter its way to legitimacy. That's why we'll continue to press for a transition to a more representative government, and that's why the world must not avert our eyes to the terrible events that are unfolding.
The Syrian regime and its Russian and Iranian allies are trying to obfuscate the truth. The world should not be fooled and the world will not forget.
So even in a season where the incredible blessings that we know as Americans are all around us, even as we enjoy family and friends and are reminded of how lucky we are, we should also be reminded that to be an American involves bearing burdens and meeting obligations to others. American values and American ideals are what will lead the way to a safer and more prosperous 2017, both here and abroad. And by the way, you (ph) embody those values and ideals like our brave men and women in uniform and their families.
So I just want to close by wishing all of them a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.
With that, I will take some questions, and I'm gonna start with Josh Lederman of A.P.
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.
There's a perception that you're letting President Putin get away with interfering in the U.S. election and that a response that nobody knows about (inaudible) don't cut it. Are you prepared to call out President Putin by name for ordering (inaudible)? And do you agree with Hillary Clinton now says, that the hacking was actually partially responsible for her loss?
And is your administration open to correlate with Trump and his team on this issues, tarnishing (ph) the smooth transition of power that you have promised?
OBAMA: Well, first of all, with respect to the transition, I think they would be the first to acknowledge that we have done everything we can to make sure that they are successful, as I promised, and that will continue. And it's just been a few days since I last talked to the president-elect about a whole range of transition issues. That cooperation's gonna continue.
OBAMA: There hasn't been a lot of squabbling. What we've simply said is the facts, which are that based on uniform intelligence assessments, the Russians were responsible for hacking the DNC and that as a consequence, it is important for us to review all elements of that and make sure that we are preventing that kind of interference through cyber attacks in the future. That should be a bipartisan issue, that shouldn't be a partisan issue.
And my hope is that the president-elect is going to similarly be concerned with making sure that we don't have a potential foreign influence in our election process. I don't think any American wants that. And that shouldn't be a source of an argument.
I think that part of the challenge is that it gets caught up in the carryover from election season. And I think it is very important for us to distinguish between the politics of the election and the need for us as a country, both from a national security perspective but also in terms of the integrity of our election system and our democracy to make sure that we don't create a political football here.
Now, with respect to how this thing unfolded last year, let's just go through the facts pretty quickly. At the beginning of the summer, were alerted to the possibility that the DNC has been hacked. And I made (ph) an order, law enforcement, as well as our intelligence teams to find out everything about it, investigate it thoroughly to brief the potential victims of this hacking, to brief on a bipartisan basis the leaders of both the House and the Senate and the relevant intelligence committees.
And once we had clarity and certainty around what in fact had happened, we publicly announced that in fact Russia had hacked into the DNC. And at that time, we did not attribute motives or you know any interpretations of why they had done so.
We didn't discuss what the effects of it might be. We simply let people know -- the public know just as we had let members of Congress know that this had happened.
And as a consequence, all of you wrote a lot of stories about both what had happened and then you interpreted why that might have happened and what effect it was going to have on the election outcomes. We did not -- and the reason we did not was because in this hyper-partisan atmosphere, at a time when my primary concern was making sure that the integrity of the election process was not in any way damaged, at a time when anything that was said by me or anybody in the White House would immediately be seen through a partisan lens. I wanted to make sure that everybody understood we were playing this thing straight, that we weren't trying to advantage one side or another. But what we were trying to do was let people know that this had taken place.
And so if you started seeing effects on the election, if you were trying to measure why this was happening and how you should consume the information that was being leaked, that you might want to take this into account. And that's exactly how we should have handled it.
Imagine if we had done the opposite, it would become immediately just one more political scrum. And part of the goal here was to make sure that we did not do the work of the leakers for them by raising more and more questions about the integrity of the election right before the election was taking place -- at a time, by the way, when the president-elect himself was raising questions about the integrity of the election.
And finally, I think it's worth pointing out, that the information was already out. It was in the hands of Wikileaks, so that was going to come out no matter what.
What I was concerned about in particular was making sure that that wasn't compounded by potential hacking that could hamper vote counting, affect the actual election process itself.
And so in early September when I saw President Putin in China, I felt that the most effective way to ensure that that did not happen was to talk to him directly and tell him to cut it out, there were going to be some serious consequences if he did not.
And in fact, we did not see further tampering of the election process. But the leaks through Wikileaks had already occurred.
So when I look back in terms of how we handled it, I think we handled it the way it should have been handled. We allowed law enforcement and the intelligence community to do its job without political influence.
We briefed all relevant parties involved in terms of what was taking place. When we had a consensus around what had happened, we announced it, not through the White House, not through me, but rather through the intelligence communities that had actually carried out these investigations.
And then we allowed you and the American public to make an assessment as to how to weigh that going into the election.
And the truth is, is that there was nobody here who did not have some sense of what kind of effect it might have. I am finding it a little curious that everybody is suddenly acting surprised that this looked like it was disadvantaging Hillary Clinton, because you guys wrote about it every day, every single leak about every little juicy tidbit of political gossip, including John Podesta's risotto recipe.
This was an obsession that dominated the news coverage. So I do think it is worth us reflecting how it is that a presidential election of such importance, of such moment, with so many big issues at stake and such a contrast between the candidates came to be dominated by a bunch of these leaks.
What is it about our political system that made us vulnerable to these kinds of potential manipulations which, as I've said publicly before, were not particularly sophisticated. This was not some elaborate, complicated espionage scheme.
They hacked into some Democratic Party e-mails that contained pretty routine stuff, some of it embarrassing or uncomfortable because I suspect that if any of us got our emails hacked into there might be some things that we would not want suddenly appearing on the front page of a newspaper or a telecast, even if there was not anything particularly illegal or controversial about it.
And then it just took off. And that concerns me, and it should concern all of us. But the truth of the matter is, is that everybody had the information. It was out there, and we handled it the way we should have.
Now, moving forward, I think there are a couple of issues that this raises. Number one is just the constant challenge that we are going to have with cyber security throughout our economy and throughout our society.
We are a digitalized culture. And there's hacking going on every single day. There is not a company, there is not a major organization, there is not a financial institution, there is not a branch of our government were somebody is not going to be fishing for something or trying to penetrate or put in a virus or malware.
And this is why for the last eight years I have been obsessed with how do we continually upgrade our cyber security systems. And this particular concern around Russian hacking is part of a broader set of concerns about how do we deal with cyber issues being used in ways that can affect our infrastructure, affect the stability of our financial systems, and affect the integrity of our institutions like our election process.
I just received, a couple of weeks back, it wasn't widely reported on, a report from our cyber-security commission that outlines a whole range of strategies to do a better job on this. But it's difficult because it's not all housed -- the target of cyberattacks is not one entity, but it's widely dispersed and a lot of it is private, like the DNC. You know, it's not a branch of government. We can't tell people what to do.
What we can do is inform them, get best practices. What we can also do is to on a bilateral basis warn other countries against these kinds of attacks, and we've done that in the past. So just as I told Russia to stop it and indicated there will be consequences when they do it, the Chinese have in the past engaged in cyberattacks directed at our companies to steal trade secrets and proprietary technology, and I had to have the same conversation with President Xi. And what we've seen is some evidence that they have reduced but not completely eliminated these activities, partly because they can use cutouts. One of the problems with the internet and cyber issues is there's not always a return address, and by the time you catch up to it, you know, attributing what happened to a particular government can be difficult, not always provable in court, even tough our intelligence communities can make an assessment.
What we've also tried to do is to start creating some international norms about this to prevent some sort of cyber arms race because we obviously have offensive capabilities as well as defensive capabilities, and my approach is not a situation which everybody's worse off because folks are constantly attacking each other back and forth, but putting some guardrails around behavior of nation states, including our adversaries, just so that they understand that whatever they do to us, we can potentially do to them.
We do have some special challenges because oftentimes, our economy is more digitalized. It is more vulnerable partly because we're a wealthier nation and we're more wired than some of these other countries and we have a more open society and engage in less control and censorship over what happens over the internet, which is also part of what makes us special.
Last point, and the reason I'm going on here is because I know that you guys have a lot of questions about this and I addressed all of you directly about this. With respect to response, my principal goal leading up to the election was making sure that the election itself went off without a hitch, that it was not tarnished and that it did not feed any sense in the public that somehow, tampering had taken place with the actual process of voting and we accomplished that. That does not mean that we are not going to respond, it simply meant that we had a set of priorities leading up to the election that were of the utmost importance.
Our goal continues to be to send a clear message to Russia or others not to do this to us because we can do stuff to you, but it is also important for us to do that in a thoughtful, methodical way. Some of it, we do publicly. Some of it, we will do in a way that they know but not everybody will. And I know that there have been folks out there who suggests somehow that if we went out there and made big announcements and thumped our chests about a bunch of stuff, that somehow that would potentially spook the Russians.
But keep in mind that we already have enormous numbers of sanctions against the Russians. The relationship between us and Russia has deteriorated, sadly, significantly over the last several years. And so how we approach an appropriate response that increases costs for them for behavior like this in the future but does not create problems for us is something that's worth taking the time to think through and figure out. And that's exactly what we've done.
So, at a point in time where we've taken certain actions that we can divulge publicly, we will do so. There are times where the message will be directly received by the Russians and not publicized. And I should point out by the way, part of why the Russians have been effective on this is because they don't go around announcing what they're doing. It's not like Putin's gone around the world publicly saying, look what we did. Wasn't that clever? He denies it.
So the idea that somehow public shaming is gonna be effective, I think doesn't read the -- the thought process in Russia very well. OK.
QUESTION: Did Clinton lose because of the hacking?
OBAMA: I'm gonna let all the political pundits in this town have a long discussion about what happened in the election. It was a fascinating election. So, you know, I'm sure there are gonna be a lot of books written about it. I've said what I think is important for the Democratic Party going forward, rather than try to parse every aspect of the election.
And I -- I've said before, I couldn't be prouder of Secretary Clinton, her outstanding service and she's worked tirelessly on behalf of the American people and I don't think she was treated fairly during the election. I think the coverage of her and the issues was troubling, but having said that, what I've been most focused on -- appropriate for the fact I am not going to be a politician in about -- what is it, 32 days, 31, 34?
(LAUGHTER)
What I've said is that I can maybe give some counsel advice to the Democratic Party. And I think the -- the -- the thing we have to spend the most time on -- because it's the thing we have most control over -- is, how do we make sure that we're showing up in places where I think Democratic policies are needed, where they are helping, where they are making a difference, but where people feel as if they're not being heard?
And where Democrats are characterized as coastal, liberal, latte- sipping, you know, politically correct, out-of-touch folks, we have to be in those communities. And I've seen that, when we are in those communities, it makes a difference. That's how I became president. I became a U.S. Senator not just because I had a strong base in Chicago, but because I was driving downstate Illinois and going to fish fries and sitting in V.F.W. Halls and talking to farmers.
And I didn't win every one of their votes, but they got a sense of what I was talking about, what I cared about, that I was for working people, that I was for the middle class, that the reason I was interested in strengthening unions and raising the minimum wage and rebuilding our infrastructure and making sure that parents had decent childcare and family leave, was because my own family's history wasn't that different from theirs even if I looked a little bit different. Same thing in Iowa.
And so the question is, how do we rebuild that party as a whole, so that there's not a county in any state -- I don't care how red -- where we don't have a presence and we're not making the argument, because I think we have a better argument. But that requires a lot of work. You know, it's been something that I've been able to do successfully in my own campaigns.
OBAMA: It is not something I've been able to transfer to candidates in mid-terms and sort of build a sustaining organization around. That's something I would have liked to have done more of, but it's kind of hard to do when you're also dealing with a whole bunch of issues here in the White House. And that doesn't mean, though, that it can't be done, and I think there are gonna be a lot of talented folks out there, a lot of progressives who share my values, who are gonna be leading the charge in the years to come.
Michelle Kosinski (ph) of CNN.
QUESTION: Thank you.
This week we heard Hillary Clinton talk about how she thinks that the FBI director's most recent announcement made a difference in the outcome of the election. And we also just heard in an op-ed her campaign chairman talk about something being deeply broken within the FBI.
He talked about thinking that the investigation early on was lackadaisical, in his words. So what do you think about those comments? Do you think there's any truth to them? Do you think there's a danger there that they're calling into question the integrity of institutions in a similar way that Donald Trump's team has done?
And the second part to that is that Donald Trump's team repeatedly -- I guess, given the indication that the investigation of the Russian hack as well as retaliation might not be such a priority once he's in office.
So what do you think the risk is there? And are you going to talk to him directly about some of those comments he made?
OBAMA: Well, on the latter point, as I said before, the transition from election season to governance season is not always smooth. You know, it's bumpy. There are still feelings that are raw out there. There are people who are still thinking how things unfolded. And I get all that.
But when Donald Trump takes the oath of office and is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, then he has got a different set of responsibilities and considerations.
And I've said this before. I think there is a sobering process when you walk into the Oval Office. And, you know, I haven't shared previously private conversations I've had with the president-elect. I will say that they have been cordial and in some cases have involved me making some pretty specific suggestions about how to ensure that regardless of our obvious deep disagreements about policy, maybe I can transmit some thoughts about maintaining the effectiveness, integrity, cohesion of the office, our various democratic institutions, and he has listened.
I can't say that he will end up implementing, but the conversations themselves have been cordial as opposed to defensive in any way. And I will always make myself available to him just as previous presidents have made themselves available to me as issues come up.
With respect to the FBI, I will tell you, I've had a chance to know a lot of FBI agents. I know Director Comey. They take their job seriously. They work really hard. They help keep us safe and save a lot of lives.
And it is always a challenge for law enforcement when there's an intersection between the work that they are doing and the political system. It's one of the difficulties of democracy generally.
We have a system where we want our law enforcement investigators and our prosecutors to be free from politics, to be independent, to play it straight. But sometimes that involves investigations that touch on politics and particularly in this hyper-partisan environment that we've been in, everything is suspect, everything you do one way or the other.
One thing that I have done is to be pretty scrupulous about not wading into investigation decisions or prosecution decisions or decisions not to prosecute. I have tried to be really strict in my own behavior about preserving the independence of law enforcement, free from my own judgments and political assessments, in some cases. And I don't know why it would stop now.
Mike Dorney (ph) of Bloomberg.
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.
On Aleppo, your views of (ph) what happens there, the responsibility of the Russian government, the Iranian government, the Assad regime (inaudible), but do you, as president of the United States, leader of the free world, feel any personal moral responsibility now at the end of your presidency for the carnage we're all watching in Aleppo, which I'm sure disturbs you (inaudible)?
Secondly, also on Aleppo, you've again made clear your practical disagreements with (inaudible) and President-elect Trump has throughout his campaign, and he said again last night, that he wants to create safe zones in Syria. Do you feel like in this transition, you need to help him toward implementing that or is that not something you need to be doing?
OBAMA: Mike, I always feel responsible. I felt responsible when kids were being shot by snipers. I felt responsible when millions of people had been displaced. I feel responsible for murder and slaughter that's taken place in South Sudan that's not being reported on, partly because there's not as much social media being generated from there.
There are places around the world where horrible things are happening and because of my office, because I'm president of the United States, I feel responsible. I ask myself every single day, is there something I could do that would save lives and make a difference and spare some child who doesn't deserve to suffer. So that's a starting point. There's not a moment during the course of this presidency where I haven't felt some responsibility.
That's true, by the way, for our own country. When I came into office and people were losing their jobs and losing their homes and losing their pensions, I felt responsible and I would go home at night and I would ask myself, was there something better that I could do or smarter that I could be that would make a difference in their lives, that would relieve their suffering and relieve their hardship.
So with respect to Syria, what I have consistently done is taken the best course that I can to try to end the civil war while having also to take into account the long-term national security interests of the United States. And throughout this process, based on hours of meetings -- if you tallied it up, days and weeks of meetings -- where we went through every option in painful detail with maps and we had our military and we had our aid agencies and we had our diplomatic teams, and sometimes, we'd bring in outsiders who were critics of ours.
OBAMA: Whenever we went through it, the challenge was that short of putting large numbers of U.S. troops on the ground uninvited, without any international law mandate, without sufficient support from Congress, at a time when we still had troops in Afghanistan and we still had troops in Iraq and we had just gone through over a decade of war and spent trillions of dollars and when the opposition on the ground was not cohesive enough to necessarily govern a country and you had a military superpower in Russia prepared to do whatever it took to keep its (inaudible) involved and you had a regional military power in Iran that saw their own vital strategic interests at stake and were willing to maintain that territory in the absence of consent from the Syrian government and now the Russians or the Iranians.
So it may be that with Aleppo's tragic situation unfolding that in the short term, if we can get more of the tens of thousands who are still trapped there out, that so long as the world's eyes are on them and they are feeling pressure, the regime in Russia concludes that they are willing to find some arrangement, perhaps in coordination with Turkey, whereby those people can be safe.
Even that will probably be temporary, but at least it solves a short-term issue that's going to arise.
Unfortunately we are not there yet because right now we have Russians and Assad claiming that basically all the innocent civilians who were trapped in Aleppo are out when international organizations, humanitarian organizations who know better and who are on the ground, have said unequivocally that there are still tens of thousands who are trapped and prepared to leave under pretty much any conditions.
And so right now our biggest priority is to continue to put pressure wherever we can to try to get them out.
(CROSSTALK)
OBAMA: Mike, I can't have too much...
QUESTION: (OFF-MIKE) but do you see, responsibility notwithstanding, moving in that direction or help President-elect Trump move in that direction?
OBAMA: I will help President Trump -- President-elect Trump with any advice, counsel, information that we can provide so that he, once he's sworn in, can make a decision.
Between now and then, these are decisions that I have to make based on the consultations that I have with our military and the people who have been working this every single day.
Peter Alexander (ph).
QUESTION: Mr. President, thank you very much.
Can you, given all the intelligence that we have now heard, assure the public this was once and for all a free and fair election? And specifically on Russia, do you feel any obligation now as they have been insisting that this isn't the case to show the proof, as it were? They say, put your money where your mouth is and declassify some of the intelligence and the evidence that exists.
And more broadly, as it relates to Donald Trump on this very topic, are you concerned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin, especially given some of the recent cabinet picks, including his selection for secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, who toasted Putin with champagne over oil deals together? Thank you.
OBAMA: I may be getting older because these multipart questions, I start losing track.
(LAUGHTER)
OBAMA: I can assure the public that there was not the kind of tampering with the voting process that was our concern and will continue to be of concern going forward, that the votes that were cast were counted, they were counted appropriately.
We have not seen evidence of machines being tampered with, so that assurance I can provide.
That doesn't mean that we find every single, you know, potential probe of every single voting machine all across the country, but we paid a lot of attention to it. We worked with state officials, et cetera, and we feel confident that that didn't occur and that the votes were cast and they were counted.
And so that's on that point. What was the second one?
QUESTION: Say more about declassification.
OBAMA: Declassification. Look, we will provide evidence that we can safely provide, that doesn't mean, though, that it can't be done, and I think there are going to be a lot of talented folks out there, a lot of progressives who share my values who are going to be leading the charge in the years to come.
Michelle Kosinski (ph) of CNN.
QUESTION: Thank you.
This week we heard Hillary Clinton talk about how she thinks that the FBI director's most recent announcement made a difference in the outcome of the election. And we also just heard in an op-ed her campaign chairman talk about something being deeply broken within the FBI.
He talked about thinking that the investigation early on was lackadaisical, in his words. So what do you think about those comments? Do you think there's any truth to them? Do you think there's a danger there that they're calling into question the integrity of institutions in a similar way that Donald Trump's team has done?
And the second part to that is that Donald Trump's team repeatedly -- I guess, given the indication that the investigation of the Russian hack as well as retaliation might not be such a priority once he's in office.
So what do you think the risk is there? And are you going to talk to him directly about some of those comments he made?
OBAMA: Well, on the latter point, as I said before, the transition from election season to governance season is not always smooth. You know, it's bumpy. There are still feelings that are raw out there. There are people who are still thinking how things unfolded. And I get all that.
But when Donald Trump takes the oath of office and is sworn in as the 45th president of the United States, then he has got a different set of responsibilities and considerations.
And I've said this before. I think there is a sobering process when you walk into the Oval Office. And, you know, I haven't shared previously private conversations I've had with the president-elect. I will say that they have been cordial and in some cases have involved me making some pretty specific suggestions about how to ensure that regardless of our obvious deep disagreements about policy, maybe I can transmit some thoughts about maintaining the effectiveness, integrity, cohesion of the office, our various democratic institutions, and he has listened.
I can't say that he will end up implementing, but the conversations themselves have been cordial as opposed to defensive in any way. And I will always make myself available to him just as previous presidents have made themselves available to me as issues come up.
With respect to the FBI, I will tell you, I've had a chance to know a lot of FBI agents. I know Director Comey. They take their job seriously. They work really hard. They help keep us safe and save a lot of lives.
And it is always a challenge for law enforcement when there's an intersection between the work that they are doing and the political system. It's one of the difficulties of democracy generally.
We have a system where we want our law enforcement investigators and our prosecutors to be free from politics, to be independent, to play it straight. But sometimes that involves investigations that touch on politics and particularly in this hyper-partisan environment that we've been in, everything is suspect, everything you do one way or the other.
One thing that I have done is to be pretty scrupulous about not wading into investigation decisions or prosecution decisions or decisions not to prosecute. I have tried to be really strict in my own behavior about preserving the independence of law enforcement, free from my own judgments and political assessments, in some cases. And I don't know why it would stop now.
Mike Dorney (ph) of Bloomberg.
QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.
On Aleppo, your views of (ph) what happens there, the responsibility of the Russian government, the Iranian government, the Assad regime (inaudible), but do you, as president of the United States, leader of the free world, feel any personal moral responsibility now at the end of your presidency for the carnage we're all watching in Aleppo, which I'm sure disturbs you (inaudible)?
Secondly, also on Aleppo, you've again made clear your practical disagreements with (inaudible) and President-elect Trump has throughout his campaign, and he said again last night, that he wants to create safe zones in Syria. Do you feel like in this transition, you need to help him toward implementing that or is that not something you need to be doing?
OBAMA: Mike, I always feel responsible. I felt responsible when kids were being shot by snipers. I felt responsible when millions of people had been displaced. I feel responsible for murder and slaughter that's taken place in South Sudan that's not being reported on, partly because there's not as much social media being generated from there.
There are places around the world where horrible things are happening and because of my office, because I'm president of the United States, I feel responsible. I ask myself every single day, is there something I could do that would save lives and make a difference and spare some child who doesn't deserve to suffer. So that's a starting point. There's not a moment during the course of this presidency where I haven't felt some responsibility.
That's true, by the way, for our own country. When I came into office and people were losing their jobs and losing their homes and losing their pensions, I felt responsible and I would go home at night and I would ask myself, was there something better that I could do or smarter that I could be that would make a difference in their lives, that would relieve their suffering and relieve their hardship.
So with respect to Syria, what I have consistently done is taken the best course that I can to try to end the civil war while having also to take into account the long-term national security interests of the United States. And throughout this process, based on hours of meetings -- if you tallied it up, days and weeks of meetings -- where we went through |
according to Mounties.
Anyone with information on Wednesday's sexual assault can contact the Surrey RCMP detachment at 604-599-0502, or Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS to remain anonymous.
With files from CTV Vancouver's David MolkoHomosexual acts are punishable by 14 years in jail in Malawi Two gay men arrested in Malawi after getting engaged are to be charged with gross public indecency, police say. "We arrested them because they committed an offence; homosexuality in Malawi is illegal," police spokesman Davie Chingwalu told the BBC. Tiwonge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza held a traditional engagement ceremony over the weekend - believed to be the first gay couple in Malawi to do so. Homosexual acts carry a maximum prison sentence of 14 years in Malawi. The pair are being held in separate cells in Blantyre until their case is heard, Mr Chingwalu told the BBC's Network Africa programme. Engagement party dress The BBC's Raphael Tenthani in Blantyre says the pair have been seen relaxing at the police station with Mr Tiwonge still wearing the dress he wore at the engagement party. Even if you charge them for 20 years, you cannot change their sexual orientation
CEDEP's Gift Trapence
He says they may have to spend a few more nights in jail as the judiciary is on its Christmas recess and they will not be able to appear in court until next Monday. Our correspondent says Malawi is a deeply conservative society, but recently a group of campaigners came together to form a gay rights organisation, Centre for the Development of People (CEDEP). CEDEP's executive director, Gift Trapence, says the laws used to arrest the couple are invalid because they are against the Bill of Rights enshrined in the 1995 constitution. "Even if you arrest them or charge them for 20 years, you cannot change their sexual orientation. They are what they are," he told the BBC. "So the issue is in a democratic era - if you are arresting people based on their sexual orientation, are you doing justice to the fundamental human rights of these individuals?" he said. Correspondents say some voices in government have also started to call for more openness about homosexuality as the authorities try to tackle high rates of HIV/Aids.
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StumbleUpon What are these? E-mail this to a friend Printable version* Photo: Mauricio Alejo * Nobody expected the number-one-with-a-bullet rise of the music videogame—least of all the music industry. Armed with little more than crappy graphics, plastic guitars, and epic hooks, play-along titles like Guitar Hero and Rock Band have become an industry in their own right, raking in more than $2.3 billion over the past three years. Album sales fell 19 percent this past holiday season, but the thrill isn't gone—it just moved to a different platform.
The success of these games is good news for the music biz. They're breathing new life into old bands (Weezer, anyone?) and helping popularize new ones. They're even becoming a significant distribution outlet for new releases. So the record labels ought to be ecstatic, right? Nope. They're whining over licensing fees.
"The amount being paid to the music industry, even though [these] games are entirely dependent on the content we own and control, is far too small," Warner Music Group CEO Edgar Bronfman told analysts last summer. The money Warner receives for the use of its songs is "paltry," he said, and if the gamemakers don't pony up more cash, "we will not license to those games." In response, Rock Band publisher MTV Games is now boycotting Warner artists, according to a source close to the negotiations.
This is a fight no one can win. Putting the brakes on music gaming would hurt everyone in the ailing music industry. Instead of demanding greater profit participation, Warner should be angling for creative participation. Thirty years ago, Hollywood took a similar threat—the VCR—and turned it into a new source of revenue, building customer loyalty in the process. The music industry could use new games the same way—but its track record suggests that it won't.
How does this play out? Gamemakers could respond by using cover versions of songs from the Warner catalog, but Bronfman already has that move blocked. He also runs the giant music publisher Warner/Chappell, and he could deny the game companies access there, too. From Bronfman's perspective, the record labels got ripped off when MTV was sold in 1985 for $690 million ($1.4 billion in today's dollars) on the strength of videos it received for free, and then ripped off again when Apple initially denied the labels control over pricing on iTunes. He won't get fooled again.
To be fair, Bronfman has a point. Game publishers generally sign low-cost synchronization licenses—as if the music were being used incidentally, in the background. Compare this to Electronic Arts' Madden NFL franchise, from which the football league collects some 30 percent of gross revenue, and you can begin to feel his pain.
But there's better money to be made by playing together. Music games are proven earners—Aerosmith has reportedly earned more from Guitar Hero : Aerosmith than from any single album in the band's history. The labels ought to push for more such titles and integrate them into their promotional strategies. They might not maximize profit on the licensing, but who cares? With more entries to come in the play-along genre, and networked hardware to play them on, the games themselves could even become an online music retail channel to rival iTunes. Or what about a game for turntable artists? Labels could provide the stem tracks for songs (in which each instrument's recording is isolated) and let players mix their own versions. Users could vote for their favorites through online services like Xbox Live, and Warner could sell the winning mixes back to customers using the very platform on which they were created. Call it Wii-Mix.
If the company wants a case study, it need look no further than Universal Music Group. Rather than cavil over licensing fees, Universal parent company Vivendi simply bought Guitar Hero's publisher, Activision. Look, the labels know that recorded music is in irreversible decline. Warner has actually led the industry with a policy of signing bands to so-called 360 deals, in which artists give the label a cut of everything they sell, be it ringtones, merchandise, or concert tickets. On the strength of such foresight, Bronfman has styled himself as the man who will reinvent the music industry. But part of that reinvention must be an end to petty haggling over fees. Going PvP against gamemakers isn't going to solve the industry's problems. At this point, Bronfman still seems intent on dragging his business kicking and screaming back to the 20th century.
Contributing editor Jeff Howe (jeff_howe@wired.com) wrote Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business.
Start Next: Q&A: Jack Horner Wants to Re-create T. Rex from Chickens—What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Guitar Hero, Rock Band and the Rock 'n' Roll Money Machine
Guitar Hero: Gateway Drug to Six-String Bliss
Robo-Voice's Greatest Hits, or How Advanced Spy Tech Topped Music ChartsOver one million people could be stripped of their insurance coverage come September. Health law could ban low-cost plans
Part of the health care overhaul due to kick in this September could strip more than 1 million people of their insurance coverage, violating a key goal of President Barack Obama’s reforms.
Under the provision, insurance companies will no longer be able to apply broad annual caps on the amount of money they pay out on health policies. Employer groups say the ban could essentially wipe out a niche insurance market that many part-time workers and retail and restaurant employees have come to rely on.
This market’s limited-benefit plans, also called mini-med plans, are priced low because they can, among other things, restrict the number of covered doctor visits or impose a maximum on insurance payouts in a year. The plans are commonly offered by retail or restaurant companies to low-wage workers who cannot afford more expensive, comprehensive coverage.
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Depending on how strictly the administration implements the provision, the ban could in effect outlaw the plans or make them so restrictive that insurance companies would raise rates to the point they become unaffordable.
A cadre of employers and trade associations, including 7-Eleven, Lowe’s, the National Restaurant Association, the National Retail Federation and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have asked the administration to allow the plans — at least through 2014, when the insurance exchanges are set up and tax credits become available for low-wage workers.
The struggle over the provision highlights the importance of the new law’s implementation timetable and the way its parts interlock with one another. The legislation was front-loaded with consumer-friendly reforms, such as the ban on most annual limits, in hopes the law would become more popular. Polls show the legislation is supported by about half the public.
But many of the more comprehensive features of the overhaul, such as the insurance exchanges and tax credits that would help cover those who use limited-benefit plans, don’t come into play until 2014.
That means, for nearly three years, the effect of the ban on annual limits could be costly for the low-wage, seasonal or temporary workers who most often use limited-benefit plans. The full effect won’t be known until the administration releases regulations that detail how the provision will be implemented.
The ban on annual caps is designed to improve the quality of all health coverage. It will prevent patients from “maxing out” of their health coverage if they are diagnosed with catastrophic illnesses or sustain costly injuries.• Manchester United manager sent to stands on Saturday after altercation • Mourinho unhappy with referee Clattenburg over penalty incident
José Mourinho can expect no more than a one game touchline ban should he accept any charge for being sent to the stands during Manchester United’s 0-0 draw with Burnley on Saturday at Old Trafford.
José Mourinho behaving at Manchester United exactly as critics said he would | Paul Wilson Read more
The manager was unhappy with the failure of Mark Clattenburg to award a penalty after Matteo Darmian went down in the Burnley area just before half-time. Mourinho approached the referee during the interval and was sent from the touchline for whatever he said to the official.
Mourinho will find out either on Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning if he is to be charged once the Football Association receives the report of the incident.
His record is not relevant because his last offence falls outside the 12-month window the FA takes into account. If charged and found guilty Mourinho could be fined and warned as to his future conduct and so escape a touchline ban.
Mourinho’s words are thought to have been abusive towards Clattenburg and it is likely he will receive a ban. This will be a single match if he accepts the charge or two games if he does not and is found guilty.
Mourinho has until 6pm on Monday to answer a separate charge of misconduct regarding comments made about Anthony Taylor before the referee officiating United’s 0-0 draw at Liverpool on 17 October.This image is from our 300- to 400-person-strong anarchist demonstration on October 17 in the city of Chania on Crete in Greece, as part of the 10-day Mediterranean Anarchist Meetings. It was just a march — against racism, borders, capitalism, states — because the organizers decided not to escalate it into more; they want our gathering to stay focused on conversations about networks of solidarity that can escalate anarchists’ capacity to offer real-life alternatives to racism, borders, capitalism, and states toward an aspiration of “freedom for all.”
Still, it was sweet to walk the streets of Chania during a busy Friday night, handing out anarchist literature, chanting slogans in about 10 different languages, communing with comrades from around this region and Europe who put qualitative meaning to the word “comrade,” rather than some sterile slogan. And all along our route, several folks, masked up, spray painted words to match our messages, many in English (always short and to the point, yet pedantic) but most in Greek (long words in long sentences that, thanks to folks who translated for me, were politics and poetry).
The next morning, on October 18, we returned to our lengthy “assembly” (meetings of all types, decisions or not) to continue the respectful and serious debates and dialogues about how socially minded, libertarian anarchists can self-organize in this time of refugee and immigrant “crisis,” the beacon of Kobane/Rojava, and the storm clouds of profound impoverishment and escalating fascism.
* * *
If you want to get word when I put out new musings, sign up at cbmilstein.wordpress.com. Enjoy, share, reprint, post, tweet any of my writings as long as it’s free as in “free water” and “freedom.”
(Photo by Cindy Milstein, Chania, Greece, October 2015.)Out of all the games to get patched today, the last thing I was expecting to see was a 1GB patch for Quake Live.
As it turns out, I wasn't the only one. But what nobody saw coming was the fact that the game is no longer free-to-play — and that's not the only disturbing change that's been unleashed on Quake fans this morning.
Without warning or provocation, Quake Live — originally the browser-based free-to-play conversion of the iD multiplayer classic before its re-release, and eventual exclusivity on Steam last year — has become a US$10 game on Steam.
The reaction from the Quake community has been instant and palpable. "You have to be kidding me. You killed Quake," one thread reads. "I Want my MONEY BACK," screams another. Another suggests players move over to the Melbourne-made arena shooter Reflex.
But apart from suddenly adding a US$10 entry price for a game that has been free-to-play for years — something it arguably needs, considering the extreme skill ceiling of high movement, high intensity shooters targeting only PC players — the most grating aspect about this morning's update was the way it has wiped players' friends lists, statistics, and even settings in some instances.
"So my old user name is gone, my clans are gone, the match browser is absolutely useless, everything looks all ****** up," one user complains. "You absolutely 100%, undeniably just destroyed THE greatest FPS ever created. It is completely ruined. You WILL be giving me my 10 dollars back. I guarantee you you will be giving me that money back. And I will be going back to Quake 3 now."
"There's no possible way I can thank person or a team who purged, truncated, nullified the entire statistics, awards and progress we've earned during past 5 years," another seething fan posted. "What the actual hell were you thinking? Oh, let's start from scratch - 5 years is nothing. Old nicknames and clans? Screw it, we'll give them steam achievements!
The Quake forums on Steam isn't a happy place to be.
At the time of writing there's no stickied threads on the Steam forums outlining any changes or information, and the link for the forums on the Quake Live site is returning a "file not found" error.
For a community that must rank up there in terms of sheer devotion, this seems to have come completely out of the blue. Perhaps the only positive out of all of this is that those who added Quake Live to their Steam account when it was free won't have to pay for the game twice — although if you lost all your preferences, clans and stats that might not be much of a saving grace, particularly if you forked out money for a premium or pro account.
Update: The developers have since posted an update on the Steam forums announcing the "Quake Live Steamworks Launch", a post which leads with the note that iD has "retired our old launcher and services in favour of integrating a robust array of Steamworks alternatives", while old subscriptions have also been shut down.
"Steam accounts are now used for all player interactions. Players may now use their Steam display name and profile avatar in-game, and still uniquely identify players by SteamId and Profile pages," the post reads. "Steam Statistics will track your progress in-game, and you will instantly be awarded achievements as you earn them, rather than as matches are completed. Improve your teamplay communication by chatting with players using our new Voice Chat. As you play online you can use the player admin menu to select players and send them Friend Invites, and right click on your friends in the Friend List to view their Statistics and Achievements progress."
The post goes on to say that "all players now have the same benefits and features in-game" and that any users with "an active Pro subscription" can contact customer support for assistance if Quake Live was not added to their Steam account.
It doesn't answer any of the users complaints though: while there are immeasurable benefits porting over to the Steamworks API, it also means that people who have stuck with the game through the browser conversion and the upheaval involved have now had all their history and hard work wiped clean.
It also means those playing on Linux or GNU are still lacking support — and while that's inevitably a very small percentage of any game's player base, it's another group of Quake fans who are increasingly feeling left out of something they love.(Photo Illustration: NRO)
EDITOR’S NOTE: The following is Jonah Goldberg’s weekly “news”letter, the G-File. Subscribe here to get the G-File delivered to your inbox on Fridays.
Dear You Guys (I apologize for this break in protocol. Normally I would begin with the traditional salutation of “Dear Reader.” But now that “you guys” is under assault, I felt this was, quite literally, the least I could do),
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#ad#If I’ve made one point over the last 20 years, it’s that you can never put too much cheese on anything involving meat. Coming in a close second is that the reason I’m a conservative is that I believe conservatism and libertarianism are only partial philosophies of life. Obviously, this is even more the case for libertarianism than it is for conservatism, but both schools of thought set relatively clear boundaries for what politics should touch. Not so for what we call liberalism.
The progressive vision sees all of mankind as clay to be molded, sheep to be herded, a third-grade diorama to be diorama’d. There are no safe harbors from politics because the personal is political.
The problem with saying “the personal is political” is twofold: You politicize what is personal (“Everyone must celebrate my lifestyle!”) and you personalize the political (“Your opposition to the minimum wage hurts my feelings!”).
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This is how you un-think yourself out of a civilization; When politics becomes a fashion choice and fashion becomes political. If you wear your politics on your sleeve, it usually means you don’t keep them in your brain where they belong.
The progressive vision sees all of mankind as clay to be molded, sheep to be herded, a third-grade diorama to be diorama’d.
This is at least partly why so much of what passes for politics these days is really lifestyle branding. I loved David Brooks’s BoBos In Paradise, but its biggest flaw was in underestimating how much of the so-called bohemian-bourgeois lifestyle came pre-loaded with very political features. In 1997 Brooks wrote in The Weekly Standard that “one of the striking things about Burlington [Vermont] is that it is relatively apolitical.” I really don’t think that was true. More likely: Burlington was — and is — so uniformly liberal that even an astute observer might confuse stultifying political conformity for apoliticalness (not a word, I know, but like they said in Fast and Furious 3, you get my drift).
It’s telling that when Phil Griffin predicted MSNBC would overtake Fox News by 2014 (Stop laughing!). He said he wanted to do it by turning MSNBC into a “lifestyle” network. “It’s a mistake for us to limit ourselves to news,” he told The New Republic. Instead, he wanted to build up something he dubbed, “the MSNBC lifestyle.” This is the sort of thinking you fall into when you can’t see where politics ends and “lifestyle” — i.e., life — begins.
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I’m not a big fan of generational stereotyping, but it’s fair to say that a large number of Millennials constitute the first big cohort of kids to be fully raised within this lifestyle-ized politics.
What’s been the effect? Well, funny enough, I have a theory about that.
There’s a lot of evidence that being too sanitary, i.e. too clean, causes allergies. If you’re not exposed to dog hair, dirt, bugs, nuts, CHUDs early in life, your immune system doesn’t know how to recognize these allergens later on and deal with them in a healthy way. It turns out if you give babies peanut butter, they are much, much less likely to get peanut allergies when they get older. Unfortunately for my kid’s generation, this news came too late. And while she doesn’t have peanut allergies herself, enough kids do at her school that all you have to do is whisper “peanut butter” and the place becomes like that scene in Monsters Inc. when the creature has a human sock stuck to his back (“23-19! We’ve got a 23-19!”).
As I’ve been arguing for quite a while, I think America is going through a kind of autoimmune crisis. We’re increasingly allergic to our own civilization and as a result we’re attacking once-healthy organs of the body politic.
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Frankly, I have trouble seeing all this “trigger warning” shinola (no, wait, the other stuff I always confuse for shinola) in any other context.
Consider this:
“America is the land of opportunity,” “There is only one race, the human race” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” are among a long list of alleged microaggressions faculty leaders of the University of California system have been instructed not to say. These so-called microaggressions — considered examples of subconscious racism — were presented at faculty leader training sessions held throughout the 2014-15 school year at nine of the 10 UC campuses. The sessions, an initiative of UC President Janet Napolitano, aim to teach how to avoid offending students and peers, as well as how to hire a more diverse faculty.
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Now, if you suffer heart palpitations, feel light-headed, or in some other way manifest symptoms of panic because you hear that “America is the land of opportunity” or “there is only one race, the human race” you have an allergy to America and its ideals.
The danger is that if we cater to these allergies, they become worse. “A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure,” Orwell observed, “and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.” We fail our kids by giving them these allergies and then fail them all the more completely by catering to them.
Miss Piggy America
Anyway, as I was saying, progressivism sees no safe harbor from politics because it doesn’t see politics as distinct from lifestyle. There is no limiting principle for what passes for liberalism, because liberalism has simply become defined as whatever liberals believe in today. Hence the once-gold standard of liberal thought — “there is no race but the human race” — is now offensive and should be avoided lest it set off some kid’s allergies (a point of view I could better understand if there were a lot of skinheads in the classroom).
One upshot of this that drives me batty is the injection of politics into areas that should remain politics-free. To pick examples near my heart, Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica were corrupted by politics. A few years ago, the Children’s Television Workshop started mucking around with Cookie Monster. Suddenly Cookie Monster was talking about how “cookies are only a sometimes food.” This is true — for humans. But for it to be true of Cookie Monster is to erase his identity. As I wrote at the time:
Since my copy of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is in storage, let me explain by paraphrasing Hannibal Lecter’s famous dialogue with Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs. Imagine Lecter isn’t a superhuman cannibalistic serial killer and that, instead of being a doe-eyed feminist naif in the FBI, Ms. Starling is a doe-eyed feminist naif at the Children’s Television Workshop. Lecter: “First principles, Clarice. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this creature you seek? Starling: He entertains children... Lecter: “No! That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What need does he serve by entertaining children? Starling: Social acceptance? Personal frustration? Lecter: No: He craves. That’s his nature. And what does he crave? Make an effort to answer. Starling: Food? Lecter: No! He is not a “food monster!” He is a cookie monster! But not according to the well-meaning social engineers of PBS. After three decades, they’ve announced he’s not a Cookie Monster at all. In the interests of teaching kids not to be gluttons, CTW has transformed Cookie Monster into just another monster who happens to like cookies. His trademark song, “C is for Cookie” has been changed to “A Cookie Is a Sometimes Food.” And this is a complete and total reversal of Cookie Monster’s ontology, his telos, his raison d’être, his essential Cookie-Monster-ness. If the Cookie Monster is no longer a cookie monster, what is he? Why didn’t they just name him “Phil: The Monster Who Sometimes Likes to Eat a Cookie”?
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(I should note that it is my understanding they didn’t ultimately change Cookie Monster’s song.)
A bit further from my heart is the more recent case of Miss Piggy. Someone thought it would be clever to give her a feminist-icon award. The stupidity of this is not infuriating in of itself. People are free to make fools of themselves and such antics will not hinder the arrival of the Sweet Meteor of Death so much as make it that much more welcome.
But what is infuriating is the way MSNBC handled its interview with Miss Piggy. Anchor Irin Carmon, sitting next to Gloria Steinem, asked a man’s hand wrapped in cloth that resembles a pig whether “she” was pro-choice. Miss Piggy responded, “I am pro — I am pro-everything.”
Now, I have some sympathy for the felt pig (Not to be confused with the poignant children’s book about bestiality, Sympathy for the Felt Pig.). Once asked the question, it would have been difficult to answer in a way that wouldn’t throw her into the abortion debate (though hardly impossible). But only someone who lives in the lifestyle bubble of MSNBC liberalism would ask a character for children whether she was pro-choice or not. Still, I would respect Carmon so much more if she had the courage of her gauzy convictions and followed up with, “Are you for any restrictions on abortion, or do you believe it is your right to have your piglets vacuumed from your belly right up until the day before they’re born?”
But no. Being pro-choice is such a sunny and uplifting thing it’s of a piece with being “pro-everything.”
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I would be just as disgusted if a Fox News anchor asked Miss Piggy, “Are you pro-life?” For that matter, I’d be enraged if over at CNN Jake Tapper asked Spongebob Squarepants what he thought of Caitlyn Jenner or if Chuck Todd grilled Fozzy Bear about Dennis Hastert. Tonight on Special Report: Bret Baier sits down with Barney the Dinosaur and asks him whether Barack Obama is losing the War on Terror.
People decry a polarized, politicized country and then they go and politicize things that don’t need to be politicized. Football is great, until some yatch starts telling you that such violent ground-acquisition games are in fact a crypto-fascist metaphor for nuclear war. Few things make me want to downgrade an actress more than hearing them explain that their moving portrayal of a limbless ballerina demonstrates why we need to pass the Lilly Ledbetter Act.
When everything is considered political, the totality of life is politicized. And that’s just a clunky way of describing totalitarianism.
The whole point of a free society is to reduce the number of things that are political, particularly at the national level. When everything is considered political, the totality of life is politicized. And that’s just a clunky way of describing totalitarianism.
Various & Sundry
Thursday on the Acela coming back from New York, I started out thinking I would write a column on why I think the fall of Baghdad is coming. But, I got distracted by a different argument and that became the column. Still, I don’t think we will do anything serious about ISIS until Baghdad is in flames. Lots of friends on the right talk about how if we just recreated the techniques of the surge, arming the Sunni tribes etc., we could win without putting too many boots in the ground. I don’t think that option is still available to us. The Sunnis have every reason not to trust us, never mind the Shia leadership in Baghdad. And anything that could overcome their doubts is not an option for this administration. Indeed, it’s not that Obama hasn’t been given strategies to defeat ISIS, it’s that he doesn’t want a strategy to defeat ISIS because he doesn’t want to pay the associated costs. I certainly understand the reluctance, I even share it. The problem is that ISIS is counting on it. I don’t enjoy saying it, but I think a bloodbath is coming. When we see helicopters fleeing Baghdad, crammed full of Americans, we’ll get serious, but probably not before that.
Zoë Update: It’s been quite a week for the Mid Atlantic’s Dog (I figure it’s too soon for Zoë to go for Jasper’s title of America’s Dog). My wife and daughter took Zoë and both cats (the good cat and my wife’s cat) to the vet. Zoë in good shape. She now weighs 60 pounds (quite a difference from when she almost wasted away from parvo) and has tested negative for all the bad things. Except, she did test positive for the anti-bodies for Lyme disease (which doesn’t necessarily mean she has Lyme disease). The vet wants to do a follow-up test to make sure she’s okay. But they want us to collect a urine sample. This seems as easy as getting sample of Vladimir Putin’s back hair.
In other news, on Monday she caught a chipmunk. When I saw her come out from the woods with it, I assumed she’d already killed it. But no. She was merely looking for an open field to play with it, free of any possible chipmunk escape routes. It was a terrible scene when she dropped the critter on the ground and it kept leaping up to attack Zoë’s face, not least because Zoë clearly thought the chipmunk’s fight for its life was so hilarious. Fortunately — with the help of Buckley Carlson’s (brother of Tucker) dogs as distraction, I managed to save the critter’s life. Future historians may one day condemn me for it if it one day becomes the Hitler of chipmunks.
I was in New York Thursday to appear on Outnumbered, which is visually like putting a rotten egg in the middle of four Fabergé eggs.
I’m going back to NYC this weekend to be on The Greg Gutfeld Show starring Greg Gutfeld. Sunday night at 10:00.
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The Fair Jessica had a great op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Monday.
Once again your humble servant was ahead of the curve.
I spend a shocking percentage of my life talking to dogs I don’t know when they stick their heads out of car windows. So I appreciated this.
Man opens five beers at once
Iguana clogs toilet bowl
Hand print shows how we’re all crawling in bacteria
Deep-fried Slim-Fast bars
Deep-fried Starbucks coffee
Hot dog–stuffed Pizza Hut crust
Goat babies in pajamas
The hills are alive… with the sound of Angela Merkel.
Clash of the Titans! Childhood icons Minnie Mouse and Hello Kitty fight it out in Times Square
Champion air guitar kangaroo
Game of Thrones coloring book coming to a store near you!
Man sues actress, claiming her “intense stares” on TV caused “spiritual damage”
Meet “the world’s happiest dog,” constantly smiling despite illnesses
Assault by pizza slice
Fawn over the world’s smallest baby deer
Guess the tarot cards didn’t predict this guy’s misfortune
Argentine province mandates hospitals employ clowns
Romanian cat hired as communications director
Dog to owners: you may NOT have the lobster
Taco Bell’s on fleek: fast-food chain keeping up on youth slang
Chimpanzee happy hourWe adopted Xena, along with her sister Xara, a little over two and a half years ago. They came as a pair from the local ferret shelter. Before that they had been adopted from the same pet store by a military man who could not keep them. He had been deployed to the Middle East and had no one here in Las Vegas to care for them. The pet store adoption papers put them at about 2 years old. They were bonded and inseparable. Not that we would ever think to do anything of the sort.
I called Xena my little warrior princess because of her name. She really didn’t live up to it. Aside from chomping my thumb twice while adjusting to her new home she rarely fought with her sister nor with her new baby brother when we adopted him a year later. She left putting the new boy in place to Xara. No, Xena was more princess than Xara was. After eating she would always find the nearest blankie and rub her face over it a few times. My wife and I figured she was just getting the crumbs off face like any proper lady should.
Xena was the caretaker of the toy stash. Any time we moved the toys she was the one that ran around to make sure each was put back in its place. She even chased around a water bottle or two at 3am, much to the annoyance of my sleeping wife.
Lately though she started to slow down. We chalked it up to her getting up in years. Then a trip to the vet a little under a year ago let us know she had insulinoma. Common in ferrets, especially for her age. As time passed she slowed down a bit more, slept a bit longer, snugged her sister more often, and put up with the boy invading their cuddle puddle as much as she ever did.
But last week Xena got really, really slow. She had runny poops. Another trip to the vet confirmed what we suspected. Her insulinoma had advanced and we needed to up her dose. She was down from 1.6lbs to 1.1lbs. The vet said the prednisone would help with her GI problems which should increase her appetite.
It didn’t.
I didn’t notice.
Two days ago as I was rounding up the kidlets to put them to bed before I myself went to sleep I found 3 very dark, very runny poops behind the igloo, Xena’s favorite out-of-the-cage sleeping spot. She was pooping blood, lots of it. I bundled her up, left for the vet’s and forgot my keys in the house. In the end my wife drove us down.
Xena was down to 0.8lbs, 1/2 her normal weight. Our normal vet, DrK, didn’t think she had a good chance. I thought now that we knew she hadn’t been eating if we syringe fed her, made sure she got some food and liquids, she might bounce back. If we could get her blood glucose levels up we can tackle the other problems. So I decided to take her home. We had instructions to feed her every few hours as long as she accepted the food. But if she didn’t perk up by morning to bring her back in as she probably would not make it much longer.
That night my wife fed her every few hours as I slept. By the time we got home I had been up almost 26 hours. After several hours of sleep we traded off. I held Xena and fed her with a syringe every few hours. But I could see the decline. She was moving less. She was starting to fight the feeding more. By morning it was clear, she wasn’t going to pull through.
So the morning of March 8th I let my wife know I think it was time to let her go. I say it that way because I’m the one who had to try one more night, who couldn’t give up the day before. I made sure Xara got to snug her sister, and Xander got to see Xena, before we left. We arrived at the vet’s office, held her tight for a little while longer, then held her as she passed.
Dook in peace, my warrior princess. Be free of pain. I’ll take care of your sister as best I can. I’ll do better.
AdvertisementsThe Syrian Arab Army’s “Tiger Forces” – in coordination with the SAA’s 87th Brigade of the 11th Tank Division, the National Defense Forces (NDF), the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), and Liwaa Assoud Al-Jabal (Lions of the Mountain Brigade) – continued their offensive inside the northern countryside of the Al-Ghaab Plains, capturing more territory from the Islamist rebels of Jaysh Al-Fateh (Army of Conquest).
On Saturday morning, reinforcements from the Syrian Armed Forces entered the battle for the Al-Ghaab Plains from their positions at Jubb Al-Ahmar in order to launch an assault on Jaysh Al-Fateh’s two largest factions – Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham and the Syrian Al-Qaeda organization “Jabhat Al-Nusra” – at the imperative hilltop of Jubb Al-Za’rzur.
Following their arrival to the contested town of Al-Bahsa, the reinforcements from the Syrian Armed Forces broke-away to the northwest, where they launched a powerful assault on Harakat Ahrar Al-Sham, Jabhat Al-Nusra, and Liwaa Suqour Al-Ghaab’s (Hawks of the Al-Ghaab Brigade) defensive positions at Jubb Al-Za’zur, killing an estimated 20 enemy combatants before they were able to impose full control over the |
a woman from Palatine remained behind bars Monday in DuPage County, charged with multiple felonies following an attempted traffic stop of a stolen vehicle Saturday.
Nicholas Stafford, 25, is charged with aggravated fleeing and eluding, possession of a stolen vehicle, residential burglary and possession of a stolen license plate.
Sylwia Kopacz, 28, of the 1000 block of Inverrary Lane, Palatine, is charged with criminal trespass to a vehicle and resisting a police officer.
Authorities said tactical narcotics officers from the DuPage sheriff's department were near Lisle's Four Lakes apartments on Saturday when they recognized a vehicle that was reported stolen in Palatine.
Officers attempted to stop the car, authorities said, but Stafford and Kopacz crashed the vehicle and fled on foot.
Roughly 12 hours later, deputies said they caught Stafford burglarizing a home in the area of Riverview Road near Lisle. Sheriff's deputies arrested Stafford, who was charged with the residential burglary. Later that evening Kopacz was taken into custody and also was charged.
Stafford is being held on $230,000 bail and Kopacz is being held on $20,000 bail.If you have ever been looking for a job I’m sure asked yourself: “What can I do to make my resume stand out and get an employer to seriously consider me for a job”? If you Googled the term “resume”, you know that there’s a dizzying array of information and advice out there about what works best in putting something together that presents you best. How do you make sense of it all? I’m going to make it easy for you - I have looked at well over 50,000 resumes and talk daily with Recruiters and HR Directors who are often the ones making the first pass at your resume. No matter your experience level or what kind of job you’re looking for, these are the most important “insider tips” you will need to know and do:
The “one-size fits all” approach won’t cut it in a marketplace of increasingly specialized needs. So plan on having several versions of your resume adjusted for the different jobs you are applying for. Include ways you can make an immediate contribution to the organization that reflects the homework you should be doing about the organization you’re applying to. Make sure that you – and at least one other person you trust - carefully review your resume and adjust it to contain the “key words” that recruiters will be searching for. Don’t worry about an objective - employers will skip over this, or worse, will screen your resume out based on an objective that is not a perfect match for the job they are hiring for. Instead let your experience, skills and results-driven descriptions make the case for you. “Space equals importance”, so put the most critical information first and spend more time and space talking about the skills, experiences, and results that are directly related to the job you are applying for. Avoid all complicated fonts or design elements. To be considered an applicant, you will likely be uploading your resume to an applicant tracking system (ATS) on a company or third-party web site. These systems have a difficult time deciphering elaborate fonts or design elements and if your resume can’t be read easily, it won’t be read at all. Quantify whenever possible. We live in a metrics driven work culture and it’s no longer enough to state that you increased sales or productivity, you need to back it up with quantifiable data whenever possible. Check your resumes for errors of fact, typos, formatting woes or omissions. After you checked it and before you send it to an employer, let a trusted person in your network review it as well. One inaccuracy or misspelling could cost you a second look. Omit any unnecessary, or potentially controversial, information, including sexual orientation, religious or political affiliations. It’s illegal for employers to ask for this information and irrelevant to whether you are a strong candidate for the job. “Size matters” and no one has the time to spend a long time reviewing a resume. Keep the resume to one or two pages depending on your experience. If your resume is more than a page, be sure to include your name and email contact on subsequent pages and do your best early on to make sure the recruiter will want to read more!Embraer, the world’s third-largest aircraft maker, is in the midst of a graft storm in India.
The Sao Paulo-based company is reportedly being probed by the US justice department for allegedly paying bribes to middlemen to secure an Indian government defence contract. The firm had inked a $208-million, three-aircraft deal with India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation in 2008.
The planes were to be equipped with indigenously built, airborne early-warning and control system (AEW&C) radars. The first of the three was delivered in 2011 and the remaining in 2013.
“I am not going to give a knee-jerk reaction and just make a statement based on rumours,” India’s defence minister Manohar Parrikar said about the alleged payoffs. “I have asked for a report which will be submitted on Monday, and if the issues are of a criminal nature, then we can forward this case to the CBI for a criminal investigation and if there are just procedural issues then we can do an internal investigation.”
Embraer has been under investigation by the United States justice department since 2010 for alleged violations of the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The probe began when a contract between the Brazilian firm and the Dominican Republic raised suspicion. The investigation was later expanded to business dealings with eight other countries.
The Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo first reported that the US government had launched a probe into bribes allegedly paid by Embraer to middlemen for “deals concluded in Saudi Arabia and India.” India does not allow the use of middlemen in defence deals.
The higher echelons of India’s defence establishment have frequently been mired in corruption scandals. In 2013, the government launched a probe into allegations of kickbacks paid to middlemen in a Rs3,600-crore ($542 million) helicopter deal with AgustaWestland, a subsidiary of the Italian government-owned Finmeccanica SpA.
In 2010, the Indian government and AgustaWestland had signed a Rs3,546-crore deal to buy 12 AW-101 helicopters for the Indian Air Force to replace the Soviet-era MI-8s. These choppers were to be used to transport the president, prime minister, and the vice-president, among others. Last year, an Italian court even named Sonia Gandhi, the leader of India’s Congress party, as the “driving force” behind the chopper deal.Bruce Washington a.k.a Hussein Fatal of Tupac’s Outlawz has died in a car accident
It is a sad day in Hip Hop, as rapper Hussein Fatal of the group established by the late Tupac Shakur, Outlaw Immortalz, died on Saturday, July, 11, 2015 in a fatal car accident at the age of 38. It has been confirmed by group members E.D.I and Napoleon via social media Saturday.
All my heroes are dead, or dysfunctional smh.”
-E.D.I
New Jersey native Fatal made his debut on ‘Pac’s double album, All Eyez on Me, on the songs “All Bout U” and “When We Ride”, as well as on the infamous diss song “Hit ‘Em Up”.
TheSouce.com sends out condolences to the entire Outlaw family, as they mourn the lost of another one of their fallen soldiers. #O4L
To donate to Fatal’s family visit the GoFundMe link HERE
-Infinite Wiz(@InfiniteWiz)Belarusian customs officers have resumed checking vehicles entering from Russia, a move that reflects tension between the neighbors.
Russia's Federal Customs Service said on December 8 that Belarusian officers were checking cars and trucks and confiscating undeclared goods. It said long lines had formed at the border.
Belarus had stopped checking Russian and Kazakh vehicles in July 2011 as part of regulations of the Customs Union linking the three former Soviet republics.
Russia and Belarus are partners in a "Union State" and often present a common front against the West, but relations are often rocky and are now strained by a growing spat over trade.
Belarusian President Alyaksandr Lukashenka lashed out at Moscow last week over a ban on many Belarusian milk and meat products, saying Belarus should not suffer losses because of Kremlin sanctions barring food products from the EU and the United States.
Those sanctions, imposed over Russia's interference in Ukraine, prohibit the direct import of EU food products into Russia but allow foods that undergo substantial reprocessing in Belarus and Kazakhstan.
The Belarusian overnment said the customs checks are necessary to prevent smuggling of Russian products into Belarus.
Leonid Slutsky, a senior Russian lawmaker, called Belarus's explanation "nonsense."
Based on reporting by TASS, Ekho Moskvy, and top.rbc.ruNew Jersey judge says not allowing gay couples to marry violates state constitution.
Advocates for gay marriage in New Jersey gather outside the Statehouse in Trenton, N.J. A judge could order New Jersey to recognize gay marriages after a hearing Thursday, Aug. 15, 2013. (Photo: Mel Evans, AP) Story Highlights New Jersey judge says not recognizing gay marriage would violate state constitution
Gov. Chris Christie's administration says it will appeal decision at higher-level state court
Judge's order says gay couples can marry starting Oct. 21, but governor likely will ask for delay
TRENTON, N.J. — A New Jersey judge ruled Friday that the state must allow same-sex couples to marry, but the decision will have to withstand an appeal from Gov. Chris Christie's administration.
Now that the federal government recognizes gay marriages, not doing so in New Jersey would violate the state constitution, Judge Mary Jacobson of Mercer County Superior Court said.
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Jacobson's order released Friday said same-sex marriages could begin Oct. 21, but Christie's appeal likely will include a request for a stay, blocking the marriages from happening until the matter receives additional judicial vetting.
Christie is opposed to gay marriage. But his press secretary, Michael Drewniak, said the governor "has always maintained that he would abide by the will of the voters on the issue of marriage equality and called for it to be on the ballot this Election Day.''
"Since the Legislature refused to allow the people to decide expeditiously, we will let the (New Jersey) Supreme Court make this constitutional determination," he said.
Jacobson accepted the position of lawyers for six couples and gay-rights groups, including Garden State Equality, that the state is preventing citizens from receiving federal benefits, such access that opposite-sex married couples have to the federal pension system.
New Jersey's top court ruled in 2006 that gay couples had to have the same legal rights as married couples. Same-sex couples in New Jersey presently can enter into civil unions.
Advocates for a new law, jubilant over the judge's decision, said they were prepared to dig in for a lengthy process before change can be enacted — either through withstanding an appeal that could take months, or by picking up enough votes in the Legislature to override Christie's 2012 veto of a marriage-equality bill.
Sheila Oliver, an Essex County Democrat who is speaker of the New Jersey Assembly and a sponsor of the bill that Christie vetoed, urged the Republican governor to not contest the court ruling.
“It just equalizes the playing field. It doesn't give gay people anything more. It gives them what everyone else is getting in this state.” Chris Paseka, Red Bank, N.J.
"Same-sex couples were denied equal right for too long and Governor Christie's veto only prolonged their struggle unnecessarily,'' Oliver said. "Let's clear the way for equal rights for all families.''
Assembly member, John Wisniewski, also a Democrat, called on Christie "to put an end to his attempt to thwart the state constitution and the will of New Jersey's people and recognize that marriage equality in New Jersey is not only right and just but it is also inevitable.''
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers with few exceptions have sided with the governor.
"My position based on religious beliefs is that marriage is between a man and a woman,'' Ocean County Assemblyman Ronald Dancer said.
Michael Premo, campaign manager for New Jersey United for Marriage, called Jacobson's decision "monumental'' and a "tipping point in the fight for marriage equality.''
"Still, we realize this is not the end,'' said Premo, whose group is lobbying lawmakers for additional support in floor votes in the Senate and Assembly. Those votes must take place by Jan. 14, the last day of action on bills in the current legislative session. An override needs two-thirds support in both houses.
John Tomicki, head of the New Jersey Coalition To Preserve and Protect Marriage, said the court case so far has dealt only with the financial implications of civil unions.
"It's not just a question of financial benefits. It's a question of the value of traditional marriage, how it strengthens a culture,'' he said. Tomicki said the appeal would give the state a chance to expand its argument.
'On the right side of history'
Chris Paseka's sister-in-law called to tell him about the ruling, which he said "is on the right side of history."
Paseka of Red Bank, N.J., joined in a civil union with his husband, Jesse Bello-Paseka, purposely opting to wait until New Jersey allows same-sex marriages instead of traveling to a state that already allows them because they want to marry in their home state.
“It's not just a question of financial benefits. It's a question of the value of traditional marriage, how it strengthens a culture.” John Tomicki, New Jersey Coalition to Preserve and Protect Marriage
While the Pasekas still have more hurdles before they can marry legally here — and Chris Paseka he intends to do so the moment they can — he sees the ruling as a positive step toward equality.
"It's a smart step for this state, and I think it's the right thing to do," he said. "It just equalizes the playing field. It doesn't give gay people anything more. It gives them what everyone else is getting in this state. It's 2013. It's about time."
Randy Bishop, a Neptune Township committeeman and the first elected official in New Jersey to enter a civil union with his husband, Dan Margo, said he was pleased with the ruling. He considered it only option New Jersey courts have after the June U.S. Supreme Court ruling that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act.
"I don't see how a judge, based on the Supreme Court ruling and the strength of the New Jersey Constitution, could have made a ruling other than what she did," he said.
Bishop said he saw an appeal of Friday's Superior Court ruling as further denial of gay and lesbian rights.
"The governor should allow the decision to stand and allow all New Jersey residents to move forward to have the full liberties and equal protection under the law that we all so cherish," he said. "To go through the appeals process, is he trying to make a point? And what is that point?"
Bishop said he will be curious to see whether the courts allow New Jersey's civil unions to be changed to marriage certificates. Bishop, who as a former Neptune mayor has performed both marriages and civil unions, said the only difference between the documents is the title at the top of the page.
"We are married," he said. "In the eyes of people and everyone else, we are married. Let us have the last and special date we celebrated be the special date for us."
New Jersey has been one of four states that allow civil unions entitling gay couples to spousal rights without calling the legal union a marriage.
Thirteen states and the District of Columbia currently now same-sex couples to marry.
Same-sex couples in New Jersey "cannot access many federal marital benefits as partners in civil unions,'' Jacobson wrote. "Same-sex couples must be allowed to marry in order to obtain equal protection of the law under the New Jersey Constitution.''
Contributing: The Associated Press
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Source: Freedom to Marry
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/199e1MvFormer Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue talks with reporters after meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at Trump Tower, Wednesday, Nov. 30, 2016, in New York. | AP Photo Trump makes Perdue nomination official
President-elect Donald Trump has formally announced his nomination of former Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue to serve as agriculture secretary following word late Wednesday that he had been chosen for the job.
“Sonny Perdue is going to accomplish great things as secretary of Agriculture,” Trump said in a statement Thursday morning. “From growing up on a farm to being governor of a big agriculture state, he has spent his whole life understanding and solving the challenges our farmers face, and he is going to deliver big results for all Americans who earn their living off the land.”
Agriculture secretary was the last vacant Cabinet spot, and Perdue's selection puts an end to months of speculation about who would get the job.
Perdue, an agribusiness owner and veterinarian by training who was governor of Georgia from 2003 to 2011, will likely need to draw on all of those experiences as he heads into his confirmation hearing before the Senate Agriculture Committee, the date of which is still to be announced. In a statement, Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) said that the next secretary needs to understand the challenges farmers are facing because of low crop prices, poor access to credit and regulatory pressure from outside USDA.
"We need an advocate for agriculture," Roberts said.I like the word “cunt”. Over the years, its served me well, but I’ve also been told off quite a few times for using it. I still do. People try to discourage my use both as a description of female genitalia and as a descriptive term for a person. I use both. They are interlinked; meanings entwined …and I like that.
Firstly there is the argument that “cunt” as a term which is often used to denote a person with the intention to offend should not be used to describe female genitalia because it has negative connotations, and there is also the argument that as a term used to describe female genitalia it should not be used to describe a person. These arguments, although coming from different angles are interlinked. As with all nouns, it is applied to artifacts that have its qualities. So what are the qualities of a cunt?
Cunt is definately an obscene word. Its not something you would use to describe that area at the doctors, preferring either clinical terms (vagina, vulva, genital area) or “softer” slang (lady bits, down there, between the legs), and there would be shock should you describe someone as a cunt in a formal situation. As an obscene word it is obscured, used only with a level of intimacy. It is an intimate term.
From that perspective, lets look at its use both in a sexual and general context. First look carefully at those considered cunts by West Central Scotland. Its certainly true that such a description it most often goes with negative epithets – Evil Tory cunts, thieving cunt, lying cunt, but not always – a clever cunts, kind cunts and agreeable cunts can all be found if you look for them hard enough. Cunt as a noun without adjective is neutral, waiting for a clarification of its nature. Yet it has intrinsic properties. A level of confidence and a warning of wariness goes with all applications of the term, regardless of where further descriptors take it. Close examination of anatomic cunts, suggests this self-same confidence. Cunts are far more confident than pussies and far more threatening than fannies. I want my genitalia to have a level of confidence, tinged with threat.
A cunt is neither scared nor profane.
It just is.
But never forget they have teethDublin electrical retailer Peats World of Electronics has ceased trading with immediate effect and announced its intention to seek the appointment of a liquidator.
A statement on the company’s website tonight said that chairman Ben Peat had told 75 staff from the company’s 11 outlets today that the company could not continue to trade in the light of “current financial constraints”.
He blamed the impact of recession, “unsustainably high rental costs” and the growing market share being taken by online stores for the decision.
“Trade hit its peak in 2007, with turnover that year of €24 million,” Mr Peat told staff at a meeting in the company’s head office in Parnell Street. “It has since retrenched to less than half for the current year.”
He said the company, which generates 60 per cent of its business between November and January, could not make enough money over the summer to allow it to continue.
“We have implemented extensive cost-reduction at all levels including payroll and terms of employment, but unfortunately it is beyond our power to continue in operation and we have to protect our staff, creditor, debtor and legal interests to best possible effect and do right by all concerned as far as is both humanly and financially possible,” said Mr Peat.
“We cannot allow our situation to deteriorate further as we do not want to compromise our capacity to secure the best possible outcome for all out of what is a difficult situation.”
He said staff, some of whom have been with the business for over 30 years, will be paid their entitlements and redundancy due in full. Three generations of the Peat family have worked in the business, with Mr peat the youngest son of the founders.
The closure of Peats is the second major blow in the Irish retail sector in the past week, with close to 130 staff losing their jobs with the closure last week of Irish outlets of video retailer Game.When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) made a statement announcing he is fast-tracking legislation to defund Planned Parenthood, he used the term "women's health" no fewer than five times, seizing on language Democrats have used for years to attack their colleagues across the aisle.
The defunding legislation, McConnell said, "reaffirm[s] the Senate’s commitment to genuine compassion and to women’s health."
"We introduced legislation last night that would ensure taxpayer dollars for women’s health are spent on women’s health, not a scandal-plagued political lobbying giant," McConnell said Wednesday in a statement. "It’s a simple choice. Senators can either vote to protect women’s health, or they can vote to protect subsidies for a political group mired in scandal."
"Let’s not filibuster women’s health in order to protect special subsidies for one scandal-plagued political organization," he added.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Democrats swept the 2012 elections in large part by accusing the GOP of waging a "war on women's health." And Republicans have since been trying to broaden their appeal to female voters.
The bill cuts off all federal dollars to Planned Parenthood, America's largest reproductive health and family planning organization, and redirects the money to "other eligible entities" that provide health care. The Medicaid reimbursements and family planning funds Planned Parenthood receives from the federal government each year allow the organization to provide low-cost and free health services to low-income and uninsured patients, and federal law already prevents that money from being used to pay for abortions.
This would affect millions of women's health care. One in five women in the U.S. has visited a Planned Parenthood clinic for a range of health services, including contraception, sexually transmitted disease testing and screenings, Pap tests, breast exams and abortions.
Texas once tried to "redirect" money from Planned Parenthood clinics, and the plan backfired. The number of women served by the state's Women's Health Program dropped by one-quarter, and the Texas Health and Human Services Commission predicted a sharp rise in unintended births that would cost taxpayers as much as $273 million.
The current attack on Planned Parenthood in Congress follows the release of three heavily edited undercover videos that purport to show Planned Parenthood doctors discussing the sale of fetal tissue after abortions. Planned Parenthood says the videos are misleading and that the full, unedited footage shows the organization is actually donating fetal tissue for scientific research and being reimbursed for some of the costs of doing so, which has been legal since 1993.
Democrats have called for an investigation into the deceptive anti-abortion group behind the videos, the Center for Medical Progress, which set up a fake fetal tissue procurement company in order to secretly film sensitive areas of Planned Parenthood clinics over the course of three years. Republicans have launched a federal investigation into Planned Parenthood and are aiming to vote by Monday on the bill that would defund the organization.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) responded to the Republicans' proposal on Tuesday by calling it -- predictably -- "an attack on women's health."
"We are dealing with the health of American women and they're dealing with some right-wing, crazy deal," he said.
A Planned Parenthood executive said she believes most people are going to side with the Democrats on the issue.
"I share the skepticism of the American public that these 'investigations' aren't designed to do anything to further the health and safety of women," said Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood. "They are in fact designed solely in collusion with these extremists to make abortion illegal in this country and to destroy Planned Parenthood."
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Also on HuffPost:Diet Coke has created this new "hunky" TV ad starring Andrew Cooper to celebrate its 30-year anniversary.
THERE'S a new diet coke hunk.
It's been 15 years since Robert Merrill - a.k.a the sexy window washer - took his shirt off and made sure a bevy of ladies were on time for their 11.30am appointment.
And now to celebrate the soft drink's 30th anniversary, there's a new ripped hunk making women swoon.
Brit model Andrew Cooper stars in the latest diet coke ad, pushing a lawnmower in a park in front of a group of eagle-eyed women.
One of the ladies cleverly rolls a can of Diet Coke down a hill which stops the Diet Coke hunk in his tracks - and of course, the fizzy drink fizzes so much upon opening that he simply must remove his shirt.
The ad has received a huge amount of buzz since it debuted online yesterday.
But sadly, “diet coke guy” is a married father-of-two who also happens to own an English pet store called The Mutz Nutz with his wife, Jane.
So how does his wife feel about women the world over ogling her husband?
"She loves it. It's been on replay a lot," Cooper told Good Morning America today. "I travel a lot so it's her way of having me at home when I'm away.
“There's definitely been a lot of hype towards it. It's been a great thing," Cooper said.
Cooper has done a number of modelling campaigns, including ones for Giorgio Armani, Bally and Louis Vuitton.
The first sexy Diet Coke ad that featured a “hunky man” aired in 1994.
Lucky Vanous made quite an impression on women everywhere when he took his daily - shirtless - break on the construction site to throw down a can of coke.Sri Lanka level series with big win in Colombo
Allrounder Glenn Maxwell has been recalled to the national set-up for next month's pair of Twenty20 internationals against Sri Lanka, just one month after he was axed from the One-Day International squad.
Quick Single: Sri Lanka square series with big win
Maxwell was overlooked for the five-match ODI series that sits at 1-1 following Sri Lanka's 82-run win last night, but the Victorian was included as part of the 13-man squad for the T20 matches in Pallekele and Colombo.
David Warner will become the fourth man this year alone – and the 10th overall – to captain the national team in the game's shortest format after the decision was made to send Steve Smith home early and provide the skipper with a rare opportunity to rest up physically and mentally ahead of a bumper summer of cricket.
Quick Single: Smith decision prudent to prevent burnout
Pace ace Mitchell Starc headlines the list of players in the squad who missed out on the ICC World T20 earlier this year, alongside Scott Boland, Travis Head, Moises Henriques, Chris Lynn and Shaun Marsh.
Lynn was named BBL|05 Player of the Tournament last summer after he plundered 378 runs at a strike rate of 173.39 for the battling Brisbane Heat, however former England batsman Kevin Pietersen raised concerns around Lynn's ability to tackle spin-friendly conditions leading into the WT20 in India.
Chris Lynn hits FIVE sixes in a row
"It is a very interesting point because this is not the kind of wicket, and the wickets you play in Australia are not the wickets you're going to play in the T20 World Cup," Pietesen said on the Network Ten broadcast while playing for the Melbourne Stars during a KFC BBL game.
"So until he destroys a spinner on a slow turner, I'm not going to be sold on the idea.
"Hitting through the line here, (with a) big bat, (with the) ball coming on in Australia.
"By all means, I'm sure you're going to give him a go. But from experience, don't expect miracles. That's all I'm saying."
Lynn is currently leading the Australia A team in their one-day quadrangular series against India A, South Africa A and the National Performance Squad in Brisbane, while Glenn Maxwell has also been plying his trade with the 'A' squad following his ODI omission.
Maxwell thrills with brilliant cameo
"Both Chris and Glenn are dynamic players who are both capable of winning a game from their own bat and they also bring that x-factor in the field," National Selector Rod Marsh said.
Test gloveman Peter Nevill has retained his place in the T20 side, despite solid white-ball form from Matthew Wade.
Nevill was the preferred option for the WT20, where he scored 18 from just five balls faced throughout the tournament and claimed two dismissals in a tidy performance behind the stumps as Australia failed to make it to the semi-finals.
"Peter is the incumbent wicketkeeper in the T20 side and had a very good World T20 for Australia," Marsh said. "The panel wanted to keep that consistency heading into these two matches."
Test players Usman Khawaja and Josh Hazlewood will join Smith on the sidelines at the conclusion of the current ODI series, while Nathan Coulter-Nile has again succumbed to injury.
Faulkner claims ODI hat-trick
The Western Australian paceman was part of the touring party for the unsuccessful Test campaign, but his services were not called upon with the selection panel opting for spin twins in each contest.
Back pain hindered Coulter-Nile's preparation for the ODI series opener on Sunday, but the quick had appeared in good shape as he charged in at Tuesday's training session in Colombo before a decision was made to also send him home early.
"Nathan had been experiencing a gradual increase in lower back pain which is now preventing him from bowling at match intensity," Bupa support team physiotherapist David Beakley said.
"He will now return to Perth for further investigation which will determine the extent of the injury and possible return to play timelines.
Coulter-Nile's spot in the ODI squad will not be replaced with Boland and Hastings already on the island nation preparing for the T20 leg, while the remainder of that squad will arrive in Colombo next Thursday.
Australia T20 squad: David Warner (c), Scott Boland, James Faulkner, Aaron Finch, John Hastings, Travis Head, Moises Henriques, Chris Lynn, Shaun Marsh, Glenn Maxwell, Peter Nevill, Mitchell Starc, Adam Zampa.
First T20 – Pallekele Stadium, 6 September at 11:30pm AEST
Second T20 – R. Premadasa Stadium, 9 September at 11:30pm AESTAccording to an exclusive report by Star News, it is very possible that idol group BIGBANG’s brand new album may be released earlier than previously expected. It is said that the members of BIGBANG are in the final stages of album productions.
A representative of YG Entertainment revealed to Star News on February 10, “BIGBANG already has a grasp of its new album and all of the members have been coming out to the company building since the beginning of February to focus on the production of the new album.”
The rep continued, “Despite each individual member’s busy overseas schedules, they are working hard to prepare for the new album. Because there are productions that they have previously completed in their spare time, the likelihood of BIGBANG’s new album coming out faster than planned is increasingly getting higher.”
It is said that the upcoming album is being aimed for release as early as before this summer. According to the rep, “BIGBANG’s album release is at the top of YG’s priorities because we know very well how long the fans have waited for their new album. The final product is high-quality and is coming along nicely.”
Fans are already anticipating what kind of music the group will be making their return with after three years.
Source (1)The History and Evolution of the Video Games Market
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Before the heroics of Super Mario and Lara Croft captured our imaginations, video games were primarily used on an academic basis.
In the 1950s, scientists built the first video games as instructional tools or to demonstrate the capabilities of new technologies. Academics tested out rudimentary forms of artificial intelligence on games like tic-tac-toe or chess, while showcasing their findings to the public at events like the Canadian National Exhibition or the Festival of Britain. It wasn’t until the incorporation of newly-invented technologies like transistors or random access memory (RAM) that the cost and size of these computers went down.
By the 1970s, video games were ready for prime time commercialization. The first arcades were opened, compelling games started to hit the market, and tactile features like joysticks made them accessible even to the most basic user.
The rest is history – and the total market for gaming is now worth close to $100 billion today.
The Evolution of the Video Games Market
The following infographic comes to us from GAMR, the world’s first video game technology ETF.
It details the history and evolution of the video games market, the emergence of mobile, and the fast-growing Asian sector.
Today, there are over two billion gamers worldwide – and they all play across a wide variety of genres and platforms.
Despite stereotypes, gamers come from all walks of life. About 59% of gamers are males, and 41% are females – and the average age of a gamer is 38 years old.
The Future of the Video Games Market
While the mobile market is all the rage today for publishers, the future of gaming is likely to be driven largely by augmented and virtual reality.
International Data Corporation, for example, estimates that worldwide revenues for the total augmented reality and virtual reality (AR/VR) market will grow from $5.2 billion in 2016 to more than $162 billion in 2020, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 181.3% over the 2015-2020 forecast period. Gaming hardware and content would make up a significant portion of this projection, but other types of content such as movies, entertainment, and advertising will also capitalize on the emergence of AR/VR.
For now, VR/AR headsets are currently only accessible to high-end users, and there is also a limited supply of content for users to enjoy. Only time will tell if the technology will mature enough to meet the public’s expectations.
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Courtesy of: Visual Capitalist
RelatedSnapshot: Cardiff City’s final pre-season run-out at CCS ended in a more than credible 3-3 draw with Bundesliga outfit VfL Wolfsburg, in front of over 8,000 supporters.
Die Wölfe had stormed into a first half lead through Marcel Schafer’s header and Kevin De Bruyne’s 25-yard strike. But City responded with two quick-fire goals just before the half time whistle. First Peter Whittingham curled a fine free kick into the bottom corner, before Nicky Maynard stabbed home a Fábio cross on 45 minutes.
Into the second half, Kim Bo-Kyung rounded off the comeback after Kenwyne Jones had nodded Le Fondre’s cross against the post. But the impressive Ivica Olić struck late on to level the scores up, as all eyes now turn to City’s Championship opener away to Blackburn on Friday evening.
Chronological report:Cardiff City took to the field against a strong Wolfsburg side hoping for some ideal preparation for Friday’s televised Championship clash away to Blackburn Rovers.
They were coming up against some strong opposition here though, with the likes of Ivica Olić and Kevin De Bruyne spraying the ball around confidently in attack, and the Bluebirds were to fall behind in under five minutes. When a low cross came in from the right, Matthew Connolly swung his leg, but could only divert the ball to Wolfsburg’s Marcel Schafer who headed home at the back post.
GOAL: CARDIFF CITY 0 – 1 VfL WOLFSBURG (Schafer 4 mins)
Just a few minutes later, the City defence had to scramble to prevent a second as De Bruyne broke down the left flank before squaring to Croatian forward Olić. The Bluebirds did enough though, and nearly equalised on the subsequent break. Le Fondre controlled in the air just inside the box before sending a dipping cross over to Nicky Maynard, whose effort struck the outside of the woodwork and nestled in the stand.
Die Wölfereally should have made City pay for that miss on 15 minutes, as Junior Malanda could only head wide with the goal gaping after the tricky Vieirinha had won a free kick on the right wing.
Cardiff soon settled into the game though, with Peter Whittingham and Le Fondre looking most likely to create something. And the best chance yet fell to Alfie before the half hour mark. As Burgstaller broke free on the wing, he swung the ball in to an unmarked Le Fondre, who turned the ball just over.
As the visitors broke, City were soon to find out that top class international players only need half a chance to score a goal, and Kevin De Bruyne is certainly one of those. After finding some space 25 yards out, the young Belgian midfielder effortlessly smashed the ball in to the top corner to make it two.
GOAL: CARDIFF CITY 0 – 2 VfL WOLFSBURG (De Bru |
, the Mughals of India all exercised immense influence over different parts of the globe in set periods of recognised ascendancy.
Sometimes tribal, sometimes national, sometimes religious, often dynastic, their success defined epochs, but was never effectively global until the twentieth century. At that point, with the future of the British Empire under threat from other aspiring nations, in particular Germany, a momentous decision was taken by a group of powerful and determined men, that direct action had to be taken to assert their control, and that of the British race, over the entire civilised world. It has grown from that tiny select cabal into a monster that may already be beyond control.
“One wintry afternoon in February 1891, three men were engaged in earnest conversation in London. From that conversation were to flow consequences of the greatest importance for the British Empire and to the world as a whole.”
So begins Professor Carroll Quigley’s book The Anglo American Establishment. It may read like a John Le Carre thriller, but this was no spy fiction. The three staunch British Imperialists who met in London that day, Cecil Rhodes, William Stead and Lord Esher, were soon joined by Lords Rothschild, Salisbury, Rosebery and Milner, men whose financial, political, and administrative powers set them apart. Some of these names may not be familiar to you, but that is a mark of the absolute success of this group. From the outset they insisted on secrecy, operated in secret and ensured that their influence was airbrushed from history. They believed that white men of Anglo-Saxon descent rightly sat at the top of the racial hierarchy and they fully understood the impending threat from a burgeoning Germany whose modern, expanding economy had begun to challenge British hegemony on the world stage.
The above named elites drew up a plan for a secret society that aimed to renew the bond between Great Britain and the United States [1] and bring all habitable portions of the world under their influence and control. The U.S. had grown rapidly in self-esteem, wealth and opportunity since the declaration of independence in 1776, but Anglo-American connections remained strong and would embroil her in the long-term plan for one world government. The meeting in 1891 was, in effect, the birth of the New World Order cabal.
Great financiers frequently used their fortunes to influence questions of peace and war and control politics for profit. Cecil Rhodes was different. He was determined to use his vast fortune not simply to generate ever-increasing profit, but to realise his dream, a dream he shared with his co-conspirators. Rhodes turned the profit objective on its head and sought to amass great wealth into his secret society in order to achieve political ends, to buy governments and politicians, buy public opinion and the means to influence it. [2] He intended that his wealth should be used to grasp control of the world, secretly. Secrecy was the cornerstone. No one outside the favoured few knew of the group’s existence. They have since been referred to obliquely in speeches and books as “The Money Power”, “The Hidden Power” or “the men behind the curtain”. All of these labels are pertinent, but we have called them, collectively, the Secret Elite.
Carroll Quigley revealed that Secret Elite influence on education was chiefly visible at the exclusive English private schools, Eton and Harrow, and at Oxford University, especially All Souls and Balliol Colleges. [3] This immensely rich and powerful group was given intellectual approval and inspiration by the philosophy of John Ruskin, professor of fine arts at Oxford. He spoke to the Oxford undergraduates as members of the privileged ruling class, telling them that they possessed a magnificent tradition of education, rule of law and freedom. He championed all that was finest in the public service ethic, duty and self-discipline, and believed that English ruling class tradition should be spread to the masses across the empire. [4]
But behind such well-serving words lay a philosophy strongly opposed to the emancipation of woman, had no time for democracy and supported the “just” war.[5] Ruskin advocated that control of the state should be placed in the hands of a small ruling class. Social order was to be built upon the authority of superiors, imposing upon their inferiors an absolute, unquestioning obedience. He was repelled by the notion of levelling between the classes and by the disintegration of the “rightful” authority of the ruling class. [6]Ruskin’s philosophy was music to the ears of the elitists. It gave their lust for global power the blessing of academic approval. What they did, they would claim, was not for them, but for mankind. They would rise to power on the spurious justification that the world would consequently be a better place for humanity.
Inspired by Ruskin, Cecil Rhodes and his accomplices created the secret society with an inner core of trusted associates called “The Society of the Elect”, who unquestionably knew that they were members of an exclusive cabal devoted to taking and holding power on a world-wide basis. [7] A second outer ring, larger and quite fluid in its membership, was named “The Association of Helpers”. At this level members might not have known that they were an integral part of, or inadvertently being used by, a secret society. Many on the outer edges of the group, idealists and honest individuals, may never have been aware that the real decisions were made by a ruthless clique about whom they had no knowledge. [8]
The man who exposed the secret society, Carroll Quigley (1910 – 1977), was the highly esteemed professor of history at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, and a lecturer at Princeton and Harvard. He revealed that the organisation was able to “conceal its existence quite successfully, and many of its most influential members… are unknown even to close students of British History”. [9] Quigley’s greatest contribution to our understanding of modern history came with his books, The Anglo-American Establishment and Tragedy and Hope, A History of the World in Our Time. The former was written in 1949 but only released after his death. His disclosures placed him in such potential danger from an Establishment backlash that it was never published in his lifetime. In a 1974 radio broadcast, Quigley warned the interviewer, Rudy Maxa of the Washington Post, “You better be discreet. You have to protect my future as well as your own.” [10]
Quigley had received assistance of a “personal nature” from individuals close to what he called the “Group”, but “for obvious reasons” he could not reveal their names. [11] He made it clear that evidence about them was not hard to find “if you know where to look,”[12] and it has to be asked why generations of historians have failed to pursue his trail. Though sworn to secrecy, Professor Quigley revealed in the radio interview that Sir Alfred Zimmern, the British historian and political scientist, had confirmed the names of the main protagonists within the secret society. Without a shadow of doubt, Zimmern himself was a close associate of those at the centre of real power in Britain. He knew most of the key figures personally and was himself a member of the inner core of the secret society for twelve years between 1910 and 1922. [13]
The enigma of Professor Quigley’s work lies in his statement that while the secret cabal had brought many of the things he held dear close to disaster, he generally agreed with its goals and aims. [14] Were these merely words of self-preservation? Be mindful of his warning to Rudy Maxa as late as 1974. Quigley clearly felt that these revelations placed him in danger. Unknown persons removed his major work, Tragedy and Hope, from the bookstore shelves in America, and it was withdrawn from sale without any justification soon after its release. The book’s original plates were unaccountably destroyed by Quigley’s publisher, the Macmillan Company, who, for the next six years “lied, lied, lied” to him and deliberately misled him into believing that it would be reprinted. [15] Why? What pressures obliged a major publishing house to take such extreme action? Quigley stated categorically that powerful people had suppressed the book because it exposed matters that they did not want known. The reader has to understand that we are discussing individuals whose power, influence and control were unrivalled.
From the very start, each of the initial conspirators brought valuable qualities and connections to the society. Cecil Rhodes was Prime Minister of the Cape Colony and master and commander of a vast area of Southern Africa which some were already beginning to call Rhodesia. His wealth had been underwritten by brutal native suppression [16] and the global mining interests of the House of Rothschild, [17] to whom he was answerable. William Stead was the most prominent journalist of his day and a voice to which ordinary people listened. Lord Esher represented the interests of the monarchy from Queen Victoria ’s final years, through the exuberant excesses of King Edward VII, to the more sedate but pliable King George V. His influence was immense because he operated between monarchs, the aristocracy and leading political figures. He chaired important secret committees, was responsible for appointments to the Cabinet, the senior ranks of the diplomatic corps and voiced strong personal opinion on top army posts. [18] Esher exerted a power behind the throne far in excess of his constitutional position. His role of powerbroker on behalf of the Secret Elite was without equal. Indeed Professor Quigley dubbed him, “the greatest wire puller of the period.” [19]
Another name that pervaded all that was powerful and influential during this period was that of the Rothschild dynasty, and Quigley placed Lord Nathaniel (Natty) Rothschild within the very core of the secret organization. [20] Rothschild was all-powerful in British and world banking and virtually untouchable.
“The House of Rothschild was immensely more powerful than any financial empire that had ever preceded it. It commanded vast wealth. It was international. It was independent. Royal governments were nervous of it because they could not control it. Popular movements hated it because it was not answerable to the people. Constitutionalists resented it because its influence was exercised behind the scenes – secretly.” [21]
Taken together, the principal players, Rhodes, Stead, Esher, Rothschild and Milner represented a new force that was emerging inside British politics, but powerful old traditional aristocratic families that had long dominated Westminster, often in cahoots with the reigning monarch, were also deeply involved, and none more so than the Cecil family. Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, the patriarchal 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, ruled the Conservative Party at the latter end of the nineteenth century. He served as prime minister three times for a total of fourteen years, between 1885 and 1902 (longer than anyone else in recent history). When he retired as prime minister in July 1902, he handed over the reins of government to his sister’s son, Arthur Balfour. Lord Salisbury had four siblings, five sons and three daughters who were all linked and interlinked by marriage to individuals in the upper echelons of the English ruling class. Important government positions were given to relations, friends and wealthy supporters who proved their gratitude by ensuring that his views became policy in government, civil service and diplomatic circles. This extended ‘Cecil-Bloc’ was intricately linked to “The Society of the Elect” and Secret Elite ambitions throughout the first half of the twentieth century. [22]
Another member of the inner core, Lord Alfred Milner, offers cause for greater scrutiny because he has been virtually airbrushed from the history of the period. Alfred Milner was a self-made man and remarkably successful civil servant who became a key figure within the Secret Elite and absolutely powerful within the ranks of these privileged individuals. He and Rhodes had been contemporaries at Oxford University, and were inextricably connected through events in South Africa. Rhodes recognised in him the kind of steel that was required to pursue the dream of world domination, “I support Milner absolutely without reserve. If he says peace, I say peace; if he says war, I say war. Whatever happens, I say ditto to Milner.” [23] Milner grew in time to be the most able of them all, to enjoy the privilege of patronage and power, a man to whom others turned for leadership and direction.
When governor general and high commissioner of South Africa, Milner deliberately caused the Boer War in order to grab the Transvaal’s gold and use the economic resources of South Africa to extend and perpetuate Secret Elite control. He had the grace to confess in a letter to Lord Roberts, Commander in Chief in South Africa, that
“I precipitated the crisis, which was inevitable, before it was too late. It is not very agreeable, and in many eyes, not very creditable piece of business to have been largely instrumental in bringing about a big war.” [24]
This was no immodest boast. Alfred Milner’s matter-of-fact explanation displayed the cold objectivity that drove the Secret Elite cause. War was unfortunate, but necessary. It had to be. They were not afraid of war.
The Secret Elite’s war against the Dutch settlers began in October 1899 and ended with the signing of the Treaty of Vereeniging on 31 May 1902. The Boer Republics were annexed to the British Empire. The Transvaal ’s gold was finally in the hands of the Secret Elite at a cost of some 70,000 dead on the battlefields, plus 32,000 dead in British concentration camps, including more than 20,000 children of Dutch descent. Some thirty thousand Boer farms were burned to the ground, livestock slaughtered, and the women and children put in British concentration camps. In the camps, the families of men fighting for the Boer army were punished by being put on half the already meagre rations with no meat whatsoever. [25] W. T. Stead, former member of the inner core of the Secret Elite who had resigned in disgust over the Boer War, was overcome by the evidence presented to him. He wrote,
“Every one of these children who died as a result of the halving of their rations, thereby exerting pressure onto their family still on the battle-field, was purposefully murdered. The system of half rations stands exposed, stark and unashamedly as a cold-blooded deed of state policy employed with the purpose of ensuring the surrender of men whom we were not able to defeat on the field.” [26]
20,000 children dying in British concentration camps were of little consequence to Milner. He was so driven that he ignored the weight of opposition ranged against him. He warned his friend, Richard Haldane: “If we are to build up anything in South Africa, we must disregard, and absolutely disregard, the screamers.” [27] It takes a very strong man to disregard the screamers, to ignore moral indignation, to put the cause before humanitarian concerns. Some frontline politicians find it all but impossible to stand against a torrent of public outrage, but those behind the curtain in the secret corridors of power can easily ignore ‘sentimentality’.
Milner’s period of stewardship in South Africa had a very important consequence. He administered the defeated Transvaal and Orange Free State as occupied territories, and recruited into the upper layers of his civil service a band of young men from well-to-do, upper-class, frequently titled families who became known as “Milner’s Kindergarten.” [28] They replaced the government and administration of the Boer republics, and worked prodigiously to rebuild the broken country. [29] The Kindergarten comprised new blood; young educated men – mostly Oxford graduates, with a deep sense of duty, loyalty to the Empire and capable of populating the next generation of the secret society. [30] In the period 1909-1913 the Kindergarten set up semi-secret groups, known as Round Table Groups, in the United States and the chief British dependencies.
Take Canada as an example. Numerous Canadian Round Table groups were established from 1909. Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr of the Secret Elite’s inner core [31] went on a four-month trip to Canada in the company of William Marris from the “Association of Helpers.” The object of the trip was to lay the foundations for Round Table groups, to reinforce the values of the British Empire and prepare them for a war against Germany. They carried a letter from Alfred Milner to his old friend Arthur J. Glazebrook asking him to help establish the groups. Glazebrook became one of the most devoted and loyal friends of the Secret Elite’s mission, and so successfully completed the task that for twenty years he was head of the groups throughout Canada. Vincent Massey, a Balliol College, Oxford graduate and lecturer in modern history at Toronto University, was another important operative for the Secret Elite in Canada. He would go on to hold senior cabinet and diplomatic posts and became governor of the prestigious private school, Upper Canada College, and the University of Toronto. [32] Sir Edward Peacock, housemaster at Upper Canada College, and Edward Rogers Wood, a prominent financier and businessman, were likewise very close to the Canadian branch of the Milner group. [33] Other members of the Secret Elite connected to Canada were, Sir George Parkin, Percy Corbett, Sir Joseph Flavelle and George P. de T. Glazebrook. [34] The latter was the son of Milner’s old friend Arthur Glazebrook. He too had studied at Balliol College, Oxford and went on to teach history at the University of Toronto.
The Round Table Groups in Canada, as elsewhere, were merely different names for “The Association of Helpers” and only part of the secret society, since the real power still lay with “The Society of the Elect”. This all-powerful inner-core would bring in new members from the outer ring as was deemed necessary. [35] The alliance of powerful investment bankers, politicians, diplomats and press barons shared the same unwritten purpose, the destruction of German imperial power and the confirmation of Anglo-Saxon domination of the world.
Money was never a problem for the Secret Elite. As we have seen, Natty Rothschild, the richest man in the world, was directly involved from the beginning, but the ‘Money-Power’ extended well beyond that single source. The Rand multi-millionaires, Sir Abe Bailey and Alfred Beit were members of the inner core [36] and always willing to finance Secret Elite proposals, fund their propaganda groups, and back Milner. Sir Ernest Cassel, an investment banker and one of the wealthiest men in pre-war Europe, was likewise involved. Cassel, a close friend of King Edward VII, acted as go-between for the British government and provided personal funds for Lord Esher. [37]
Other great financiers and bankers, centred in the City, the financial and banking district of London, shared the vision of a single world power based on English ruling class values. The world had entered an era of financial capitalism where these wealthy international investment bankers were able to dominate both industry and government if they had the concerted will to do so. [38] This “Money Power” seeped into the British Establishment and joined the aristocratic landowning families who had ruled Britain for centuries. Together, they lay at the heart of the Secret Elite.
In his “Confession of Faith”, Cecil Rhodes had written of bringing the whole uncivilized world under British rule, and the “recovery” of the United States to make the “Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire,” [39] by which he meant a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant America working in tandem with like minds in England. Clearly the United States could not be “recovered” by force of arms, so Rhodes dream was expanded to include the wealthy elites in the U.S. who shared a similar mind-set.
Rhodes suffered from heart and lung problems and was aware that his projected life span was limited. He wrote several wills to ensure that his fortune would be used to pursue his dream. Part of his strategy was to gift scholarship places at his alma mater, Oxford University, in the belief that exposure to British culture, philosophy and education would strengthen the best young minds from the colonies and, most importantly, the United States. Rhodes scholarships favoured American students, with two allocated for each of the fifty States and Territories, but only sixty places for the entire British Empire. The “best talents” from the “best families” in the US were to be nurtured at Oxford, spiritual home of the Secret Elite, and imbued with an appreciation of “Englishness” and “retention of the unity of the Empire.” [40] Professor Quigley revealed that “the scholarships were merely a façade to conceal the secret society, or, more accurately, they were to be one of the instruments by which the members of the secret society could carry out his [ Rhodes ] purpose.” [41]
The Secret Elite appreciated America ’s vast potential, and adjusted the concept of British Race supremacy to Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Rhodes ’s dream had only to be slightly modified. The world was to be united through the English-speaking nations in a federal structure based around Britain. [42] Alfred Milner became the undisputed leader of the secret society when Cecil Rhodes died in 1902. Like Rhodes, he believed that the goal should be pursued by a secret political and economic elite influencing “journalistic, educational and propaganda agencies” behind the scenes. [43]
The flow of money into the United States during the nineteenth century advanced industrial development to the immense benefit of the millionaires it created, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt and their associates. The Rothschilds represented British interests, either directly through front companies or indirectly, through agencies they controlled. Railroads, steel, shipbuilding, construction, oil and finance blossomed in an oft-cut throat environment, though that was more apparent than real. These small groups of massively rich individuals on both sides of the Atlantic knew each other well, and the Secret Elite in London initiated a very select and secretive dining club, The Pilgrims, that brought them together on a regular basis.
On 11 July 1902, an inaugural meeting was held at the Carlton Hotel [44] of what became known as the London Chapter of The Pilgrims Society, with a select membership limited by individual scrutiny to 500. Ostensibly, the society was created to “promote goodwill, good friendship and everlasting peace” [45] between Britain and the United States, but its highly secretive and exclusive membership leaves little doubt as to its real purpose. This was the pool of wealth and talent that the Secret Elite drew together to promote its agenda in the years preceding the First World War. Behind an image of the Pilgrim Fathers, the persecuted pioneers of Christian values, this elite cabal advocated the idea that “Englishmen and Americans would promote international friendship through their pilgrimages to and fro across the Atlantic ”. [46] It presented itself as a spontaneous movement to promote democracy across the world [47] and doubtless many of the members believed that, but The Pilgrims included a select collective of the wealthiest figures in both Britain and the United States who were deeply involved with the Secret Elite. They shared Rhodes ’ dream and wanted to be party to it.
The New York branch of The Pilgrims was launched at the Waldorf-Astoria on 13 January 1903, [48] and comprised the most important bankers, politicians and lawyers on the Eastern Seaboard. They established a tradition of close interaction with British and American ambassadors. [49] The ambassadorial connections with The Pilgrims would prove absolutely crucial in linking the Foreign Secretary in London and the Secretary of State in Washington to the Secret Elite and its agenda for war. A number of the American Pilgrims also had close links with the New York branch of the Secret Elite’s Round Table.
In Britain, at least eighteen members of the Secret Elite, including Lords Rothschild, Curzon, Northcliffe, Esher and Balfour attended Pilgrims dinners, though the regularity of their attendance is difficult to establish. Such is the perennial problem with secretive groups. We know something about the guests invited to dinner, but not what was discussed between courses. [50] In New York, members included both the Rockefeller and Morgan dynasties and many men in senior government posts. Initially, membership was likewise limited to 500. [51] The power-elite in America was New York centred, carried great influence in domestic and international politics, and was heavily indulgent of Yale, Harvard and Princeton Universities. They conducted an American version of what Carroll Quigley termed the Secret Elite’s triple-front-penetration of politics, the press and education. [52] The Pilgrims Society brought together American money and British aristocracy, royalty, government ministers and top diplomats. It was indeed a special relationship.
Of all the American banking establishments, none was more Anglo-centric than the J. P. Morgan bank, itself deeply involved with The Pilgrims. An American, George Peabody, established the bank in London in 1835. In 1854 he took on a partner, Junius Morgan, (father of J. P. Morgan) and the bank was renamed Peabody, Morgan & Co. When Peabody ’s retired in 1864 it became the J. S. Morgan bank.
The Rothschilds had developed a close relationship with Peabody and Morgan, and following a crash in 1857 saved the bank by organizing a huge bailout by the Bank of England. Although American by birth, the Morgan family wore their affinity to England like a badge of honour. Despite stinging criticism from Thomas Jefferson that Junius’s father-in-law, the Rev John Pierpont, was “under the influence of the whore of England,” [53] Junius sent his son to the English High School in Boston. J. P. Morgan spent much of his younger years absorbing English traditions, and was an ardent anglophile and admirer of the British Empire.
In 1899 J. P. Morgan travelled to England to attend an international Bankers Convention and returned to America as the representative of Rothschild interests in the United States. [54] It was the perfect front. Morgan, who posed as an upright Protestant guardian of capitalism, who could trace his family roots to pre-Revolutionary times, acted for the Rothschilds and shielded their American profits from the poison of anti-Semitism. In 1895 the Rothschilds had secretly replenished the US gold reserves through J.P. Morgan, and raised him to the premier league of international banking. [55] In turn, his gratitude was extended to another Rothschild favourite and leading figure in the Secret Elite, Alfred Milner. In 1901, Morgan offered Milner a then massive income of $100,000 per annum to become a partner in the London branch [56] but Milner was not to be distracted from the vital business of the Boer War. J. P. Morgan was an Empire loyalist at the heart of the American Establishment.
A second powerful bank on Wall Street, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., also served as a Rothschild front. Jacob Schiff, a German who ran the bank, came from a family close to the Rothschilds.[57] He had been born in the house his parents shared with the Rothschilds in the Jewish quarter of Frankfurt. [58] Schiff was an experienced European banker whose career straddled both continents, with contacts in New York, London, Hamburg and Frankfurt. His long-standing friend, Edward Cassel of the Secret Elite, was appointed Kuhn, Loeb’s agent in London. Schiff even dined with King Edward on the strength of Cassel ’s close friendship with the King. [59] Jacob Schiff had married Solomon Loeb’s daughter and, backed by Rothschild gold, quickly gained overall control of the Kuhn, Loeb Bank. [60] Schiff in turn brought a young German banker, Paul Warburg, over to New York to help him run the bank. Paul and his brother Max had served part of their banking apprenticeships with Natty Rothschild in London. Like the Peabody-Morgan bank in London, the Warburg family bank in Hamburg had been saved by a very large injection of Rothschild money, and undoubtedly acted as a Rothschild front thereafter.
On the surface there were periods of blistering competition between the investment banking houses and international oil goliaths J. D. Rockefeller and the Rothschilds, but by the turn of the century they adopted a more subtle relationship that avoided real competition. A decade earlier, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild had accepted Rockefeller’s invitation to meet in New York behind the closed doors of Standard Oil’s headquarters on Broadway. Standard’s chief spokesman, John D Archbold [61] reported that they had quickly reached a tentative agreement, and thought it desirable on both sides that the matter was kept confidential. Clearly both understood the advantage of monopolistic collusion. It was a trend they eventually developed to their own advantage. By the early years of the twentieth century much of the assumed rivalry between major stakeholders in banking, industry and commerce was a convenient façade, though they would have the world believe otherwise.
Consider please this convenient façade. Official Rothschild biographers maintain that the dynasty’s interests in America were limited, and that the American Civil War led to “a permanent decline in the Rothschild’s transatlantic influence”. [62] All our evidence points in the opposite direction. Their associates, agents and front companies permeated American finance and industry. Their influence was literally everywhere. J. P. Morgan, the acknowledged chieftain of the Anglo-American financial establishment was the main conduit for British capital [63]and a personal friend of the Rothschilds. Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb, another close friend of the Rothschild family, worked hand-in-glove with Rockefeller in oil, railroad and banking enterprises. Jacob Schiff the Pilgrim was both a Rothschild agent and a trusted associate of J. D. Rockefeller the Pilgrim. Morgan, Schiff and Rockefeller, the three leading players on Wall Street, had settled into a cosy cartel behind which the House of Rothschild remained hidden, but retained immense influence and power. Control of capital and credit was increasingly concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer men until the rival banking groups ceased to operate in genuine competition. [64]
This trans-Atlantic financial collusion underpinned the Anglo-American bond on which the Secret Elite built their dream of world domination. Political control moved hand in glove with the Money-Power. One of the problems the Secret Elite had to contend with was democracy, even the very limited choice that British and American democracy had to offer. Professor Quigley observed that Alfred Milner, and apparently most members of the Secret Elite, believed that “democracy was not an unmixed good, or even a good, and far inferior to the rule of the best…” [65] They, of course, believed themselves “the best” and their morality did not exclude the use of warfare to carry out what they deemed to be their civilising mission; a new world order based on ruling class values in which they would be first amongst men.
In Britain, faced with an electorate that frequently changed allegiance from the Conservative party to the Liberal party and back again, the Secret Elite selected reliable and trusted men to hold high office in both parties. Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, a member of the inner circle of the Secret Elite, [66] and Foreign Secretary Lord Lansdowne began the transformation of British Foreign policy towards war with Germany in the sure knowledge that senior Liberals would continue that policy if and when the people voted for change. Herbert Henry Asquith, Richard Haldane and Sir Edward Grey were Milner’s chosen senior men in the Liberal Party and “objects of his special attention”. [67] Their remit was to ensure that an incoming Liberal government maintained a seamless foreign policy that served the grand plan. Their Secret Elite connections were impeccable. Together, with their good friend Arthur Balfour, they were intimately involved with the inner circles of the cabal. Their duty was to the King, the Empire, to Milner’s dream, to Rhode’s legacy. They confronted the same problems, analysed the same alternatives and agreed the same solution. Germany had to go.
The senior Liberals, Asquith, Grey and Haldane, conspired to undermine the anti-war Liberal Party leader Campbell-Bannerman from within and were supported by both the Conservative party leaders and King Edward VII, himself a key figure inside the Secret Elite. Every major step taken by the British Foreign Office from 1902 onwards was dictated by the overall objective to destroy Germany. Treaties with Japan, the Entente Cordiale with France and all of its secret clauses, the secret conventions agreed between King Edward and the Russian Czar had that single purpose. Simply put, the large field armies of France and Russia were needed to crush Germany.
In the United States, and indeed in France, political power was guaranteed by financial incentives and the appointment of suitable candidates, in other words through bribery and corruption. Senator Nelson Aldrich of Rhode Island was chosen by the Secret Elite to be the voice of “sound economics” in the Senate. A wealthy businessman and father-in-law of J.D.Rockefeller Jr., Aldrich was known as “Morgan’s floor broker in the Senate.” [68] Shameless in his excesses, he used public office to feather his own very large nest. Public service was to him little more than a cash cow through which he built a ninety-nine roomed chateau and sailed a two hundred foot yacht. [69] Over a two-year period the Money-Power worked steadily on their chosen Senator to turn him into an “expert” on banking systems. Congress appointed a National Monetary Commission in 1908 with Aldrich as Chairman to review U.S. banking. Its members toured Europe, supposedly collecting data on various banking systems. Aldrich’s final report, however, was not the product of any European study tour, but of a collective conspiracy.
In November 1910, five bankers representing Morgan, Rockefeller and Kuhn Loeb interests, met in total secrecy with Senator Aldrich and the Assistant Secretary to the U.S. Treasury on Jekyll Island, an exclusive playground of the mega-rich off the coast of Georgia. Of the seven conspirators, five, Senator Aldrich, Henry Davison, Benjamin Strong, Frank Vanderlip and Paul Warburg, were members of The Pilgrims. [70] Their objective was to formulate a Central Banking Bill that would be presented to Congress as if it was the brainchild of Aldrich’s Monetary Commission.
The proposed “Federal Reserve System” was to be owned entirely by private banks, though its name implied that it was a government institution. Individuals from the American banking dynasties, including Morgan, Warburg, Schiff and Rockefeller, would hold the shares. It was to be a central bank of issue that would have a monopoly of all the money and credit of the people of the United States. It would control the interest rate and the volume of money in circulation. The Federal Reserve System constructed on Jekyll Island had powers that King Midas could never have contemplated. The objective was to establish a franchise to create money out of nothing for the purpose of lending, get the taxpayer to pick up any losses, and convince Congress that the aim was to protect the public. [71]
The Aldrich proposals never went to a vote. President Taft refused to support the Bill on the grounds that it would not impose sufficient government control over the banks. The Money Power decided that Taft had to go. Their support in the 1912 Presidential election swung behind the little known Woodrow Wilson. The speed with which Wilson was bounced from his post at Princeton University in 1910, to Governor of New Jersey in 1911, then Democratic Party nominee for the Presidency in 1912 made him the Solomon Grundy of U S politics.
Not only did the Secret Elite put their man in the White House, they also gave him a minder, Edward Mandell House. Woodrow Wilson was President of the United States but this shadowy figure stood by his side, controlling his every move. House, an Anglophile who had been part educated in England, was credited with swinging the 1912 Democratic Convention in Baltimore behind Wilson. [72] He became Woodrow Wilson’s constant companion from that point onwards, with his own suite of rooms in the White House. He was also in direct, sometimes daily contact with J. P. Morgan Jr, Jacob Schiff, Paul Warburg, and Democrat Senators who sponsored the Federal Reserve Bill. [73] Mandell House guided the President in every aspect of foreign and domestic policy, chose his Cabinet and formulated the first policies of his new Administration. [74] He was the prime intermediary between the President and his Wall Street backers. [75] The Anglo-centric Money Power had complete control of the White House and finally established its central bank in time for the Secret Elite’s war.
Ponder the significance of this coincidence. Provided with huge sums of Secret Elite money rerouted via St Petersburg, French politicians, newspapers and journalists were effectively corrupted to elect the Revanchistwarmonger candidate Raymond Poincare to the Presidency of France. By February 1913, two major powers, The United States and France, had new Presidents who were elected to office through the machinations of the Secret Elite. They had positioned key players in the governments of Britain, France, and the United States and exerted immense influence over the foreign ministry in Russia. Politics, money and power were the pillars on which the Anglo-Saxon elite would destroy Germany and take control of the world.
All that was left to concoct was a reason for war. The Kaiser’s refusal to be drawn into direct confrontation with France and Britain over crises in Morocco in 1905 and 1911 demanded a rethink. Public hysteria in Britain about spies was developed into a cottage industry, with barely literate novels and wild articles in Northcliffe’s papers portraying Germany as a dangerous warmongering nation of Huns preparing to pounce on an unsuspecting and ill-prepared Britain. Similarly in France, through blatant bribery and corruption, both the press and the Revanchistesin French politics fomented anti-German sentiment. But Germany remained stubbornly unwilling to become involved a European war.
From 1912 onwards the Secret Elite looked to the Balkans to provide the excuse for war. Alexander Isvolsky, their top Russian agent, had been strategically moved to Paris, from which vantage point he directed the Balkan agitation. The mix of ethnic diversity, religious animosities, political intrigue and raw nationalism was deliberately provoked into two brutal Balkan wars which in themselves could have brought about a pan-European war, but the Kaiser refused to take the bait.
Something more dramatic, more sensational, was needed. The notion propagated by many historians that world war was ‘inevitable’ or that the world ‘slid’ into war is crass. Chance was not involved. It required a complex set of manipulated events engineered by determined men to set the fuse. What remained was a spark to ignite that fuse. It came with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir-apparent to the Austrian Empire, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. Millions of words have been written to describe the events in Sarajevo that day, but none have ever revealed the trail of complicity |
of the OP.
With a couple of refreshing exceptions what transpired between the members of this oh-so-erudite group was a demonstration of feminist dominance and cluelessness, complete with the obligatory attack on MND for fearing women’s equality. Or as one devout atheist-feminist put it:
The whole web site mensnewsdaily.com is a sad overreaction to the growing equality of women in society.
These people are forward thinkers; people who think they have overcome ages of religious indoctrination and bravely stand to tell the world their vision isn’t clouded by superstition and fantasy?
Apparently they can’t even handle 50 years of loud mouthed arts majors without drinking the Kool-aide and going brain dead. There was scarcely a voice among them that did not wallow in the ersatz enlightenment so common to feminist ideologues. There was no real discussion, just an impotent thread that came to a rather underwhelming and predictably vacuous conclusion.
I understand the phenomena all too well. Feminism, as far as ideology goes, has been very effective at using human reproductive realities to co-opt other movements. In fact, from the American Civil Rights Movement to Occupy Wall Street, feminism has progressed without paying its own way, but rather by sending women in to other social arenas and wheedling men into supporting them. The Borg would be proud if they had emotions. Resistance is Futrelle.
All of this goes to demonstrate the power of reproductive dynamics between men and women. Even in a sub culture that places an unusually passionate emphasis on science and empirical evidence, the dogma of gender feminism, complete with the entire litany of enabling fantasies, was just able to waltz in and take over.
You find this in the work of PZ Myers, a zealous ideologue with an openly feminist agenda who makes no bones about what men should do in the presence of women. They should put a piece of tape over their dominant, patriarchal mouths and shut up. So says Myers:
Listen. To. The. Women. I’ve got a simple suggestion for my fellow men. Learn to shut up and listen. Seriously. You want women to find your organization pleasant and interesting and worth contributing to? Then don’t form panels full of men trying to figure out what women want, talking over women who try to get a word in edgewise, belittling women’s suggestions with jokes, and trying to determine how We Well-Meaning Men can give Those Women what we think they want. You are assuming an authority and presuming that it is in your power to give it to the minority, when what you should be doing is deferring to that minority and giving them your attention, letting them speak and shape your organization.
If that is not enough bilge for you, he also recommends that you click on over to be treated to more shaming at the hands of fellow ideologues Sharon Moss and Lyz Liddell, who are making it their mission to convince free thinkers (there’s a fucking laugh) of the male persuasion to similarly shut their mouths and let feminists dictate their sense of decency as well as their beliefs, rational or not.
How’s that for humanism?
As an atheist, I will be the first to admit that I take some issue with the male disposability often furthered by religious doctrine, and I surely do not approve of the way many modern churches have taken a top-down pro-feminist stance. But I understand that sort of thing a good bit more in communities that so strongly attach themselves to tradition.
What I find utterly laughable, though, is the idea that a collection of people whose raison d’être appears inextricably tied to freedom of ideas and independence from groupthink, now find themselves in open public view, turning their hymnals to the instructed page, and singing for phony salvation.
The more of Myers you read, the more you get the idea that masculinity is his version of original sin, and that he is constantly trying to indoctrinate his readers (or is it congregation?) to fall into line with it; without thinking, without dissent. Religiously.
Just shut up and listen to the women. How long, one has to wonder, before PZ wants us all to pray to them?Commodity bulls believe we are in early stages of a bullish ‘supercycle’ for commodities that may last several decades.
Before this cycle, commodities prices stagnated for many years.
Global economic growth and demand for commodities was limited due to the “ongoing economic challenges in the West, a slowdown in Japan, the collapse of the Soviet Union, debt and currency crises in Latin America, and the relatively small [economic] size of China and India,” stated Standard Chartered in a note.
Moreover, advances in technology made the extraction/processing of commodities cheaper and more efficient, which lowered prices on the supply side.
Since 2001, however, things have changed.
On the demand side, China is industrializing and urbanizing, which created demand for consumer goods and infrastructure. In the decades to follow, other large countries like India and Brazil will likely follow suit.
On the supply side, innovation is still occurring, particular on efforts to develop renewable energy. However, these efforts will likely not be enough to offset the rising demand. Moreover, non-energy commodities like metals and food are still not renewable.
The chart below shows that the commodities rally began in 2001. It was briefly interrupted by the global financial crisis. Now, on the back of the global recovery and loose US monetary policy, it’s in full-swing again.
It’s unclear which commodity will benefit the most. Some think it’s energy, whose consumption will increase with urbanization and industrialization of countries like India. Others think it’s agricultural commodities because the growing middle class in emerging market economies will result in more people being able to afford more food. Still, others thinks it’s metals due to the demands of infrastructure building, cars, and home appliances.
There are several ways to invest in commodities. One way is to buy and store the physical commodities. For easily storable and divisible commodities like gold, this method is a popular choice.
Another is to buy futures contracts of these commodities and roll them over at each expiration.
A third way is through equities of commodity producers or commodities exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
For US retail investors, the equities market is by far the most convenient and practical way to invest in commodities.
Below is a list of candidate equities for the commodities supercycle play.
Energy
United States Oil Fund LP (NYSE:USO) – an ETF that buys oil futures
SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Explore & Prod. (ETF) (NYSE:XOP) – an ETF that holds oil and gas exploration and production companies
Petroleo Brasileiro SA (ADR) (NYSE:PBR) – largest oil producer in Brazil
PetroChina Company Limited (ADR) (NYSE:PTR) – largest oil producer in China
ExxonMobil (NYSE:XOM) – large international oil company
United States Natural Gas Fund (NYSE:UNG) – an ETF that buys natural gas futures
Chesapeake Energy Corporation (NYSE:CHK) – large US natural gas producer
Devon Energy Corporation (NYSE:DVN) – large US natural gas producer
Peabody Energy Corporation (NYSE:BTU) – large US coal miner
Yanzhou Coal Mining Co. (ADR) (NYSE:YZC) – large Chinese coal miner
Food
PowerShares DB Agriculture Fund (NYSE:DBA) – an ETF that buys corn, soybean, sugar, and wheat futures
Market Vectors Agribusiness (ETF) (Public, NYSE:MOO) – an ETF that holds agricultural stocks
Potash Corp (NYSE:POT) – large crop nutrient producer
The Mosaic Company (NYSE: MOS) – large crop nutrient producer
Deere & Company (NYSE:DE) – large agricultural equipment manufacturer
AGCO Corporation (NYSE:AGC) – large agricultural equipment manufacturer
Metals
Powershares DB Base Metals Fund (ETF) (NYSE:DBB) – an ETF that buys metals futures
SPDR S&P Metals and Mining (ETF) (NYSE:XME) – an ETF that holds metals and mining stocks
Southern Copper Corporation (NYSE:SCCO) – large copper, zinc, and molybdenum producer
Vale (ADR) (Public, NYSE:VALE) – largest iron ore producer in the world
Rio Tinto plc (ADR) (NYSE:RIO) – large aluminum, iron ore, and copper producer
Stillwater Mining Company (NYSE: SWC) – palladium and platinum producer
Email Hao Li at hao.li@ibtimes.com
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Click here to read recent articles by Hao LiLast updated on: December 31, 2009 00:29 IST
"The essential nature of the material world is not material; the essential nature of the physical world is not physical; the essential stuff of the universe is non-stuff."
With these words, spiritual guru Dr Deepak Chopra explained the fundamental nature of the universe and argued that modern science has much to learn from the Vedic worldview and its associated mathematics.
Chopra was speaking at the Indian Astrology Conference, organised by the
Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan at the Reeves Great Hall at the Fashion Institute of
Technology in New York on December 18 and 19. He was the chief guest.
Admitting that he lacked the wisdom some of those attending might have, given that his training was in endocrinology, Chopra spoke of how he had come to realise -- in spite of his medical training -- that Western medicine was straitjacketed by reductionism. That, he said, was when he began to look into Vedanta.
"Western science is still frozen in an obsolete, Newtonian worldview that is based literally on superstition -- and we can call it the superstition of materialism -- which says you and I are physical entities of the physical universe," he said.
He cited the origin of consciousness as one of two most important mysteries for science. For the last 300 years, he said, scientists have believed that consciousness is a product of our brains. But in fact, he said, the more the brain is studied, the more elusive consciousness becomes.
Describing the problem of perception, Chopra pointed at a red band on the edge of the banner for the conference, saying that nothing red was coming from the band to the viewer's eyes; it was just frequencies that the brain interpreted as red.
"Is the colour red there or in your consciousness," Chopra asked, answering
the question himself, "This is a fundamental misunderstanding that perception is in the brain. It's not in the brain; perception is in consciousness. All our thoughts are in consciousness, all our imagination is in consciousness, all our cognition is in consciousness. Everything that we call reality is in consciousness. Everything! There's nothing outside consciousness. And no one can find this consciousness. And the reason they can't find consciousness is because they are looking in the wrong place," he said.
Chopra said that good scientists --- such as Amit Goswami, a retired theoretical nuclear physicist and member of The University of Oregon Institute for Theoretical Physics, and Hans-Peter Durr, a physicist, philosopher and the former vice executive director of the Max Planck Institute for Physics -- agreed that 'the universe is made up of subatomic vibrations that are going on and off at the speed of light.'
He said the real universe could be viewed through Jyotish (astrology) but not through the distorted lens of perception.
"Past, present and future are actually one phenomenon, one picture, one reality, one consciousness." Chopra said, adding that this explains simultaneity in the universe.
He said this held true for biological organisms, too: The hundred trillion cells in the human body were more than the number of stars in the Milky Way and performed a hundred trillion activities every second.
"Every cell instantly knows what is happening in every other cell, in fact, in the whole universe," Chopra said.
Others who spoke at the conference were Vedic astrologer Chakrapani Ullal, who gave a historical perspective of astrology in the East and West, astrologer Raj Kumar Sharma, palmist Rakesh Sharma and physician and author T I Radhakrishnan.
The event hosted some panel discussions, including those on the scientific basis for and the practical aspects of astrology. A press release described Jyotish as an ancient system that is one of the six auxiliaries of the Vedas developed to explain the movements of planets, sub-planets etc on the universe at large.
Dr Uma Mysorekar, president of the Hindu Temple Society of North, was the guest of honour.BERLIN (Reuters) - Chancellor Angela Merkel defended Germany’s BND intelligence agency on Monday against accusations it illegally helped the United States spy on officials and firms in Europe.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel commemorates the centenary of the massacre of 1.5 million Armenians by Ottoman Turk forces, during a regular session of the German lower house of Parliament, Bundestag, in Berlin, Germany April 24, 2015. REUTERS/Hannibal Hanschke
In her first public comments on a scandal that has gripped Germany for weeks, Merkel said it was still unacceptable for friendly nations to spy on each other - a reference to her dismay over reports the NSA had tapped her cell phone up to 2013.
She ardently backed BND cooperation with the U.S. National Security Agency in fighting terror even as Germany’s top public prosecutor launched an investigation. Spying on behalf of the NSA has upset many in Germany where surveillance is a sensitive issue due to abuses by the Nazis and East German Stasi.
“We’ve quite correctly got controls on the BND in parliament and I consider that to be absolutely essential,” Merkel said, adding that her office stood ready to answer all its questions.
“But on the other hand, intelligence agencies are working to ensure the public’s safety and the German government will do everything it can to ensure that it can carry out its job.
“And this ability to carry out its duties in the face of international terrorism threats is done in cooperation with other intelligence agencies, and that includes first and foremost the NSA.”
Merkel said spy agencies had to cooperate with each other but conceded there is “an innate tension” between freedom and security. “Striking the right balance is my job,” she said.
Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere, a close Merkel ally and her chief of staff from 2005 to 2009, has faced calls to resign over the scandal. He has denied he lied to parliament about Germany’s intelligence cooperation with the NSA.
The chancellery has said it had known of the NSA interest in spying on European defense firms since 2008, even though parliament was told in 2014 it had no information about that.
BND president Gerhard Schindler rejected charges leveled by opposition politicians that the BND had committed treason by assisting the NSA. Revelations by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that Washington carried out large-scale electronic espionage in Europe have provoked outrage in Germany.
“I emphatically reject the accusations of treason,” he said at a panel discussion in Berlin. “It’s totally absurd.” He also said Germans had the wrong impression about the cooperation with the NSA. “The BND isn’t a compliant tool of the United States.”Jeff Saturday says when healthy, Steelers center Maurkice Pouncey could be Pittsburgh's best offensive player. Trey Wingo calls him the "all-time champ" for having so many surgeries. (1:07)
PITTSBURGH -- The Steelers' Maurkice Pouncey is relieved to be back on the field after a horrific 2015 season that saw the Pro Bowl center undergo six surgical procedures and a skin graft, he told ESPN.
Pouncey broke his left fibula in the preseason when Green Bay Packers safety Ha Ha Clinton-Dix fell onto the back of his leg. Packers receiver Jordy Nelson also tore his anterior cruciate ligament in that Aug. 23 game.
Pouncey suffered a setback in October. The surgical wound didn't close properly, resulting in a staph infection.
"It was scary," Pouncey said. "I don't want that on my worst enemy."
Pouncey has recovered from the injury and fully participated in offseason workouts, even as the coaching staff has urged him to take days off.
He's making up for lost time.
Maurkice Pouncey is happy to be back on the practice field for the Steelers. In 2015, he underwent seven procedures after he broke his left fibula in the preseason. AP Photo/Keith Srakocic
In October, Pouncey was preparing for a return to the lineup by running and working out at the team facility. Something didn't feel right. An examination found Pouncey's wound didn't heal as the team had hoped, he said.
In the ensuing weeks, Steelers coach Mike Tomlin never officially ruled out Pouncey for the season when talking to reporters. But his 2015 was basically over.
"It all went downhill from there," said Pouncey, who was eligible to return Nov. 8 against Oakland after a stint on short-term injured reserve. "It all happened so fast. I thought I was going to play."
"I blame no one. We're all professionals. I respect this organization for everything they did to get me through this."
The staph infection hadn't yet reached the bone; after corrective surgeries, Pouncey slept with a PICC line for medicine two different times. At some point, Pouncey also had an E. coli infection that wasn't as serious but required attention, he said.
Pouncey said he underwent multiple surgeries along with a few "clean-outs," plus the graft, equaling seven procedures total.
He also made two visits to Dr. Robert Anderson's clinic in Charlotte, North Carolina. Anderson is a renowned foot and ankle specialist and essentially served as a second opinion. Pouncey went to Anderson's clinic because he's considered the best in that field. "I can't play around with my career," Pouncey said.
Pouncey doesn't blame anyone for what happened, pointing out that "we all took the heat for it" and saying he knows the injury was complicated.
"We had to figure out the best plan possible to get it right," he said. "No one really had that many infections like that [around here].... I blame no one. We're all professionals. I respect this organization for everything they did to get me through this."
Editor's Picks Steelers RB Bell won't talk deal until healed Steelers running back Le'Veon Bell will not discuss a new contract until his surgically repaired knee is healed.
Pouncey's offensive line teammates visited him every Thursday to keep his spirits high. Miami Dolphins center Mike Pouncey, Maurkice's twin brother, called him every day. His girlfriend and 4-year-old daughter did their best to make him smile.
Pouncey learned enough about staph infections, so now he immerses himself in blocking techniques. By the second week of organized team activities, Pouncey started to feel like himself, planting and turning with vigor. The metal placed in Pouncey's leg for stability was removed during the procedures, which Pouncey considers a positive.
Minicamp is over, but instead of vacationing over the next week, Pouncey said he'll be putting in two-a-days in South Florida. He rested for five straight months, after all.
"It's just another reality check, shows you how fast things can be taken away," Pouncey said. "At the same time, it's a humbling experience, shows you how much something is important in your life, and football is very important to me."Well it's very hard to choose few books when you like many of them. I am an avid reader, a bibliophile. But I tried to mention few which are very close to my heart.
1. The Kite Runner -
By Khaled Hossieni.
The first novel by Khaled Hossieni.I still remember about Amir and Hassan. This story is so close to my heart and it made Khaled Hossieni one of my fav authors.
My fav lines from this novel are :
~ "For you, a thousand times over."
~ "It may be unfair, but what happens in a few days, sometimes even a single day, can change the course of a whole lifetime."
~ "And that's the thing about people who mean everything they say. They think everyone else does too."
~ "There is only one sin. and that is theft... when you tell a lie, you steal someone's right to the truth."
2. The Diary Of A Young Girl -
By Anne Frank
Oh boy, Anne was just 15 when she wrote all this things in her diary and when she went all through this, she makes me cry but teaches many things as well. If I were there at that time, I'd have fallen in love with her. <3
~ "It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart."
~ "I think a lot, but I don't say much."
~ "Although I'm only fourteen, I know quite well what I want, I know who is right and who is wrong. I have my opinions, my own ideas and principles, and although it may sound pretty mad from an adolescent, I feel more of a person than a child, I feel quite independent of anyone."
3. To Kill A Mockingbird -
By Harper Lee
Well it's one of the bestest classics and I don't wanna say much, I'd want my children to read this book. :)
~ "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
~. “I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It’s when you know you’re licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do.”
4. A Thousand Splendid Suns -
By Khaled Hossieni.
I told you he is my fav. This is his second book and I still remember Mariam and Laila. Khaled's characters leaves a print on your mind and heart, I cried in this one too.
~ "Marriage can wait, education cannot."
~ "One could not count the moons that shimmer on her roofs, Or the thousand splendid suns that hide behind her walls."
~ "Of all the hardships a person had to face, none was more punishing than the simple act of waiting."
5. Looking For Alaska -
By John Green
You must be thinking why do I often fall in love with all these characters but I can't help it, one such character is Alaska <3 she is kind of a special girl and I miss her. I love her *cries in the corner*
~ "I go to seek a great perhaps"
~ "The only way out of the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive"
~ "We all use the future to escape the present."
~ "I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane."
Few of my other favorites are “and then there were none”, “the fault in our stars”, “the alchemist”, “the monk who sold his Ferrari”, “a walk to remember” and “the notebook”
Pic credit - my phone galary.One of our regular readers, John Frewen-Lord, a quantity surveyor, has attempted to answer this question. In this article J F-L refers to the junior Education Minister’s suggestion that there would be more teaching of imperial units in the future school curriculum (subsequently played down by Department officials as “no significant change”).
UKMA regards the Minister’s suggestion as a political stunt to appease Eurosceptic critics (not that it has anything to do with “Europe”). It has still to be formally consulted upon and is unlikely to get any further. Nevertheless, John’s analysis is a useful demonstration of the order of possible costs of the DfT’s obstinate refusal to join the rest of the world and permit metric units on the UK’s road signs. This is what he wrote:
“For very many years now, the UK Department for Transport (DfT) has used the excuse of cost in its obstinate resistance to converting the UK’s traffic signs from imperial to metric values. It has become quite obvious that this is simply a smokescreen for some other (and rationally unjustifiable) reason for refusing to bring the country’s road signs in line with virtually everywhere else in the world.
Just recently, it has been proposed to start teaching Britain’s schoolchildren imperial measures in school, purely, it must be emphasised, because of the use of imperial units on road signs – there is absolutely no other reason whatsoever for re-introducing imperial units in the school curriculum after some 40 years of metric-only teaching, and no other use of imperial units in government, industry, commerce or the professions.
This is very much the tail wagging the dog (any sane person would suggest changing the road signs!). Has the DfT backed itself into a corner on this issue? Can it still now use the argument of cost in refusing to change? Perhaps the following may shed some light on the total cost implications of this somewhat bizarre and very backward step.
The DfT, as reported on in MV on many occasions, has come up with a grossly inflated cost of £700 million to convert all of the UK’s speed limit and distance signs to metric units. Others have said that the true cost, especially considering the economies of scale involved, are more like a tenth of that. My own assessment is that the real cost may be as much as double that tenth, but is unlikely to exceed £150 million. Let us use that figure as an upper-bound and conservative estimated one-time cost.
That cost must then be compared with the recurring annual costs of NOT converting the UK’s road signs. In order to do that, the one-time cost must be annualised over a number of years. Road signs probably last somewhere in the order of 20 years before they either wear out, or are replaced for other reasons. The average mid-life will therefore be 10 years. The £150 million thus represents an annualised cost of £15 million per year. (I have ignored the time value of money.)
Now let us look at what ‘saving’ this annual amount of £15 million is actually going to cost, or is currently costing, the UK:
Re-introducing imperial units into the school curriculum
Back in 1992, Richards Phelps undertook a study in the US for Education Week, showing how much teaching dual measurements costs US schools. In particular, Phelps noted that: “… there is a cost to the time spent in teaching two systems. A full year of mathematics instruction is lost to the duplication of effort. Mostly in the elementary grades, our schools spend a few weeks a year [my emphasis] teaching two measurement systems when teaching just metric could be done in one-third the time. Elementary school mathematics textbooks generally give equal weight to the two systems, as do the newly completed curriculum standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.”
In the UK, it is doubtful that equal weight would be given to teaching imperial units alongside the metric system (although it could happen!), and therefore the full year lost in the US (over the 12 years typical for US students) would be much less here. Nonetheless, additional time must be allowed (or is the UK going to abandon other subjects to incorporate teaching imperial units?). This additional time is, say, one third of that spent in the US, or four months over those 12 years. With a typical school year of, say, 200 days, that represents an extra 5 ½ days a year additional classroom time [that is, 200 days per year multiplied by 4 months divided by 12 years, 200 x 4 /144 = 5.6 days – Editor] (I’m sure British schoolchildren will really relish that!). What will this additional time cost per year?
It would be unfair to simply pro-rata the total costs of these 5 ½ days into the annual education budget, as many fixed costs (such as tangible assets) won’t change. But incremental costs will. I will assume that these incremental costs amount to 50% of the annual budget. In 2008-9, the UK education budget was £62.2 billion (source Wikipedia). Allowing for some inflation, let us assume in 2013 it is currently £65 billion. Over a 200-day school year, that represents £325 million PER DAY! Those 5 ½ days, at an incremental cost factor of 50%, are going to cost the UK a staggering £894 million a year!
That alone exceeds the entire one-time cost of converting Britain’s road signs, even at the DfT’s own inflated estimate! But it doesn’t stop there – there are other costs as well.
Lost Exports
I have reported before on a lost export order suffered by an engineer colleague when his Japanese client, undertaking a due diligence visit, assumed that, as all he could see were imperial road signs, the UK was not metric (or metric enough), and, rather than risk a metric-imperial mix-up, awarded the contract to a competitor in a properly metric country. Other British companies may never even get the opportunity to bid on export projects, as overseas companies look upon Britain’s workers as being potentially proficient in neither metric nor imperial units (but particularly metric), and look elsewhere.
In 2011, the UK exported £480 billion of goods and services. Let us round that up to £500 billion for 2013. The US (the world’s only main non-metric country) represents 11% of that, leaving £445 billion exported to the metric world. But how much more than £445 billion would that be if that metric world had TOTAL confidence in the metric capabilities of Britain’s companies and their workforce? Even at a miniscule 0.1% of lost opportunity, the UK may be (and likely is) losing almost £445 million a year in lost exports. It could in reality be much more than that.
Again, we see a cost to the UK economy EVERY YEAR that is of the same order of magnitude as the one-time costs of converting the UK’s road signs (and many times those costs on an annualised basis, using some sensible cost estimates).
The above are just two significant aspects of the UK’s economy that are being, or will be, negatively affected PURELY by the DfT’s insistence on retaining imperial measurements on our road signs. There are numerous other costs well, such as companies having to deal with dual measurements, a workforce with less than optimum mathematical skills, the real costs to society as a whole of foreign lorries striking bridges, and so on, all of which probably amount to many more hundreds of millions of pounds a year.
How can Britain’s politicians be blind to what’s happening here? To cost the British economy at least £1.5 billion a year to save a mere £15 million over that same year – £100 of costs for each £1 saved – is plain madness!”
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The goal of this document is to collect instructions for performing unattended / silent installations of many popular application installers. Such instructions are useful for automating these installations.
A quick word on terminology: Strictly speaking, an unattended installation is one which does not require user interaction, and a silent (or quiet) installation is one which does not display any indication of its progress. However, most people use these terms interchangeably.
Here, we are interested not only in performing unattended installations, but also in waiting for those installations to finish and suppressing any reboot they might want to perform. This is necessary for reliably installing multiple applications.
General information
There are several systems which vendors use to create installers for their applications. To make an educated guess about how to run an installer unattended, you need to know which system was used to create it. Sometimes this will be obvious from the installer's splash screen; sometimes you can figure it out by running strings; and sometimes you will have to guess.
Of course, you can try running the installer with the /? switch to find out which other switches it supports. But if you really expect this to work, then you have not been using Windows for very long. In my experience, the odds are about 1 in 4 that /? will tell you anything at all, even when there is something to tell.
MSI packages
Microsoft's own Windows Installer Service is the nominal standard, and if everybody used it, there would be no need for this document. Unfortunately, Microsoft invented it too late.
The package files have a.msi extension, and you manipulate them using the msiexec utility.
For installation, use the /i and /qb switches. Use the /l* switch to produce a log file. You can provide named options (or "properties") at the end of the command line; which properties are supported depends on the package. For example, this command:
msiexec /qb /l* perl-log.txt /i ActivePerl.msi PERL_PATH=Yes PERL_EXT=Yes
...is how you install ActiveState Perl, instructing the MSI package to add Perl.exe to your PATH and to associate.pl files with it.
Perhaps the most important common property is the REBOOT property, which you can use to suppress any automatic reboot the MSI package might try to perform. So in general, you want to provide the /i, /qb, and REBOOT=ReallySuppress parameters to msiexec.
msiexec can do many other things, like uninstall software or apply patches. Neat, huh? Too bad nobody uses it.
InstallShield
InstallShield is one of the oldest and most widely used application packaging systems.
Installers created by InstallShield recognize the /r, /s, /sms, /f1, and /f2 switches. The installer itself is invariably named setup.exe.
To perform a silent installation, you need an InstallShield "answer file", customarily named setup.iss. Some applications ship with such a file, but if yours does not, you can use the graphical installer itself to create one.
Here is how it works. Run the installer with the /r ("record") switch. Proceed through the dialogs and complete the installation. This will create a setup.iss file and place it in the C:\WINDOWS directory (yes, really). This file will include all of your responses to the InstallShield dialogs, allowing you to perform unattended installations as if you were giving the same answers again. Simply copy setup.iss to the same directory as the installer executable.
Once you have a setup.iss file, run the installer with the /s ("silent") option. This will perform an unattended installation.
Unfortunately, the installer will fork a separate process and exit, meaning it will return immediately even if you run it under start /wait. This makes it useless for scripting purposes. Luckily, there is another switch, /sms, which will cause the installer to pause until the installation completes.
Hence, for an InstallShield application, you want to provide both the /s and the /sms switches.
The /f1 filename switch allows you to specify a fully-qualified alternate name for the setup.iss file. Note that there must be no space between the /f1 switch and the file name. This switch works both with /r to create the file and with /s to read it.
The /f2 filename switch specifies a log file. Once again, there must be no space between the switch and the file name.
WARNING: Be careful what characters you use in these file names, because InstallShield silently strips certain non-alphanumerics (like hyphens).
Oh, one more thing. The /r and /s switches only work if the release engineer is competent. Many packages have "custom dialogs" which are not supported by setup.iss, which means the dialogs will always appear no matter what you do. For such packages, I suggest asking the vendor to fix their installer. If that does not work, I suggest doing what you can to deprive them of business.
PackagefortheWeb
InstallShield has a relatively new add-on product called PackagefortheWeb, or PFTW for short. This is basically an InstallShield tree bundled up as a single-file executable.
When you run this executable, it extracts a bunch of files to a temporary directory and launches the setup.exe within.
The PFTW package recognizes the /s and /a... switches. The /s switch instructs the PFTW package to run silently, although this does not necessarily mean that the underlying setup.exe will run silently.
The /a... ("add") switch allows you to add switches to the command line of the underlying setup.exe process. You may provide any of the normal InstallShield switches here, including /r, /s, and /sms.
Thus, to automate the installation of a PFTW package named foo.exe, you would first perform one installation by hand to create the answer file:
foo.exe /a /r /f1c:\temp\foo.iss
Then, to install the package completely silently, you would run:
start /wait foo.exe /s /a /s /sms /f1c:\temp\foo.iss
The first /s is only needed for a completely silent installation. If you leave it off, the PFTW package will show you a status bar as it extracts the InstallShield tree to the temporary directory.
InstallShield with MSI
Recent versions (7 and above) of InstallShield's tools are able to produce MSI files. Read InstallShield's documentation for full details.
These MSI files may be shipped alone or with a setup.exe installer. These installers in turn come in two flavors, called "InstallScript MSI" and "Basic MSI". InstallScript MSI uses the traditional InstallShield switches. Basic MSI is another story.
To perform an unattended installation using a Basic MSI installer, you provide the /s /v"..." switches, where... represents any additional switches you want to pass down to msiexec. These should include the /qb (or /qn ) switch to make the installation non-interactive, so a minimal invocation would be:
setup.exe /s /v"/qb"
Just to make things interesting, any of these mechanisms might be combined with PFTW. For example, we eventually figured out that the IBM Update Connector requires these flags for unattended installation:
updcon532.exe /s /a /s /v"/qb"
The first /s tells the PFTW installer to extract silently. The /a tells it to provide the remaining switches to the underlying setup.exe. The second /s tells setup.exe to run silently, while the /v"/qb" tells it to pass /qb to msiexec, |
more. Because if I do not manage my life now, everything is over,” the defendant said during his court trial.
According to the court records, the 25-year-old was standing before the St. Pölten court since he placed two orders for narcotics at the dark web while he was in therapy. However, the customs officers identified that the parcels were containing narcotics. One package, containing 50 grams of heroin, was caught at the Vienna Schwechat airport while the other parcel, which was also stopped by the Austrian customs, contained 50 grams of amphetamine.
Both of the packages, especially the one with the 50 grams of heroin, contained large amounts of narcotics. It is unknown whether the defendant sought to resell some of the drugs to local customers or he purchased all for his own use. However, investigators suspected that the man was also selling a portion of the drugs.
During the 25-year-old’s court trial, the prosecution highlighted the fact that the defendant ordered the drugs while he was being treated. Furthermore, the judge stated that law enforcement authorities suspected that the defendant ordered large amounts of drugs since he wanted to resell a portion of the substances to other inmates who were also on treatment.
The 25-year-old regretted his actions and admitted to the judge that he was using ketamine since he heard it could not be discovered during a drug test.
Since the 25-year-old breached the conditions, which were previously imposed by the court, the judge sentenced the defendant to 18 months in prison with 11 months already imposed conditionally. According to the court documents, the previous sentence of the court will be revoked, however, this is not legally binding.
Since it was not clear whether the 25-year-old is eligible for another drug treatment, the judge ordered an evaluation by a psychiatrist to decide whether the defendant is willing to participate in a drug treatment program.Brie Larson has discussed taking on the mantle of Captain Marvel, saying that while she is excited for the role, she may be giving up a couple of things.
The Oscar-winning star – who has led movies such as Room, Short Term 12 and The Glass Castle – told Porter Magazine that joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn't a straightforward decision for her.
"I spent months thinking about whether or not I was going to do the film," she explained, "and I realised that it was a chance to tell a story on the largest scale possible.
@brielarson Twitter
Related: Captain Marvel starring Brie Larson – everything you need to know
"I know it is going to make me lose some of the things I love most about my life, but I think it's worth it."
Larson also spoke about standing up to sexism publicly.
At the Oscars earlier this year, Casey Affleck won Best Actor. The win was controversial, as Affleck had been hit by sexual harassment lawsuits in 2010. Larson, who was presenting the award, noticeably did not clap as he took to the stage and accepted the statuette.
MARK RALSTON Getty Images
"I've been on sets where I didn't feel safe, I've felt objectified," she explained. "But as I'm getting older, I'm realising that I can value myself. I'm allowed to."
Captain Marvel will arrive in cinemas on March 8, 2019.
Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our @digitalspy Twitter account and you're all set.Find out more about Poker Hand Rankings
Try it out yourself!
[console=rules-1]
Your Options
Every poker player has five options to choose from when it's their turn to act in a betting round.
Fold
If a player doesn't feel their holding is strong and doesn't want to continue in the hand, they can elect to 'fold' and throw their cards away. This player will be dealt into the next hand.
Note: If there is no bet to call then it's always advisable to 'check' instead of folding. Even if you don't feel you have a strong card, the next card could change that!
Bet
When no-one acting before the player has bet anything, the player can 'bet'. As the name suggests, bets aren't limited in No Limit Hold'em. As long as the best is at least the size of the 'Big Blind' the player can bet their entire stack at anytime.
After a bet has been made anyone who wishes to continue playing in the hand must either match your bet or raise. If other players are not prepared to match the bet, the only option left for them is to fold.
In a situation where a player bets all their chips, the player is deemed to be 'all in'. Once all in, the player cannot do anything more, but also cannot be forced to fold.
Raise
If a player is facing a bet they have the option to raise.
For example if you are facing a bet of $10 you might consider raising to $30. This will make your opponent re-evaluate their hand. If they're not prepared to match or raise your raise, they have to fold.
Call
If a player is facing a bet they have the option to call.
For example if you are facing a bet of $10 you might consider matching it and calling. By calling you're ensuring you stay in the hand for the time being.
Check
If you are not facing a bet, then you can check. To check is to simply pass the action onto the next player.
When is it Your Turn?
It is important to understand when it is your turn to act. There are a couple of simple rules to understand regarding this.
In the first round of betting the player to the left of the Big Blind is first to act. This is because both the blinds are deemed to have acted. The action moves clockwise with each player electing to: call the big blind, raise or fold. If there has been no raise the action for the round ends with the Big Blind who can either check or raise.
In all later rounds of betting (Flop, Turn & River) action continues to move clockwise, but starts with the small blind and ends with the 'dealer' or 'button'.
Best Five Card Hand Wins
There are a total of seven cards that can be used to make a poker hand: Two hole cards & Five community cards.
Players can use any combination of their hole cards and the community cards to make their best five card poker hand. In some instances a player's best five card hand will be comprised of just the community cards and in others they will maybe only use one hole card and four community cards.
Player one uses both of his hole cards together with three community cards to make the best possible five card hand he can, a full house. The best hand player two can make is an Ace High Flush. See all Poker Hand Rankings.
If you're still having difficulty learning how to play, please watch our how to play poker beginner training video.
Put it all Together!
[console=rules-2]JOHANNESBURG — Nelson Mandela was livid. He believed that two of his daughters, working with a lawyer he had recently fired, were trying to meddle in his financial affairs. So he summoned the daughters, Makaziwe Mandela and Zenani Dlamini, to his home here for a family meeting in April 2005. According to two people present, he gave them a withering talking-to.
“Mr. Mandela made it clear,” Bally Chuene, Mr. Mandela’s current lawyer, said this month in a sworn statement, “that he did not want them involved in his affairs.”
At the time, the daughters appeared to acquiesce to Mr. Mandela’s wish to appoint independent trustees to a trust he had created to provide for his descendants. According to the statement, they agreed to the appointment of Mr. Chuene and George Bizos, a veteran human rights lawyer and close associate of Mr. Mandela, as trustees to a trust financed by the sale of paintings of Mr. Mandela’s handprints.
But the daughters secretly amended the trust document, with the help of Mr. Mandela’s estranged lawyer, Ismail Ayob, according to statements by Mr. Chuene and Mr. Bizos. And by 2011, they were seeking to distribute much of the trust’s money, about $1.3 million, among Mr. Mandela’s children and grandchildren, despite the insistence of the independent trustees that he wanted the money to last for generations.Even though for most people Valentine's Day is a night for great romance, almost from the time I came out at 40, for me it has been bittersweet. Although for 24 years I have shared many romantic Valentine's Days with Doug, the love of my life to whom I am now legally married, on Valentine's Day two of my best friends died tragically because they were gay. There is a strange irony that loving someone of the same sex could bring both such joy and such pain.
I met Ken in a support group for gay fathers. The group was instrumental in resolving many of the conflicts I had about my hidden homosexual desires. Everyone there had come out to their wives and they were seeking to find ways to deal with the loss of losing their families. These men were my entire circle of friends when I first came out.
Ken was my mentor in how to be gay while at the same time remaining a good father. His daughter, Jennifer, lived with him, and I hoped my own daughters could learn from her how to deal with having a gay father.
Ken had just come out of a long term relationship. Not wanting to be alone on Valentines Day, 1988, and not having connected with anyone at the gay bar, Ken went to a cruising area of Des Moines and picked up two young men and took them to his apartment. These two men, Gary Titus and "Billy" Green, stabbed Ken to death. Jennifer, asleep in the next room when her father was murdered, discovered his body in the morning. Titus later testified, "All gay people should be dead." His wish took a strange twist when his brother sent a letter to him in jail telling him he was gay; his brother later died of AIDS.
Jim was the first psychiatric patient I treated who had HIV. It was in the late 1980s and little was known about HIV. I remember being anxious about shaking his hand as he left my office. Jim was a cautious man -- except once. He knew precisely the moment he'd been infected; one night his sexual passion over-powered his rational thought. Jim was very closeted, and he came to see me because and he now faced having not only to tell his family that he was gay but also that he was going to die from AIDS.
Later, as my group of gay acquaintances expanded, Jim and I met again and became good friends. As he became sicker, he asked me to be his medical decision maker in the event he was unable to make his own decisions. I accepted, but didn't realize how difficult it would become.
Jim died on Valentine's Day, 1993. The day, too, was bittersweet. We'd had several inches of new snow; the sun was shining brightly in a sparkling blue sky, but it was bitterly cold. As he lay unconscious in his antique bed, covered with a down duvet and hand-made quilts, Jim's home was filled with people who loved him. The opera music he cherished filled the room where he lay. He had a high fever, was very dehydrated and his breathing was increasingly labored. As he neared death, I was torn between calling for IV's and antibiotics, or allowing him to die with the dignity he'd requested. He died precisely at noon, exactly the way he would have wanted.
How easily either Ken's death or Jim's could have been mine. I came out when I was 40, beginning the process in the early 1980s. As a newly freed man I was eager to experience every gay experience I'd missed earlier in my life. My sexual passions ran high and clouded my ability to make rational choices. If I had come out earlier in my life, I am quite certain I would have been infected with the deadly HIV.
But sweetness remains in my Valentine's Days, too. At about the time of Ken's death I met Doug, and we have been together ever since. I fell in love with him the night we met and he said, "I'm monogamous. Very monogamous." It was obvious that we shared many of the same values. Doug and I have had our challenges, of course, but those shared values have allowed us to work through them. I could never have imagined when I came out that Iowa's Supreme Court would make a unanimous decision in 2010 that would allow us to be married.A stage event at the Dengeki Bunko Autumn Festival 2015 event revealed on Sunday that Reki Kawahara's Sword Art Online light novel series is inspiring a new anime film. Dengeki Online also began streaming an announcement video on Sunday that highlights the previous entries in the series and reveals the film project.
The film project will be a completely new anime work, and Tomohiko Ito is returning from the two TV anime series and the anime special to direct the film at A-1 Pictures. Shingo Adachi is also returning from the TV anime to design the characters. Kawahara is writing a new story for the film.
Kadokawa will reveal more information about the film in the next issue of Dengeki Bunko Magazine on October 10.
The event also revealed that a new soundtrack collection featuring 131 songs titled Sword Art Online Music Collection will ship in Japan on January 27. It will feature Yuki Kajiura's music from the series and previously unreleased tracks on four CDs with a bonus Blu-ray Disc (for footage from Kajiura's live performance at the February 1 "Sword Art Online: Sing All Overtures" event).
Illustrator abec will have an art collection book, and fans can vote for which characters will appear on the cover.31st July 2016
New TV series will follow Mars mission set in 2033
National Geographic has announced "MARS" – a six-part TV series debuting around the world this November that will follow the first human exploration of the Red Planet.
The first human astronauts on Mars. Credit: National Geographic
Of all the planets in our Solar System, none has captured our collective imagination like Mars: a mysterious, indelible part of the zeitgeist. Visible in the night sky for as long as humans have been around, its striking red colour has symbolised blood, passion, anger and love. The existence of Mars as a wandering object was noted by ancient Egyptian astronomers and by 1534 BCE they were familiar with its retrograde motion. In 1610, the Italian astronomer Galileo became the first person to see it via telescope. By the 19th century, the resolution of telescopes had reached a level sufficient for surface features to be identified and the first detailed map was produced in 1877. Seasonal changes, combined with observations of "canals", led to speculation about life on Mars, and it was a long-held belief that vast seas and vegetation were present.
When the first spacecraft began visiting the planet during the 1960s and 70s, Mars was revealed to be a dead and barren planet. However, the search for life would continue. Since then, various rovers have explored the surface, with ever larger science payloads and exponentially more detailed imagery. We now know that huge volumes of liquid water existed on Mars in the ancient past and that small amounts are still present under certain conditions.
Today, we stand on the cusp of the first human missions to Mars. In the near future, it will be technically and financially viable to send people there, beginning a whole new chapter in the history of our species. The Red Planet would offer a second home for humanity, safeguarding us from the various threats on Earth and greatly boosting our chances of survival into the far future. An independent, self-sustaining Mars could be used as a blank slate to forge a more rational, egalitarian and scientifically-minded world – much like the future depicted in Kim Stanley Robinson's epic trilogy.
Size comparison of Earth and Mars. Credit: NASA
As the prospect of exploring and settling this far-away planet moves ever closer to becoming a reality, it has engaged the top minds in science in a modern-day space race, and infiltrated pop culture through blockbusters like Andy Weir's "The Martian" and through out-of-this-world tweets from astronaut Scott Kelly. Now, the National Geographic Channel (NGC), working with a team of award-winning producers, has announced the launch of a global event series later this year.
Premiering on the NGC in 171 countries and 45 languages, the TV show – "MARS" – will redefine storytelling by combining feature-film-quality scripted drama and visual effects with best-in-class documentary sequences, to drive forward a cohesive, edge-of-your seat story of mankind's thrilling quest to colonise Mars. This epic, six-part series, debuting in November, is filmed from the vantage point of a fictitious crewed mission in 2033.
"Brian [Grazer] and I, along with our friends at Radical, had this ambitious idea, which was to create a documentary about the quest to go to Mars but also bring it to life in a really dramatic and cinematic way," says the Executive Producer, Ron Howard. "The offer to the audience will be information meets vivid and experiential filmmaking. Nat Geo's ambition was high – and we are really honoured and thrilled to try and meet that challenge."
The starting point for this unique storytelling method is the year 2033. As dramatic scripted elements and feature film-calibre visual effects bring this future world to life, the modern-day quest to reach the Red Planet is told in a documentary style, and through interviews with present-day scientists and innovators who are researching and developing the space technology to make such a mission possible. Executive producers Howard and Grazer hand-selected visionary Mexican filmmaker Everardo Gout ("Days of Grace") to direct the scripted portions of the series, filmed in Budapest and Morocco.
Earth and the Moon, viewed from Mars. Features visible include the Pacific Ocean, clouds, much of South America, and part of North America. Credit: NASA/JPL/Malin Space Science Systems
MARS envisions the future of space travel funded through a corporate-public partnership of two fictional organisations: the Mars Mission Corporation (MMC), a consortium of aerospace corporations formed in 2022 that builds and manages the technological hardware, and the International Mars Science Foundation (IMSF), created by a coalition of space-faring nations.
The scripted portion will focus on Earth's first crewed mission to Mars aboard the spacecraft Daedalus. Its maiden voyage is crewed by a carefully selected international crew of six uniquely qualified astronauts, including American mission commander Ben Sawyer (Ben Cotton), Korean American mission pilot Hana Seung (Jihae), Spanish hydrologist and geochemist Javier Delgado (Alberto Ammann), French mission physician and biochemist Amelie Durand (Clementine Poidatz), Nigerian mechanical engineer and roboticist Robert Foucault (Sammi Rotibi) and Russian exobiologist and geologist Marta Kamen (Anamaria Marinca). Back on Earth, the MMC control team, based in London, includes Hana Seung's twin sister, capsule communicator (CAPCOM) Joon Seung (also played by Jihae) and French CEO of the MMC Ed Grann (Olivier Martinez).
Once Daedalus successfully lands on Mars and establishes a preliminary base of operations, British nuclear physicist Leslie Richardson (Cosima Shaw) will lead a Phase 2 settlement team along with her husband, world-renowned experimental botanist Dr. Paul Richardson (John Light).
The production team took painstaking efforts to base the scripted narrative on real-world science. The writing team worked extensively with experts – both in the public and private sectors – to understand how the science could serve the story. Dr. Robert Braun, an aerospace engineer and professor of space technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, provided expert consultation on all scientific aspects of the fictional storyline. Dr. Mae Jemison, former NASA astronaut and the first woman of colour in space, acted as a space advisor on the series, working closely with the cast to help them hone their portrayals.
In terms of the visual look of the series, production designer Sophie Becher turned to NASA and SpaceX to craft her designs for the Daedalus spaceship and Olympus Town, the first human colony on Mars as portrayed by the series. Costume designer Daniela Ciancio extensively researched the types of fabrics being developed today to make spacesuits lighter, stronger, more flexible and radiation-resistant to protect the astronauts of the future. Framestore, the Academy Award-winning visual effects team behind "Gravity," will layer in the final external visuals to complete the look of the series.
MARS also showcases an unprecedented collection of interviews with top scientific minds currently working to overcome the many obstacles that stand in the way of an eventual maiden launch. National Geographic received exclusive access to record Elon Musk (the founder of Tesla and SpaceX) and his team at SpaceX mission control, as they successfully landed their Falcon 9 reusable rocket on a drone ship this past April.
"The future of humanity is fundamentally going to bifurcate along one of two directions," says Musk in the series. "Either we're going to become a multi-planet species and a spacefaring civilisation, or we're going to be stuck on one planet, until some eventual extinction event. In order for me to be excited and inspired about the future, it's got to be the first option."
Future water industry on Mars, with a giant pipeline and domed city. Credit: PLRANG ART
MARS truly brings together all of the world's leading minds in a way never before accomplished – think of the world's largest TED talk with the most fascinating people on Earth. Those interviewed for the series include:
• Charles Bolden, NASA administrator; former NASA astronaut
• Peter Diamandis, founder and executive chairman, X-Prize; co-founder and co-chairman, Planetary Resources
• Neil DeGrasse Tyson, director, Hayden Planetarium at The Rose Center for Earth and Space
• David Dinges, professor, department of psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania
• Casey Dreier, director, space policy, Planetary Society
• Ann Druyan, executive producer and writer, Cosmos
• Charles Elachi, retired director, NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL); professor emeritus, Caltech
• Jim Green, NASA planetary science division director
• John Grunsfeld, NASA associate administrator, Science Mission Directorate; former NASA astronaut
• Jennifer Heldmann, NASA planetary scientist
• Jedidah Isler, award-winning astrophysicist; emerging Explorer, National Geographic
• Thomas Kalil, deputy director, policy, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; senior advisor, science, technology and innovation, National Economic Council
• Roger Launius, associate director, collections and curatorial affairs, Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum
• John Logsdon, professor emeritus, political science and international affairs, George Washington University
• James Lovell, former NASA astronaut; commander, Apollo 13 mission
• Elon Musk, CEO and chief technology officer, SpaceX; CEO, Tesla Motors; chairman, SolarCity
• Stephen Petranek, author, "How We'll Live on Mars"
• Mary Roach, author, "Packing for Mars"
• Jennifer Trosper, Mars 2020 mission manager, JPL
• Andy Weir, author, "The Martian"
• Robert Zubrin, president, The Mars Society; president, Pioneer Astronautics
The desire not only to reach Mars but also to colonise it has stirred vigorous debate among the space community. The question is not only "could we?" but also "should we?" Neil DeGrasse Tyson is not convinced that we have to send humans to Mars; he bets it would take less effort and less money to figure out how to survive threats to Earth than to colonise another planet in order to maintain the species: "I think we should visit planets, as you'd visit any place you've never been before," he says. "But we evolved on Earth to live on Earth."
The consensus seems to be forming that humans will eventually make the trip to Mars, but the timetable for doing so also remains a point of debate. Robert Zubrin, president of The Mars Society and of Pioneer Astronautics, makes a bold assertion: "If the next President were to get up in the spring of 2017 and announce his or her commitment to send humans to Mars, we could be there by the end of that administration's second term."
National Geographic will extend the storytelling in an unprecedented, cross-platform effort that includes a six-part companion prequel. Virtual reality experiences will be available at MakeMarsHome.com. There will also be a MARS Experience installation in New York City this October. Further, MARS will be the November cover story of National Geographic magazine and will be featured in a standalone book, "MARS: Our Future on the Red Planet," on sale from 25th October. An NG Kids Book, "MARS: The Red Planet," will go on sale from 27th September and further educational materials will be released. NG Live speakers will also be touring. You can watch the official trailer below. Please subscribe to us at YouTube.com/futuretimelinedotnet.
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Comments »Johnny Depp, Gwyneth Paltrow, Olivia Munn, Aubrey Plaza, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Goldblum and Paul Bettany star in in the action comedy 'Mortdecai' who is an art dealer searching for a painting linked to nazi gold. This is the second trailer in HD.
PAUL Bettany knows he’s has a few slightly dodgy movies on his CV.
The straight-talking British actor freely admits he’s done plenty for the paycheques, particularly after becoming a father, when the desire to safeguard his family financially outstripped any of his other concerns.
He’s not naming names, but after his initially lauded breakthrough movies such as A Beautiful Mind and Master and Commander: the Far Side Of the World, it’s hard not to point the finger at B-grade actioners such as Legion (in which he played machinegun-toting archangel) and Priest (in which he played a vampire hunting man of the cloth).
“There are movies that you do that you don’t like or that you don’t even see,” he says. “There are other movies that you are not ashamed of and then there are movies that you are so proud to have been in,” he says, naming Master and Commander with Aussie master director Peter Weir as one of the titles that fits into the last category.
As a result there he says there was a period that he “fell out of love with acting”. But having set up his future with actor wife Jennifer Connelly and their three children, splitting their time between homes in New York City and their farm in Vermont, he’s now able to pick and choose his projects with more precision.
Slowly, thanks to smaller roles in gritty, low-budget dramas such as Margin Call and Blood, and keeping his hand in the blockbuster world with the likes of Transcendence and the coming Avengers sequel, The Age Of Ultron, not to mention directing his wife in his first feature, he has rediscovered his professional passion once more.
Best of all, landing a key role as Vision in the Marvel Universe after voicing Tony Stark’s artificial intelligence computer JARVIS in the three Iron Man movies will give him a solid base to which he can return.
Though The Avengers sequel’s secrets are ridiculously closely guarded, it would appear that his role as an android created by the villainous Ultron, will be a recurring one.
“That’s the really great thing about the Marvel gig for me,” he says. “I have never known if I have had a job six months out ever in my life. And now I know that they have plans and I can be even more judicious about the stuff that I do outside of that work. I can wait for the right thing and feel really attached to it.”
One of those jobs for love and laughs is his latest movie, Mortdecai, his third collaboration with good mate Johnny Depp. Given that their last two films together, 2010’s critically panned The Tourist and last year’s box-office bomb Transcendence, didn’t exactly set the world on fire, just what was it that made him say yes when Depp asked him to play his one-eyed, sex-obsessed, often shot-at manservant named Jock Strapp?
“It seemed like a really fun thing to do,” Bettany says, adding that Depp gave him the books on which the film is based to read on the set of the distinctly gag-free Transcendence.
“I don’t get to do a lot of comedy and we laugh all the time — him and me. I guess he was thinking, ‘why don’t you ever do comedy?’ He saw it in me and wanted me to be part of the whole thing and I have never had so much fun on a film set.”
“We tend to laugh and giggle whatever we are doing. He is the most relaxed actor you could work with. That’s where a lot of that crazy creativity comes from, the relaxation of a kind I have never seen in another actor.”
Johnny Depp, Gwyneth Paltrow Are Mile High Club Members 0:48 The cast of Mortdecai participated in a game of Never Have I Ever while on Ellen Degeneres' show. And the stars revealed some pretty interesting answers to burning questions, like who has joined the mile high club, who has sent a naughty text, and who has been arrested.
Although Mordecai, with Depp in the title role as an shady, art-dealing, upper-class twit Brit who has fallen on hard times, has a very British sensibility, with echoes of the Pink Panther movies or the Jeeves and Wooster stories, Bettany doesn’t buy into the oft-trotted out theory that American don’t get British humour.
“It’s a real cliche the notion that Americans don’t have a sense of irony,” he says. “I have never found that to be the case. The people who say it are usually English actors who live in Los Angeles and the only ironic thing about it is that they have no sense of irony.
“A lot of my all-time favourite comedians are American — Bill Hicks, Doug Stanhope and so forth. I don’t think it’s true and I think those Pink Panther movies played huge in the US, which is why Johnny grew up in f — king Kentucky watching Peter Sellers movies.”
Bettany, the son of actor parents, first dabbled in music before attending drama school in London and steadily rose through West End plays, the Royal Shakespeare Company and British TV and film roles.
His first big Hollywood production was A Knight’s Tale, opposite Heath Ledger, and he retains a wary respect for the show-business mecca, even if he has made his home for the past decade on the other side of the US.
“There is no kindness there but it’s an even playing field,” he says. “Well, if you’re a man it’s an even playing field. It’s absolutely an industry and it makes no bones about it. And it will spit you out. But everywhere I went it was ‘what have you got? Can I make some dough out of you?’ That’s at least honest. It’s like being in a being in a gravel shower — you come out thinking ‘f---ing hell, that hurt but I feel really clean and aware’.”
Bettany recently had a crash course in the cold, hard realities of movie-making in his first feature film as director, a drama about two homeless New Yorkers called Shelter.
Even with his wife on board as leading lady, he describes the process of raising funds, filming and editing a feature as “an obsession that I will never take lightly again’.
Shot over a few short weeks and with a minuscule budget, Bettany says he was venturing into unfamiliar territory for someone who had only ever had to turn up on set on time with his lines learned.
Pre-production, he says, was “a lot of people telling me what I couldn’t do” and post-production was something he “bled into” for a year and a half after the shooting stopped.
“Editing for me was intense and having to leave a scene when it’s not working on a Friday night and take the weekend off and pretend to be playing with your kids when you are actually thinking about how to solve the scene — it’s an obsession that I will never take lightly again,” he says.
“It was amazing and intense and I am still unpacking how I felt about it. It’s a pretty extreme experience and some pretty extreme things that I put my wife through. She is extraordinary in it — as is Anthony Mackie — I am very proud of it.”
Just how much he had to do with so little was put into stark relief once he walked on to the massive London sets of Age Of Ultron. Despite having taken “a huge bag of cash” for a short stint in a studio to record JARVIS, Bettany admits he hadn’t actually seen any of the Marvel Universe films before he was cast as Vision.
“I did a lot of research — and my research was watching all of the films,” he says with a laugh. “I realised they are so interlinked and I wanted to understand the universe I was in. So I did and it was a really amazing, fun experience — especially going from my tiny, 20-day movie with no money and no trailers to this behemoth film was just great.
“Everybody made me feel really at home and I have no bad stories — they are really funny people and really creative. I have never seen sets that big in my whole career. I have never seen set pieces like it — we were in a set that felt like a town.”
Mortdecai opens today. Avengers: Age Of Ultron opens on April 23.ASMARA, Eritrea—The lies used to justify the NATO war against Libya have surpassed those created to justify the invasion of Iraq. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch both had honest observers on the ground for months following the rebellion in eastern Libya and both have repudiated every major charge used to justify the NATO war on Libya.
According to the Amnesty observer, who is fluent in Arabic, there is not one confirmed instance of rape by the pro-Gadaffi fighters, not even a doctor who knew of one. All the Viagra mass rape stories were fabrications.
Amnesty could not verify a single “African mercenary” fighting for Gaddafi story, and the highly charged international satellite television accounts of African mercenaries raping women that were used to panic much of the eastern Libyan population into fleeing their homes were fabrications.
There were no confirmed accounts of helicopter gunships attacking civilians and no jet fighters bombing people, which completely invalidates any justification for the No-Fly Zone inSecurity Council resolution used as an excuse for NATO to launch its attacks on Libya.
After three months on the ground in rebel-controlled territory, the Amnesty investigator could only confirm 110 deaths in Benghazi which included Gadaffi supporters.
Only 110 dead in Benghazi? Wait a minute, we were told thousands had died there, ten thousand even. No, only 110 lost their lives including pro-government people.
No rapes, no African mercenaries, no helicopter gunships or bombers, and only 110 deaths prior to the launch of the NATO bombing campaign; every claim was based on a lie.
Today, according to the Libyan Red Crescent Society, over 1,100 civilians have been killed by NATO bombs, including over 400 women and children. Over 6,000 Libyan civilians have been injured or wounded by the bombing, many very seriously.
Compared to the war on Iraq, these numbers are tiny, but the reasons for the Libyan war have no merit in any form.
Saddam Hussein was evil, he invaded his neighbors in wars that killed up to a million. He used weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the form of poison gas on both his neighbors and his own people, killing tens of thousands. He was brutal and corrupt and when American tanks rolled into Iraq, the Iraqi people refused to fight for him, simply putting down their weapons and going home.
Libya under Col. Gadaffi hasn’t invaded their neighbors. Gadaffi never used WMD on anyone, let alone his own people. As for Gadaffi being brutal, in Libya’s neighbor, Algeria, the Algerian military fought a counterinsurgency for a decade in the 1990s that witnessed the deaths of some 200,000 Algerians. Now that is brutal and nothing anywhere near this has happened in Libya.
In Egypt and Tunisia, Western puppets like Mubarak and Ben Ali had almost no support amongst their people with few, if any, willing to fight and die to defend them.
The majority of the Libyan people are rallying behind the Libyan government and “the leader,” Muammar Gadaffi, with over one million people demonstrating in support on July 1 in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. Thousands of Libyan youth are on the front lines fighting the rebels and,despite thousands of NATO air strikes, authentic journalists on the ground in western Libya report their morale remains high.
In Egypt, the popular explosion that resulted in the army seizing power from Mubarak began in the very poorest neighborhoods in Cairo and other Egyptian cities where the price of basic food items, like bread, sugar and cooking oil, had skyrocketed and led to widespread hunger. In many parts of Egypt’s poor neighborhoods, gasoline/benzene is easier to find then clean drinking water. Medical care and education is only for those with the money to pay for it. Life for the people of Tunisia is not that much better.
In contrast, the Libyan people have the longest life expectancy in the Arab world. The Libyan people have the best, free public health system in the Arab world. The Libyan people have the best, free public education system in the Arab world. Most Libyan families own their own home and most Libyan families own their own automobile. Libya is so much better off than its neighbors that every year tens of thousands of Egyptians and Tunisians migrated to Libya to earn money to feed their families, doing the dirty work the Libyan people refused to do.
When it comes to how Gadaffi oversaw a dramatic rise in the standard of living for the Libyan people, despite decades of UN inSecurity Council sanctions against the Libyan economy, honest observers acknowledge that Gadaffi stands head and shoulders above the kings, sheiks, emirs and various dictators who rule the rest of the Arab world.
So why did NATO launch this war against Libya?
First of all, Gadaffi was on the verge of creating a new banking system that was going to put the IMF, World Bank and assorted other Western banksters out of business in Africa. No more predatory Western loans used to cripple African economies, instead, a $42 billion dollar African Investment Bank would be supplying major loans at little or even zero interest rates.
LIbya has funded major infrastructure projects across Africa that |
1-2-3 kid towards the end of that year.
These two would quickly become fan favorites. After a short period of time they found themselves in contention for the tag titles. They would face the Quebecers and beat them to become the WWF tag team champions.
In a way it was a little ironic, after all the years of chasing the tag titles he would win it with someone besides Shawn Michaels. This would make Jannetty a tag champ with four different partners.
His run with the Kid would only last a week. They would end up losing the titles back to the Quebecers at the Royal Rumble. He and the 1-2-3 Kid would break up shortly after that. Then Marty Jannetty just disappeared.
While it was never confirmed, most believe the reason why was because of the Austin court case.
After spending some time in the Independent scene, Jannetty came to Extreme Championship Wrestling in 1995.
Jannetty would quickly be thrown into the title picture upon arrival. He would go onto challenge Shane Douglas for the heavyweight title.
At the end though, Douglas would go on to keep his title, and Jannetty would then go back to the Independents scene for a while. He would finally resurface back to the WWF in 1995.
When Jannetty returned, he would instantly start feuding with his former partner, the 1-2-3 Kid. This would lead into a match at the 1995 Survivor Series. During his match, he would end up getting eliminated by his former partner.
For the next year or so, Jannetty was pretty much pushed as a low mid carder. During this time they would pair him with Leif Cassidy to form the new Rockers. They would never achieve the success hoped for.
They would have some minor feuds with the Godwins, and the Smoking Gunns. They did wrestle for the titles once, but ended up losing to the Smoking Gunns. The New Rockers would disband in 1997, and Jannetty was again out of the WWF.
This time his departure was due to managerial decisions. He felt that the New Rockers weren’t getting over and wanted to break the team up. In the end, management refused to oblige him, so he quit.
Jannetty wrestled with the NWA for a little while before coming to World Championship Wrestling in January 1998. He had a couple off notable matches against such wrestlers as Chris Jericho and Booker T.
Jannetty would get injured a short time later and was released by WCW.
He began touring the independent scene. He was wrestling in New Breed Pro Wrestling, where he won the Heavyweight Title in October '99. He also briefly reappeared in Extreme Championship Wrestling.
He would continue to have some mild success in the Indies, but he would never reach the success he had before. In 2004 Jannetty would have a break down. He had reached dangerous levels of depression.
He even went as far as calling all his friends and family and telling them he was going to kill himself. It was a desperate cry for help from a broken-down soul. His cries would not be unheard though.
Marty Jannetty would get a call that he never expected. His longtime friend and tag partner, Shawn Michaels called him by chance just to check up on him. It would turn out to be a life-changing moment for Jannetty.
After hearing the disparaging news of his former partner, Michaels would go to his aid, this time as just a friend. He would be re baptized as a born again Christian. At the service along his side was none other than HBK and Sting. It was a heartfelt moment for all parties involved.
In 2005, Michaels was in a feud with Kurt Angle, with the two signed for a match at Wrestlemania. Angle announced in his promo that he would do everything that Michaels had in his career in only a month's time.
One of the things Angle spoke about was facing Michael’s old partner, Marty Jannetty. Jannetty showed up on the next Raw, where Michaels let him know that he would be making his first return on the show in a tag-team match.
The Rockers would reunite to take on La Resistance; Jannetty would still look good after so many years away from the WWF. Jannetty would get the victory, after landing the Rocker Dropper on Conway.
Jannetty would also go on to have an outstanding match with Kurt Angle. In fact he performed so well in the match he would be offered another contract. Unfortunately, his troubled past would catch up with him again.
He was arrested due to a domestic disturbance and was unable to make the show. He was released a short time later by the WWE. He would once again have to return to the independent scene.
After that he has made some brief appearances with the WWE. One time was in 2006, there was supposed to be a Rocker re-union, but Jannetty failed to show up for Raw. He was unable to make the show without breaking his parole.
In 2007, Jannetty was supposed to come back again for the WWE. These plans would be foiled again after Jannetty failed another drug test. Vince has since then severed all ties with the former Rocker.
Throughout Marty Jannettys life he has been given many chances. Sadly this once great wrestler just can’t seem to beat his demons. It is sad but far too often problem for many people in life.
Ring Rap is on the look for new writers. So if you would like to have your work put up on a new site just let me know. We can either set you up with an account. Or if you prefer I can copy and paste your read, and of course you would get the credit. If your interested PM me or email me at mhester@ring-rap.com.
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On a narrow street in the Balkhu neighborhood of Katmandu on Monday, police officers were swarming over what was once the house of Dhan Bahadur Karmachaya, picking at the rubble with axes, power drills, power saws, pickaxes and even a garden hoe.
Occasionally, they would toss shovelfuls of broken glass that made a tinkling sound, like tiny bells, when the shards hit the ground.
The officers were looking for the body of Mr. Karmachaya, who had been taking his midday nap when the earthquake hit on Saturday. The search was in its second day and proceeding at an agonizingly slow pace; Superintendent Ganesh Thada Majar, who was overseeing the operation, freely acknowledged this.
The search for Mr. Karmachaya was only the first of 20 searches lined up for his officers. The heat was blazing, and they were already sweaty and exhausted.
Mr. Majar wanted – desperately wanted – sniffer dogs. He wanted cranes and excavators.
Much of the neighborhood was gathered around, watching his officers dig: teenage boys in skinny jeans and goth T-shirts, women holding umbrellas against the sun, middle-aged men in button-down shirts caked with dust. Prabin Sharma, like many of the spectators, had clambered up onto the pile of broken concrete so he could watch the officers use a crowbar to pry up a heavy beam, under which, everyone hoped, they would find Mr. Karmachaya.
As the officers strained, a large chunk of brick wall fell off the nearest building with a crash, but nobody seemed to notice.
“Until now, people are panicking more than angry,” said Mr. Sharma, 37, a sportswriter. “Even now, everybody is in fear. There is a rumor that at 4 o’clock there will be a 9 Richter again. If I think scientifically, I think, ‘No, it can’t be predicted.’ But if you have seen thousands of people dying, it’s human nature, this internal fear.”
When the earthquake hit Saturday, Mr. Sharma had been eating lunch at a family gathering. His first instinct was to grab his wife and pull her into a doorway, where solid beams can serve as protection in an earthquake.
“It was shaking like. … I’ve never seen anything like that before,” he said. “I was feeling, me and my wife, we are together, we are alive. Forget everyone else.”
As he was recalling this, over his shoulder, the heavy beam came loose, revealing the shell-pink ceiling of one of the rooms where Mr. Karmachaya had lived. One of the officers reached in and pulled out a cardboard trunk, flattened and dusty, and a small bag filled with what appeared to be rags. There was nothing else; as it turned out, the search would go on until nightfall, but there was nothing else.
Hovering behind the searchers, peering into the dust, was Prabin Karmachaya, a heavyset man in a blue jacket, who wanted to say how proud he was of the Nepal Army and the police, whose lack of heavy equipment was, after all, not their fault. They were trying, he said.
The sadness he knew he would feel, he said, would have to wait: “First I have to bring out the dead body of my father.”Personal Story of One Person’s Nightmare! Please Watch.
Abuse of the Florida involuntary commitment law-the Baker Act- is rampant and what is consistent with each case of abuse, is a misunderstanding, by those who initiate the commitment, as to what the law states for the criteria. Other cases of Baker Act abuse are the medical professional’s inability to recognize adverse reactions to the psychiatric drugs and/or street drugs. If a person is on an antipsychotic drug and shows up at the Emergency Room after not sleeping for several days and appears confused and delusional, it is the physician’s duty to recognize the adverse effect, listed by the FDA on the package insert for that antipsychotic, of insomnia. Similarly, if an individual has abused street drugs and is exhibiting the side effects of those drugs, it is a simple matter of utilizing the tools of medicine to detect the drug in the person’s system.
There may be individuals who present themselves as a potential harm to themselves and/or others and who do meet the criteria for the Baker Act, and in keeping with the law, will be involuntarily committed. Unfortunately for many, they were never a real threat to themselves or others and hereafter will have a “mental health history” of commitment. If an individual did not meet the criteria and this can be documented, it is an abuse of the Florida involuntary commitment law-the Baker Act.
This video presents the story of a young man who was forcibly given mental health drugs, involuntarily committed and arrested. His brother stayed by his side every step of the way to find out what caused the young man’s erratic behavior and what would remedy the situation and prevent future Baker Act incidents.
In order to understand your rights in regards to the Baker Act, you can call our office (800-782-2878), look around on our site for more information and you can come back to this site on a regular basis to see our most recently uploaded video interviews. Perhaps your story is similar to one that you will see here.Russian forward Alexander Semin has signed a one-year deal with the Montreal Canadiens, reportedly worth $1.1 million.
Alex Semin 1year at $1.1 M with the Canadiens. — Renaud Lavoie (@renlavoietva) July 24, 2015
The deal is low risk and high reward for the Habs. If Semin can bounce back from a disappointing year in Carolina, they could have a legitmate offensive gamebreaker. If he doesn’t and needs to be sent to the AHL, the Habs would only carry $200,000 of his salary (pro rated to the time of send down), on the cap.
Semin, 31, has spent the last three seasons with the Carolina Hurricanes and put up 41 goals and 105 points in 166 games. Drafted 12th overall in the 2002 draft, Semin became a major player for the Washington Capitals during the 2006-07 season, after spending two years in Russia. His 73 points in 77 games was good for second on the team, behind only Alexander Ovechkin. During the 2008-09 post-season, Semin gave a point-per-game performance, scoring 5 goals and adding 9 assists in 14 games. His best season came in the 2009-10 season, where he posted 84 points (40 goals, 44 points) in 73 games, placing him third on the team in scoring behind Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom, whom both hit the 100-point plateau that year.
After Semin was unable to replicate his great performance, posting 54 points in each of the next two seasons with the team, he was on the move to Carolina. Unfortunately, injuries continued to haunt him and Semin’s best season for games played came during the lock-out shortened season, when he played in 44 of the 48 games.
Despite appearing in only 57 games last season, Semin posted his best possession stats since the 2008-09 season. The majority of his career, he has received more defensive-zone starts with both the Capitals and Hurricanes, making him a desirable player to have on the ice for driving the play up the ice. While his offensive production has taken a dip, players around him tend to look better when he’s on the ice. Semin has also averaged over 20 minutes just once in his career, and his ice-time was reduced by four minutes last season compared to the previous one. It will be interesting to see if he can remain healthy over the course of a season, and if his possession numbers continue to remain steady as they have for his career.The Canadian Press
OTTAWA - Prime Minister Harper says he will neither call, nor cause, an election in the new year.
In a year-end interview with CTV, Harper says Canadians "don't need an election."
He says Canadians don't want see their politicians -- in his words -- "screw around with a bunch of political games."
Although Harper admits there'll be some minor cabinet changes in the new year, he says his focus will be on the economy -- not politicking.
That said, the Tories are rolling out new attack ads for radio that accuse the Liberals of wanting to put a tax on iPods -- a charge the Girts says is patently untrue, and meant to mislead Canadians.
Although Harper describes the global economic recovery as fragile, he says Canada is in a "very good" long-term economic position.
He says the government's top priority is trimming the deficit, which is on track to reach almost 50 (b) billion dollars in the current fiscal year.
But Harper says there will be no "slash and burn" campaign to reduce spending and no gutting transfer payments the provinces use for things like health-care and education.by
While much of the world pursues the abolition of nuclear weapons — embraced by the adoption July 7 by 122 nations of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons — the militarized Trump White House is pursuing plans for a trillion-dollar rebuild of the entire US nuclear weapons complex. The enormous, extravagant program is designed to produce 80 new nuclear warheads every year, including three new warhead types, a new $20 billion nuclear-armed Long Range Standoff (LRSO) weapon, a new $12 billion B61 nuclear gravity bomb, a new fleet of nuclear-armed submarines, and a new $100 billion intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) system..
As WallStreet.com online reported recently, “A review by the Arms Control Association, a nonpartisan, nuclear weapons watchdog, [found] the total 30-year cost of the program could rise to $1.5 trillion” — $500 billion beyond what the Obama Administration first proposed in 2016. Beyond the colossal expense, the program appears to be a flagrant violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty.
The Trump administration must believe that urgent domestic and global humanitarian crises can be solved using guns since traditionally civilian White House Chief of Staff is Marine Corps General James Kelly, his National Security Advisor is Army General HR McMaster, and his Defense Secretary is Marine Corps General James “Mad Dog” Mattis.
On Aug. 8, the militarized Energy Dept. and US Air Force conducted two tests of the new “B61-12” gravity bomb at Nevada’s Tonopah Test Range. The unarmed bomb test — using an F-15E jet fighter, currently employed in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and Libya — demonstrated the jet’s ability to wage nuclear war. The B61-12 program “is progressing on schedule,” said Phil Calbos, the Acting Deputy Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. NNSA builds and maintains US nuclear warheads. Although NNSA is nominally a civilian agency, Mr. Calbos graduated from West Point and studied at the Pentagon’ National War College.
The B61-12 bomb test involved new “tailfin” hardware designed by Boeing Corp. NNSA wants the first B61-12s to be finished in 2022 and to ship 180 of them to five “nuclear sharing” NATO partners in Europe — replacing the ones already there. Critical German, Dutch, and Belgian politicians have called for the permanent removal of all US nuclear weapons, and the Air Force itself may soon remove its B61s from Turkey. Another 400 to 600 of the new B61s are set to be built to replace those now used on long-range Air Force B-52 and B-1 bombers.
The Air Force also granted $349 million in contracts to Boeing, and $329 to Northrop Grumman in August, and put the two giant weapons contractors into competition to replace today’s arsenal of 450 Minuteman III ICBMs. Popular Mechanics reports that “Northrop Grumman and Boeing each have been awarded just under $350 million to churn out Technology Maturation and Risk Reduction studies before the Air Force picks a single winner.” One of the two can expect to win the plum $100 billion contract to build the new ICBMs, dubbed Ground Based Strategic Deterrent.
This push for a replacement ICBM flies in the face of authoritative calls for their abolition. In January 2015, General/Secretary Mattis told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “You should ask, ‘Is it time to reduce the triad … removing the land-based missiles?’” Speaking Dec. 3, 2015, former Defense Secretary William Perry called for retiring land-based missiles altogether saying, “ICBMs aren’t necessary … they’re not needed. Any reasonable definition of deterrence will not require that third leg.” (Other “legs” are submarines and long-range bombers.) Sec. Perry’s commentaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post last year were titled respectively, “Why It’s Safe to Scrap America’s ICBMs,” and “Mr. President, kill the new Cruise missile” (the LRSO).
Additionally, a blue-ribbon commission chaired in 2012 by Gen. James Cartwright, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for eliminating the ICBM system, not replacing it. At a Senate hearing later in 2012, Gen. Cartwright testified that the ICBMs could be scrapped without leaving the US at risk. Cartwright’s commission report was signed by then Senator and soon-to-be Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, and recommended a US nuclear arsenal with none left on ICBMs.
Congressional pleas for austerity, fiscal responsibility, and budget cutting should be lampooned and rejected unless the $ trillion-plus nuclear weapons plan — prohibited now by the Non-Proliferation Treaty and soon by the Nuclear Weapon Treaty Ban — is zeroed out first.WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman is demanding answers from the Veterans Administration after the agency quietly promoted a manager in charge of its yet-unfinished Aurora hospital project — a boondoggle that’s about $1 billion over budget and years behind schedule.
In a letter to VA Secretary David Shulkin, Coffman — whose Aurora-area district includes the hospital — castigates the agency for picking Stella Fiotes to serve as its acting head of its division of acquisition, logistics and construction.
That’s a step above her longheld role as chief of the VA’s office of Construction and Facilities Management — the same position she occupied when the VA hospital in Aurora spun out of control.
“As you know, since 2013, Ms. Fiotes was responsible for overseeing the egregiously mismanaged construction project of the Rocky Mountain Regional VA Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado, which is finally nearing completion after ballooning in cost by over a billion dollars and being delayed by over four years,” he wrote.
The VA issued a one-sentence response to a media inquiry about the letter.
“We appreciate the congressman’s concerns and will respond to him directly,” wrote VA spokesman Curt Cashour.
An investigation by The Denver Post found that gross mismanagement by top VA officials was a major factor in the project’s inability to stay on schedule and budget.
An internal VA watchdog confirmed the findings a year later in its own report.
“Escalating costs and schedule slippages are primarily the result of poor business decisions, inexperience with the type of contract used and mismanagement by VA senior leaders,” noted investigators with the VA Office of Inspector General.
Coffman also blamed officials such as Fiotes for keeping Congress in the dark about the hospital’s lack of progress.
“Ms. Fiotes testified to the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs in March 2014 that the medical center’s design could be built within its appropriated amount, then $800 million, which all available evidence indicates was untrue,” wrote Coffman, R-Aurora.
Its price tag now is about $1.7 billion – a difference that led Coffman to ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Fiotes for perjury. (The agency declined to prosecute).
“I urge you to appoint a permanent principal executive director of the Office of Acquisition, Logistics, and Construction who is well qualified and untainted by scandal as quickly as possible,” Coffman wrote.
Construction of the Aurora facility is scheduled to conclude next month with an opening expected sometime in 2018.IT SITS, a tiny eight-square-mile speck, way out in the vast and lonely reaches of the Pacific, halfway between Hawaii and Australia. In 1798 a passing British captain, the first westerner to see it, dubbed it Pleasant Island. That old name sounds cruelly ironic now. Seen from the air, Nauru resembles an enormous moth-eaten fedora: a ghastly grey mound of rock surrounded by a narrow green brim of vegetation. On the ground, this unlovely impression is confirmed. Strip-mining has turned Nauru into a barren, jagged wasteland. The once-dense tropical vegetation has been cleared. The exposed rock reflects the heat of the equatorial sun and drives away rain.
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Unlike many small, remote Pacific islands, Nauru possesses a valuable commodity, phosphate, a sought-after fertiliser ingredient. A high-grade supply was discovered in 1900. For a brief, heady moment in the 1970s, Nauruans were, astonishingly, among the richest people on earth. Now they are poverty-stricken, unhealthy and look set to be clobbered by international trade sanctions. The story of Nauru's descent from prosperity to penury is one of the most cautionary tales of modern development.
The Japanese solution to Nauru's endemic leprosy was to load sufferers on to a boat and sink it
Many of Nauru's problems can be traced back to the 19th century. In the 1870s, civil war between the island's 12 tribes reduced the population by 40%, largely thanks to firearms introduced by passing whalers. Then, starting with the Germans in 1888, the island was colonised not by one country but by five, in quick succession. The Germans brought with them lethal European diseases, which dealt another heavy blow to the indigenous population. Their rule was at best neglectful, as was that of the trustees from Britain, Australia and New Zealand who succeeded them at the end of the first world war. The Japanese, who occupied the island for three years during the second world war, were even worse. Their solution to the island's endemic leprosy was to load all the sufferers on to a boat and sink it. By the end of the war, what with air-raids, deportation and massacres, there were fewer than 600 Nauruans left on the island.
Phosphate-mining, however, continued apace under rulers of any kind. The stuff is not easy to get at. It lies between conical pillars of fossilised coral up to five metres high, and cannot be mined without leaving an uneven, unfarmable, impassable forest of white stone pinnacles. According to the outrageous terms of the monopoly which the colonial powers granted themselves, Nauruan landowners were paid just half a penny for every ton of phosphate extracted. Ominously enough, the first consignment sank in a storm off Australia in 1906.
Undaunted, the colonial rulers introduced foreign labour to speed the plunder of the island. Today, out of a total population of 12,000, some 4,000 are foreigners. Australians serve as managers, doctors and engineers, Chinese run the restaurants and shops, while other Pacific islanders do the dirty work in the mines. That was all very well for much of the 20th century, when the money was flowing in and Nauruans saw no need to work for a living. But nowadays few Nauruans are capable of doing these jobs. Only a third of children go to secondary school.
Foreigners continued to govern Nauru until 1968. By then some two-thirds of the phosphate was already gone—with all the destruction that entailed. In a terrible indictment of its own stewardship, the government of Australia declared Nauru uninhabitable and offered to resettle the population on a deserted island off the coast of Queensland. The Nauruans, determined to win control of their own affairs, opted instead for independence. In a final act of exploitation before bowing out, Australia, New Zealand and Britain forced Nauru to borrow against its future earnings from mining to buy out their shared phosphate company.
Nevertheless, Nauru's problems seemed surmountable. Indeed, the future looked bright. The government planned to set aside a portion of its revenues from mining to rehabilitate the land. Another portion would go towards public services and economic development, and yet another would be invested to provide for future generations. Nauru bustled with optimism and activity. A second, elaborate cantilever was installed to vault the phosphate over the sharp, bone-breaking reef which encircles Nauru and on to boats anchored offshore. A plant to treat the phosphate before export was also built. The islanders, no longer bound by colonial loyalties, began selling to new buyers, such as Japan and South Korea. All this helped push up revenues to $123m by 1981—around $17,500 for each islander.
The government lavished much of this money on ordinary Nauruans, on a scale that has since proved unsustainable. There are no taxes of any kind in Nauru. The government employs 95% of those Nauruans who work. Schooling and medical care are free. If Nauruans need treatment that neither of the two hospitals on the island can provide, the government pays to fly them to Australia instead—though Ausaid, an Australian aid agency, recently warned that Melbourne hospitals would turn away Nauruan patients unless the country's medical bills are settled. Students who want to go to university are also sent to Australia on the government's tab. Electricity, telephones and housing are all subsidised.
Going pear-shaped
With their government salaries and low living costs, Nauruans have enjoyed a way of life that, to other Pacific islanders, might seem enviable. Office hours are flexible. A much-used golf course fills some of the last green spaces on the island. A government station broadcasts three television channels for the islanders' enjoyment, though technicians often seem to lose interest in the programmes halfway through.
The most popular pastime seems to be driving round the island, drinking beer and tossing the empty cans out of the window
Yet the most popular pastime seems to be idly driving the 20-minute circuit around the island, drinking imported Victoria Bitter beer and tossing the empty cans out of the window. More active types lift weights or train frigate birds—although the pelican-like creatures are no longer coached to regurgitate the fish they catch for the islanders. Far easier to stop off at Capelle's, the island's biggest general store, where three times more shelf-space is given over to biscuits than to fruit and vegetables. Greasy fried rice at one of the many hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurants is another staple.
No wonder Nauru has become something of a case study for research on obesity and diabetes. The government does not keep precise enough statistics to be entirely sure, but Nauru appears to have one of the world's fattest populations, and certainly one of the most diabetic: around 50% of Nauruans suffer from the disease. It stems from their sedentary lifestyle and fatty diet, coupled with genes more suited to warding off starvation. Male life expectancy has fallen to just 55 years, some 20 years less than relatively nearby New Zealand.
Earlier this year, in an effort to set a healthy example, the island's president, Rene Harris, began a weekly walk around the kilometre-long airport runway. But this has failed to attract anything like the crowds that thronged to a recent “Big Is Beautiful” beauty pageant. Injury followed insult when, soon after his first walk, Mr Harris had to be flown to Australia for emergency medical treatment.
Unsound investments
In the decades following independence, Nauru still had money to burn, even after the government had indulged its citizens' leisurely lifestyle. Surplus revenue was invested in property around the Pacific rim, stakes in different businesses and all manner of financial schemes. Although the government has always been cagey about its finances, outsiders valued its investments at over $1 billion as recently as the early 1990s. Since then, however, the value of those investments has plummeted to something nearer $130m. Even that estimate may be on the high side, as it includes many mortgaged properties and excludes an unknown amount of other borrowing.
Unscrupulous foreigners have played a large part in Nauru's post-independence catastrophe. A series of shysters and con-artists persuaded Nauruans to fritter away their money. One Australian financial adviser persuaded Nauru to shell out $2m for a musical he had written about the life of Leonardo da Vinci, which folded after four weeks on the London stage. Another conned the government into spending $60m on “prime banknotes”, a sort of derivative that turned out to be just as dodgy as it sounds. Much of the money was eventually recovered, but only after lengthy court cases spanning several continents.
Former presidents used to commandeer Air Nauru's planes for holidays, leaving paying customers stranded on the tarmac
Nauruans, too, wasted their fair share. Many investments were made for reasons other than economic merit. The island, whose remoteness in the middle of the Pacific is impossible to exaggerate, makes an improbable air-travel hub. Yet the government backed Air Nauru, which for a while boasted a fleet of five 737s. (It is now down to one.) It did not help that former presidents used to commandeer the airline's planes for holidays, leaving paying customers stranded on the tarmac. Similarly, a cruise ship based in Nauru did more for the people who worked on it than for the country's bottom line. Prime pieces of property have languished, undeveloped, for decades. The government of Fiji recently repossessed a hotel in its capital that Nauru had bought years ago and then left to rot. Another hotel, in the Marshall Islands, has been under construction for more than 20 years. Over A$50m (US$36.6m) was spent on a site in Melbourne that Nauru later sold for less than A$20m.
In 1993, the man brought in to run the Nauru Phosphate Royalties Trust, the government's main investment vehicle, resigned after just two months, complaining that it was on the brink of insolvency through mismanagement. The root cause of the trust's difficulties, though, has been the government's failure to own up to Nauru's reduced circumstances. Phosphate production peaked in the 1980s, and has since fallen by two-thirds. The price of phosphate has also dropped, greatly reducing Nauru's revenues. To cover the shortfall, the government has simply run up enormous debts for years and passed the bill to the trust. In 2000 the deficit reached 18% of GDP, according to the Asian Development Bank. The government found it could not pay civil servants' wages, and had to limit withdrawals from the state-owned Bank of Nauru.
Reuters
Eventually Nauru's leaders had to do something about their increasingly dire financial situation. In 1998, they persuaded the ADB to lend the country $5m to help overhaul the sieve-like public sector. Since 1999, as part of the deal, the government has sacked roughly a third of its civil servants. But Nauru's government (like most others) would rather do almost anything than cut its own budget. So it has resorted to several desperate money-raising ventures, including that old stand-by of cash-strapped third-world governments, befriending Taiwan. A sun-bleached Taiwanese flag flaps wanly outside the run-down colonial villa that serves as the island's only embassy. In return for this dubious honour, Taiwan has lent Nauru money at bargain rates.
Suing colonial governments for the destruction wrought by mining has also proved a handy source of revenue. In 1989, Nauru brought a case against Australia at the International Court of Justice in The Hague—despite the fact that, since independence, it had been as responsible for its own misfortunes as any foreign government. In 1993, Australia settled out of court for $72m.
Bring money, no questions asked
But Nauru's biggest money-spinner by far is offshore banking. For as little as $25,000, anyone can set up a bank in Nauru, without ever setting foot on the island. Some 400 people have done so; all are registered to the same post-office box at a tiny cabana in Nauru. There is next to no regulation. Unlike other tax havens, which oblige banks to record transactions but keep the details from the prying eyes of foreign officials, banks incorporated in Nauru are not required to keep records at all. Tracing shady transactions or the crooks who conducted them is all but impossible. As if that were not enough, Nauru also sells citizenship—a useful last resort for evading extradition.
Banks incorporated in Nauru are not required to keep records at all
The Russian mafia could not have devised a better system for itself. According to the Russian central bank, some $70 billion vanished into Nauruan accounts in 1998, never to be seen again. Nor is Russia the only concerned party. In 2000, a task-force of the Group of Seven rich nations identified Nauru as one of 15 countries deemed unco-operative in its fight against money-laundering. By October, only Nauru had not managed to pacify the G7. The government had introduced anti-laundering legislation in August, but the taskforce dismissed it as inadequate. It is hard to see how Nauru could manage a more sophisticated system, yet the G7 are still threatening to impose severe financial sanctions. As it is, big western banks will no longer handle transactions involving Nauru. The island's days as a banking haven are numbered.
That knowledge may have driven Nauru to its most extraordinary money-making scheme yet: to hire itself out as a detention camp for would-be immigrants to Australia. The original announcement, in September 2001, that Nauru would take in 283 refugees intercepted off Australia while their claims for asylum were assessed, made sense for both countries. The Australian government, which did not want these people, was able to preserve its policy that only “genuine” refugees could land on its shores, while Nauru earned A$20m in the form of eight months'-worth of free fuel, two new electrical generators, ten scholarships for Nauruan students at Australian universities and a promise to pay off the island's accumulated medical bills. The commotion surrounding the event also brought lots of high-spending diplomats, journalists, immigration officials and contractors to the island. Delighted islanders greeted the refugees with songs and flowers.
The refugees, however, were less than delighted to end up on a barren rock in the middle of the Pacific, several thousand miles from their intended destination. Many refused to leave the Australian naval vessel that had brought them to Nauru. Scuffles broke out when soldiers tried to frogmarch them ashore. Some islanders worried that their more disgruntled guests might raise a ruckus to draw attention to their plight. Their misgivings were redoubled when their government accepted a second boatload of 237 refugees, and then a third of 262. At least one former president has warned against accepting any more. In any event, Nauru faces competition as a processing centre from other poor Pacific nations beholden to Australia, such as Papua New Guinea and Kiribati, Nauru's closest neighbour, 400 miles away.
Meanwhile, evidence of Nauru's decay grows more and more alarming. The government has been forced to ration electricity and water between visits of the ship that brings fuel for the island's desalination and power plant. The petrol supply regularly runs out. Several times this year, the Australian aviation authority, which regulates Air Nauru, grounded its one and only plane for fear of the frequent power and communications blackouts at Nauru's airport. A further humiliation came when the International Weightlifting Federation, the governing body of the island's favourite sport, cancelled plans to hold the world championships in Nauru earlier this year, moving them first to Guam and then to Turkey instead.
The citizens of Nauru, to their credit, have not taken all this lying down. A disgruntled populace has forced no fewer than ten changes of government since 1995. Rare visits from international dignitaries have been disrupted by placard-wielding protesters, demanding to know where their money has gone. It |
It’s the exact nightmare scenario security experts have warned about when it comes to backdoors: they are not only available to those that operate them “legally”, but also to those who can hack into them to spy without anyone’s knowledge. If the NSA can do it, so can China, Russia and a host of other malicious actors.
The White House is reportedly close to coming to a decision on their official policy on encryption. Despite the FBI and NSA’s best efforts to convince them that they should push for a law mandating backdoors - a catastrophe for human rights, cybersecurity and the US economy - the White House may be on the verge of openly condemning the FBI’s approach, according to the Washington Post.
This would be great news for everybody. However, they have yet to come to a final decision. To help them, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a host of other groups (including Freedom of the Press Foundation, where I work) have launched a White House petition calling on the Obama administration to do the right thing on encryption: strongly support everyone’s right to use it.
Coming out strongly against such a mandate would be huge on multiple fronts for the Obama administration: it would send a strong message for human rights around the world, it would make it much harder for other governments to demand backdoors from US tech companies and it would also strengthen the US economy.
For the White House, it would cement President Obama’s legacy as a president who ultimately decided to strengthen the internet under his watch, rather than weaken it.The House Intelligence Committee on Friday released 28 previously classified pages from a 2002 congressional investigation into the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
The long-secret pages detail evidence linking Saudi Arabia to 9/11 uncovered in the immediate aftermath, though officials warn that it is merely preliminary and was later dismissed by subsequent investigations into the issue.
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There is no single smoking gun within the pages to definitively implicate any senior Saudi leaders for supporting the al Qaeda terrorists.
Yet the evidence is nonetheless likely to inflame the relationship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, which has been rocky for the last year. In the U.S. in particular, release of the pages will likely lead to new scrutiny of the complex relationship between the two nations, which has previously been used as a foil during the political season.
Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and rumors have simmered for years about possible links between the kingdom and al Qaeda.
According to the formerly top-secret pages, investigators uncovered “numerous reports” from FBI sources that at least two people in contact with some of the 9/11 hijackers may have been Saudi intelligence officers. Those two men may have provided financial, legal and social help to two of the hijackers in San Diego.
Additionally, the FBI discovered that numbers in the phone book of al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah traced back to an umbrella company used to manage the Colorado residence of the then-Saudi ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan, and a bodyguard at the Saudi embassy in Washington.
Another phone number found in a safe house used by 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden traced back to someone in the U.S. who “regularly provides services” to personal assistants of Prince Bandar, the report claimed.
Other bits of evidence create additional potential links, such as a Saudi Interior Ministry official who stayed at the same hotel as one of the hijackers and appeared “deceptive” in a subsequent interview.
And in one instance that appeared notable in retrospect, two men flying on tickets paid for by the Saudi embassy in 1999 acted suspicious during the flight and twice tried to enter the cockpit. Charges were not filed in that instance even though the plane was forced to make an emergency landing, but the FBI’s field office in Phoenix believed the incident may have been a “dry run” to test airline security.
Some of the connections are easy to dismiss as coincidental, especially among the somewhat tight-knit Saudi immigrant community.
The findings were repeatedly characterized as preliminary, and the authors noted that they did not attempt to follow through on the CIA and FBI’s information.
“In their testimony, neither CIA nor FBI witnesses were able to identify definitely the extent of Saudi support for terrorist activity globally or within the United States and the extent to which such support, if it exists, is knowing or inadvertent in nature,” authors claimed in the report.
“It should be clear that this joint inquiry has made no final determinations as to the reliability or sufficiency of the information regarding these issues that we found contained in FBI and CIA documents.”
The Friday publication of the pages brings to a close a years-long effort to declassify them, which had in recent months gained nearly unanimous support throughout Washington.
Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) cautioned that the document “does not put forward vetted conclusions, but rather unverified leads that were later fully investigated by the intelligence community.”
Many of those leads were chased down in the higher-profile 9/11 Commission investigation, he noted, in an effort to avoid having the public read too much into the initial reports.
The 9/11 Commission report concluded that investigators “found no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” al Qaeda, though the specific language left many wondering if there were lower-level figures involved with backing the terrorists.
The 28 pages nonetheless ought to have been revealed, lawmakers have argued, to shed light on one of the darkest days in American history.
“The American people have the right to know the full scope of the matters examined by the joint inquiry, and I have every confidence the public can assess the allegations raised in the 28 pages and the 9/11 Commission's conclusions on those matters,” Rep. Adam Schiff Adam Bennett SchiffHouse Democrats file legislation to ensure Mueller report released Hannity echoes Bill Maher, invites Schiff to appear on show Curtain rises on 3 days of Cohen drama MORE (Calif.), the Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, said in a statement.
The pages should “diminish speculation that they contain proof of official Saudi Government or senior Saudi official involvement in the 9/11 attacks,” he added.
The pages have captivated imaginations and taken on an increasingly prominent role as Congress moved forward with legislation allowing Americans to sue Saudi Arabia for any potential role in supporting the terrorists. That bill sailed through the Senate earlier this year, despite vigorous opposition from the White House and Riyadh, and appears primed for action in the House in the fall.
The pages were initially redacted from the 2002 joint congressional inquiry into 9/11, partly out of fear that publication would embarrass the Saudis and upset a relationship that had proven critical for U.S. interests in the Middle East.
In addition to detailing potential connections between the Sept. 11 hijackers and the Saudi kingdom, the report accuses Saudi officials of being extremely uncooperative both ahead of and in the aftermath of the terror attack. Dating back to 1996, the report claimed, CIA officials working to capture bin Laden realized that Saudi Arabia “would not cooperate” on any matters regarding the al Qaeda leader.
White House press secretary Josh Earnest said the newly unclassified portion of the 9/11 report "does not change" the administration's position that senior Saudi officials had no role in the attack.
Families of the victims of the terror attack had been among the most vocal advocates of making the document public.
The Saudi kingdom itself has supported the release of the pages, if only to quiet the lingering allegations about its potential connections to al Qaeda.
In a statement on Friday, the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. welcomed the release.
“We hope the release of these pages will clear up, once and for all, any lingering questions or suspicions about Saudi Arabia’s actions, intentions, or long-term friendship with the United States,” Ambassador Abdullah Al-Saud said. “Saudi Arabia is working closely with the United States and other allies to eradicate terrorism and destroy terrorist organizations.”
Intelligence officials throughout the Obama administration had begun reviewing the pages for declassification in recent months.
Earlier on Friday, the White House sent to Congress a version of the pages that had been redacted to remove sources and methods. Shortly afterward, the House Intelligence Committee approved its release to the public.
In addition to the 28 pages, the director of national intelligence will soon release a declassified executive summary of a joint assessment from the FBI and CIA, Nunes said.
Read the 28 pages below:
— Updated at 3:45 p.m. Jordan Fabian and Harper Neidig contributedThe last word in miracles. (Photo: Vezoy/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)
Of all the legendary hucksters, grifters, and con men throughout American history, there is perhaps none more brazen than Curtis Howe Springer. In 1969, the American Medical Association, not a group prone to wacky turns of phrase, dubbed Springer “King of the Quacks.” Springer’s entire life was a combination of wild lies, get-rich-quick schemes, and bizarre ploys.
But perhaps his crowning achievement is a town in California that still stands: Zzyzx, in the Mojave Desert.
Springer was born in 1896 in Birmingham, Alabama, which is one of the last objectively true facts about his early life we can confirm. He may or may not have served in World War I as a boxing instructor, may or may not have preached against the scourge of alcohol for William Jennings Bryan, may or may not have worked at a school in Florida and may or may not have attended college in Chicago. By the 1930s, Springer began touring the United States, with his base in Chicago, giving lectures.
Would you trust this man? (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Springer usually gave himself whatever advanced degrees he felt sounded best at the time, from MD to Ph.D to ND. None seem to have been accurate, which is easily proven because the institutions that supposedly issued these degrees did not, for the most part, exist. He claimed to represent “The National Academy,” “Westlake West Virginia College,” and, perhaps best of all, “The Springer School of Humanism.” (Let’s take a moment and reflect on the cojones to not only give yourself a false honorific but also to insist it was issued by a school that doesn’t exist that you have named after yourself.)
Starting in the mid-1930s, Springer began doing sort of vague Christian-ish speeches on radio. The first radio station at which he applied reported him to the American Medical Association for being a crazy liar. By 1936, the AMA had issued an entire paper debunking any possible claim Springer might have to any training or degrees of any sort. (The paper had the excellent title of “Nostrums and Quackery and Pseudo-Medicine.”) It doesn’t seem to have mattered much; Springer got a job at another radio station in Chicago, then moved to Pittsburgh, where his radio career took off.
His radio pronouncements were bonkers. Some Christian stuff, some political stuff (he liked FDR), and some shilling for his miracle cures, which almost exclusively took the form of beverages. A common refrain was that following his advice and imbibing his cures would make anyone “internally, externally, and eternally clean.” After a few initial failures, he eventually found a location to create a health spa to more thoroughly hawk his wares: an oasis/swamp in the Mojave Desert.
Veranda of Zzyzx Mineral Springs and Health Spa. (Photo: Jitze Couperus/flickr)
Springer was at this point touting himself as “the last of the old-time medicine men,” which is not too far off, really. He filed a mining claim on 12,800 acres in the Mojave, which legally would give him the right to mine for whatever he wanted and to keep the proceeds, but which did not give him ownership of the land. Weird U.S., a publication tracking the strangest stories throughout the country, has written extensively about Springer, and makes it clear that at no point did he entertained the idea of actually mining anything.
Zzyzx was founded around a natural spring, historically known as Soda Springs. It is a very cool-looking place, an oasis in the desert surrounded by palm trees, and is currently patrolled by the National Park Service, as it borders federally protected Mojave. Springer named it Zzyzx (which rhymes with “Isaacs”) to be “the last word” in health, alphabetically.
And that’s where the miracles come in. Soda Springs was not a hot spring; there are plenty of those in California’s desert, but not this one. So Springer installed a bunch of heating pumps to fake it. At Zzyzx, Springer built a hotel, which was very cheap, but which served as a base to sell most of the 27 different miracle health cures he claimed to create during his life. These included:
Antideluvian Tea: A mixture of various barks and herbs, described as a “laxative in a tea bag.” It shows up on eBay every now and then; the cover art is nice.
Re-Hib: An antacid found to be mostly baking soda, which, weirdly, probably would have worked, though certainly could have been made at home for much cheaper.
Hollywood Pep Cocktail: A blend of “concentrated vital food energy,” according to the Mojave Project. It was likely a smoothie of several cheap root vegetables and some brown sugar.
Mo-Hair: Likely a bunch of salt and mud, which Springer instructed users to rub on their heads while holding their breath as long as they could. The redness of the user’s face was claimed as evidence that the product was working.
Zy-Crystals: Dried salt from the oasis, which according to a lawsuit contained these instructions:
“Again the label on the can has the warning for “External Use Only” and the suggestion, “To hasten results, breath deeply, get at least eight hours of uninterrupted sleep in twenty-four, exercise in moderation and think only clean and constructive thoughts. Also, drink one pint of water one hour before each meal, none at meal time or for two hours thereafter; none before retiring.”
There are many others about which we have much less information; really all I could find were the names of the products and their brief description from Springer’s catalog, listed in a 1972 lawsuit. Here’s a few of those:
Shangralae: “Suggested by an Asian Missionary” (cost: $20.00 for four, about $114 in today’s dollars)
Cosmo: “Suggested by an Indian for Lovely Skin” ($15.00 for three, about $85 in today’s dollars)
F-W-O: “Food Delightfully Pleasing to Women” ($15.00 for 24 ounces)
Anthron: “My Mother’s Favorite Food” ($25.00 for 24 ounces)
Zzyzx Foot Crystals: “For Poor Tired Feet” ($15.00 for 40 ounces, about $142 in today’s dollars)
A lovely place, built on lies. (Photo: Tom Hilton/flickr)
Eventually the government figured out that Springer was a lunatic, that he didn’t own the land he was squatting on (and, sometimes, trying to sell), and that none of his miracle cures consisted of much besides over-the-counter chemicals plus mud and minerals from the desert. Springer was evicted in 1974 and convicted of false advertising, for which he served 49 days of a 60-day sentence. After prison, he moved to Las Vegas, where he died in 1985 at the age of 88.
Zzyzx remains the last name in the American atlas, if not in health circles, and it remains in use as an outpost for a few California universities. It’s now home to the Desert Studies Center, a research facility run by the California State University system; its proximity to Mojave National Preserve makes it ideal for studying the desert.
None of Springer’s miracle cures were ever found to do what they claimed, except possibly the antacid cure. Baking soda is, after all, also the main ingredient in Alka-Seltzer.India opener Gautam Gambhir does not think IPL form should influence Champions Trophy selection. Gambhir, who last played an ODI for India in January 2013, has been in fine form for Kolkata Knight Riders in the ongoing IPL but said a call-up for the Champions Trophy was not on his mind. Scoring runs for KKR with the Champions Trophy in mind would be "selfish", he said, and emphasised that good T20 form should not warrant ODI selection given the differences in the two formats.
"Absolutely, I totally agree [that T20 numbers should not be the sole criteria for ODI selection]," Gambhir told ESPNcricinfo. "T20 runs should only be a criteria to get selected for a T20 side. The moment you start picking players in the one-day format by their T20 performance, then you are giving your domestic 50-over competitions absolutely no relevance."
Ahead of today's games, Gambhir is the second-highest run-maker in the IPL, with 411 in 11 matches at 51.37 and four half-centuries. His strike rate of 134.75 is his best since 2012, when it was 143.55 and helped KKR to their first IPL title. In the four IPLs in between, his strike rate did not touch 122. Given these numbers, Gambhir said he could easily have fallen into the trap of hoping to break into the the Indian team once again, but that is not the case. "I could have said that yes, I hope I'm in contention. But I have generally not thought about it. I am someone who tries a lot to stay in the present.
"The moment I start thinking about me scoring runs to be part of the Champions Trophy team, it would be a very, very selfish thing to do. And being a leader you can't do that. If I start thinking on those lines, there may be so many other guys in the [KKR] team who would be thinking of being in the Champions Trophy squad too and they would be thinking about their own individual performances then. That's not right. You should always stay in the present. Rest of the things are byproducts - if it happens, it happens. If it doesn't happen, it is fine. Ultimately I don't play to get selected, I play to win a game of cricket."
The demands of ODI cricket are very different to those of T20, Gambhir pointed out. "You need different skills to do well in 50-overs cricket. You need completely different skills to do well in Test cricket. You need different skills to do well in T20 cricket. It is not the same.
"The moment you start picking players in the one-day format by their T20 performance, then you are giving your domestic 50-over competitions absolutely no relevance." Gautam Gambhir
"Imagine, you have two new balls, two bouncers in one over, you have field restrictions, you have got 300 balls, and you have got quality bowlers from both ends with the new ball. You have got to have a tight technique, you can't be so fearless like how you do it in T20 format. You have got to have technique to survive those first 10 overs."
Gambhir last played for India in ODIs in the home series against England in January 2013. Inconsistent form and having alternative choices for the opening slot led to Gambhir being sidelined. Gambhir said there was no point dwelling on why he has not been picked since. "Nah, I don't need to do that. The only thing [that happened was] I didn't play one-day and T20 international cricket. I still play cricket. I still enjoy winning games. That is all that matters to me. That is what gives me happiness."
The Indian team for the Champions Trophy will be picked tomorrow, and the selectors will have to work out the opening combination. With KL Rahul injured, Ajinkya Rahane, Rohit Sharma and Shikar Dhawan are at the top of the queue. But Rohit has not played for India since getting injured during last year's New Zealand series, and Dhawan and Rahane have endured patchy form. Gambhir, Dinesh Karthik, Parthiv Patel and Sanju Samson could be some of the names up for discussion should the selectors look outside those three.
One thing that stands against Gambhir is his domestic one-day form: he totalled 166 in five games at 33.20 in this season's Vijay Hazare Trophy for his state team Delhi. To an extent, the disruptions in the Delhi dressing room this season with senior players revolting against coach KP Bhaskar did prove a distraction, but Gambhir said a seasoned player like himself would be expected to rise above such issues and he tried to do as much. "It was a good learning [experience] for me, as to how to shut the [dressing-room] environment issue off."With all these new “D/D” monsters, Duelists who picked up the 2016 Mega-Tins can now unleash the maximum potential of D/D/D Flame King Genghis and D/D/D Gust King Alexander to create even more exciting and powerful card combinations. Duelists can add even more “D/D” cards to their Extra Decks with cards from the 2016 Mega-Tin Mega-Packs like D/D/D Wave Oblivion King Caesar Ragnarok and D/D/D Duo Dawn King Kali Yuga. “D/D” Pendulum Monsters can also be found in The Dark Illusion
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Aug. 8, 2013, 6:00 PM GMT By Tia Ghose
The caste system in South Asia — which rigidly separates people into high, middle and lower classes — may have been firmly entrenched by about 2,000 years ago, a new genetic analysis suggests.
Researchers found that people from different genetic populations in India began mixing about 4,200 years ago, but the mingling stopped around 1,900 years ago, according to the analysis published Thursday in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Combining this new genetic information with ancient texts, the results suggest that class distinctions emerged 3,000 to 3,500 years ago, and caste divisions became strict roughly two millennia ago.
Though relationships between people of different social groups was once common, there was a "transformation where most groups now practice endogamy," or marry within their group, said study co-author Priya Moorjani, a geneticist at Harvard University.
Ancestral populations
Hindus in India have historically been born into one of four major castes, with myriad subdivisions within each caste. Even today, in some parts of the country, marriage outside of one's caste is forbidden and those in the outcast, or "untouchable" group are discriminated against and prohibited from participating in religious rituals. (The Indian government has outlawed certain types of discrimination against the lowest classes.)
But when and why this system evolved has always been a bit murky, said Michael Witzel, a South Asian studies researcher at Harvard University, who was not involved in the work.
Moorjani's past research revealed that all people in India trace their heritage to two genetic groups: An ancestral North Indian group originally from the Near East and the Caucasus region, and another South Indian group that was more closely related to people on the Andaman Islands.
Today, everyone in India has DNA from both groups. "It's just the proportion of ancestry that you have that varies across India," Moorjani told LiveScience.
To determine exactly when these ancient groups mixed, the team analyzed DNA from 371 people who were members of 73 groups throughout the subcontinent.
Aside from finding when the mixing started and stopped, the researchers also found the mixing was thorough, with even the most isolated tribes showing ancestry from both groups.
Period of transition
Researchers aren't sure which groups of ancient people lived in India prior to 4,200 years ago, but Moorjani suspects the two groups lived side by side for centuries without intermarrying.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the groups began intermarrying during a time of great upheaval. The Indus Valley civilization, which spanned much of modern-day North India and Pakistan, was waning, and huge migrations were occurring across North India. [History's Most Overlooked Mysteries]
Ancient texts also reveal clues about the period.
The Rigveda, a nearly 3,500-year-old collection of hymns written in Sanskrit, a North Indian language, mentions chieftains with South Indian names.
"So there is some sort of mixture or intermarriage," Witzel told LiveScience.
Early on, there were distinct classes of people — the priests, the nobility and the common people — but no mention of segregation or occupational restrictions. By about 3,000 years ago, the texts mention a fourth, lowest class: the Sudras. But it wasn't until about 100 B.C. that a holy text called the Manusmruti explicitly forbade intermarriage across castes.
The study doesn't suggest that either the ancestral North or South Indian group formed the bulk of the upper or lower castes, Witzel said.
Rather, when caste divisions hardened, any type of intermarriage was sharply curtailed, leading to much less mixing overall.
Follow Tia Ghose on Twitter and Google+. Follow LiveScience @livescience, Facebook and Google+. Original article on LiveScience.com.Forget the debt ceiling debate -- the U.S. is already in default, a Chinese ratings agency claims.
"In our opinion, the United States has already been defaulting," said Guan Jianzhong, president of Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. Ltd., reports AFP, describing that organization as "the only Chinese agency that gives sovereign ratings."
U.S. Treasury officials have already said that the government exceeded its $14.3 trillion debt ceiling in April, but that accounting procedures would finance obligations through Aug. 2.
The Chinese claim to the contrary comes just two days after another Chinese official warned that congressional Republicans are "playing with fire" in opposing efforts to increase the debt ceiling.
The debt ceiling is a primary topic of ongoing budget talks between President Obama's administration and members of Congress from both parties.
Republicans, including those who control the U.S. House, say they won't vote to increase the debt ceiling until the administration commits to major spending cuts.
"We believe that many of the problems surrounding the lack of job creation and growth in this country have to do with the fact that there isn't a credible plan to manage down the debt and deficit in this country," said House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va. "That's what we're trying to produce here."
Obama officials say they too want to reduce the debt, but raising the debt ceiling as soon as possible is an imperative.
"This is not a matter of spending," Obama said. "This is a matter of the United States meeting its obligations, not defaulting on its obligations."Three years in a penal colony for calling Putin a fascist; no wonder no one insults Nazarbayev.
A 46-year old in Aktobe was found guilty and sentenced to three years in a penal colony for criticizing Russian President Vladimir Putin on Facebook.
Sanat Dosov — referred to in various Kazakh media sources as a “social activist” and “entrepreneur” — was a prodigious poster to Facebook until late August, presumably when he was arrested.
Dosov was charged under the infamous Article 174 of the Kazakh criminal code, which outlaws actions aimed at inciting “social, national, generic, racial, class or religious hatred” as well as the “insult of the national honour and dignity or religious feelings of citizens” and “propaganda of exclusivity, superiority or inferiority of citizens on grounds of their relation to religion, class, national, generic or racial assignment.”
Article 174 is about as vague as possible and Kazakhstan’s justice system has taken advantage of that vagueness to jail several in the past two years, particularly for social media posts. Last Feburary, Bruce Pannier outlined the cases of several victims of Article 174 for RFE/RL, commenting, “Listing those who have been detained and incarcerated on this charge, one could get the impression Article 174 is being used as a tool to remove inconvenient individuals.”
Dosov’s case is novel in that he was charged for insulting the president of a country not his own. (As of December 26, 1991 — 25 years ago — Kazakhstan and Russia ceased to be part of the same country, in case you missed it.)
Ratel.kz reported in late November on Dosov’s case that the Aktobe-native’s posts criticizing and insulting Putin were what led to the charges. The article included photos of what appear to be court documents, outlining the offending posts, from late 2015 to early 2016.
For example, on December 4, 2015, Dosov shared a meme which depicted the faces of Lenin, Stalin, and Putin. A few days earlier he shared a news story from a Ukrainian site (about plans between Turkey, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan and Georgia to bypass Russia in transporting goods between them) with a comment calling Putin “the enemy” and a “terrorist.” Dosov frequently shared news stories and memes critical of Putin and Russian policy, particularly with regard to Ukraine and Syria.
The post referenced in most stories about Dosov’s sentencing was, according to Ratel.kz’s images, from December 1, 2015. Dosov reportedly wrote, “Putin is ruining the country!” and that Russians needed to stop fascism in their country. (Note: I was not able to find the specific post referenced, but Facebook’s algorithms can make finding a specific post very difficult. The post, as quoted by various sources, would fit into the tone of Dosov’s other posts — for example, he calls Putin a fascist a few days later.)
According to the Aktobe Times, one of Dosov’s Facebook friends reported him to the authorities.
Dosov reportedly plead guilty and sought leniency in sentencing, due to the fact he has six children, four of which are minors. His lawyer apparently intends to appeal, arguing that Dosov committed no crime.
Meanwhile, as EurasiaNet reports, the chief editor of a Kazakh news website has fled the country, fearing prosecution. Bekzhan Idrisov’s flight is unrelated to Dosov’s case, but is worth noting as it underscores the increasing pressure being felt by those who criticize the state — be they journalists, opposition politicians, or Facebook users.
If criticizing and insulting the president of a different country results in jail time, one must wonder what comes of criticizing or insulting Nazarbayev?Photo
Steve Huffman has just walked into what may be one of the most difficult jobs in Silicon Valley.
As the new chief executive of Reddit, the hugely popular online message board, Mr. Huffman is set to face intense scrutiny from the site’s users over even the tiniest management decision. And he has inherited ill will that has festered for years between a small staff and the millions of community members that make up, and largely govern, the site.
That much was reflected on Friday when Ellen Pao, a controversial figure in Silicon Valley, abruptly resigned from her position of interim chief executive of Reddit after just eight months. Hundreds of thousands of people had called for her to step down this month after what they considered to be the mishandling of an employee dismissal. The employee, Victoria Taylor, was beloved by the Reddit community, and users shut down parts of the message board in protest over her departure. Ms. Pao, who faced misogynistic and racist comments, eventually apologized for the incident.
Mr. Huffman, a co-founder of Reddit, was brought in to replace Ms. Pao at the behest of the San Francisco-based company’s board, who considered him to be the best manager and operator for the company.
“Reddit is this amazing and wonderful thing, and it’s only a fraction of what it can be,” Mr. Huffman said in an interview on Friday.
Mr. Huffman created Reddit in 2005 with his roommate and college friend, Alexis Ohanian, in a two-bedroom apartment in a suburb of Boston. The site consists of thousands of forums that host varying topics of discussion, from current affairs to video games to question-and-answer sessions with people such as President Obama. It is an online tour de force, with more than 160 million monthly visitors.
Mr. Huffman left the day-to-day operations of Reddit in 2009, three years after it was acquired by Advance Publications, and he went on to co-found Hipmunk, an online travel site where he will remain the chief technology officer.
The challenges Mr. Huffman faces at Reddit are numerous. Since the site’s inception, every chief executive of the company has faced intense scrutiny from users.
“Reddit’s definitely a lot more fun when you’re not running the place,” Yishan Wong, Reddit’s former chief executive who preceded Ms. Pao, wrote in a post to the site on Saturday.
At least Mr. Huffman, 31, will probably not face the same type of invective over race and gender that were regularly levied at Ms. Pao. She was also regularly criticized for her lack of communication with the site’s user base, as were many other employees. She had acknowledged earlier this month that Reddit managers had a history of broken promises and poor communication, and that users had lost trust in her and other administrators of the site.
Photo
The exit of Ms. Taylor, who joined Reddit in 2013 as director of communications and talent and later collaborated closely with users for the site’s “ask me anything” section, was a breaking point for Reddit moderators because she was a main point of contact between the company’s employees and the site’s volunteers. While the exact circumstances of Ms. Taylor’s departure remain unclear, her dismissal increased concerns among Reddit moderators that executives cared little about keeping the community informed.
“We all had the rug ripped out from under us and feel betrayed,” Karmanaut, a Reddit moderator who worked regularly with Ms. Taylor, wrote in a Reddit post last week. “Before doing that, the admins really should have at least talked to us.”
On Saturday in a Reddit post, Mr. Huffman said improving relations with the community was a top goal, and that he planned to hold regular “ask me anything” question-and-answer sessions on the site.
Reddit had also languished in talent and technology, with little money for expansion. It was only in the last few years that Reddit was spun off from Advance, and raised two separate rounds of venture capital that it could use to grow.
In the interview on Friday, Mr. Huffman noted that the many unpaid volunteers who control the site have not been given the proper software tools to help expand and moderate their communities. And despite seeing a surge in traffic from smartphone users, the company has done little to improve its mobile web and app offerings.
“It hasn’t really changed in nearly 10 years,” he said. “It’s just this incredible platform, but there are a lot of technology issues holding it back.”
Mr. Huffman also must be deft in navigating how he will shape Reddit’s policies on what can be posted to the site. The issue was a contentious one that Ms. Pao and Yishan Wong, a former chief executive, regularly came under fire for during their respective tenures.
Ms. Pao stumbled with content policy in May, when the company decided to explicitly prohibit harassment on the site or using its forums to organize harassment. As a result of that change, Reddit banned five communities, or subreddits, on the site, including one dedicated to the ridicule of overweight people. For some, those changes were perceived as a form of censorship and the prohibition of free expression, contravening two pillars upon which Reddit was founded.
Mr. Huffman has not said whether Reddit will uphold its current content policies. But presenting his stance on what the policies should be is another top priority, he said.
“We will make it very clear what is and is not acceptable behavior on Reddit,” Mr. Huffman wrote in the Reddit post on Saturday. At least some of that, he said, will very likely include prohibiting illegal activity or posts that would cause harm or fear for one’s well-being.
Mr. Huffman will also be faced with improving the morale of Reddit’s battered staff, which numbers about 70. For most of this year, staff members have grappled with a loudly dissatisfied user base and, in some cases, witnessed their wrath.
“The Reddit team has been through a lot the past while,” Mr. Huffman wrote in his Reddit post. “I hope I can bring some stability.”HE’S known for hard-hitting roles in films such as Hunger and Shame — but Michael Fassbender would love to tackle a comedy sometime.
The Oscar nominee shot to fame ten years ago for his portrayal of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands.
9 Michael Fassbender would relish more roles that allowed him to show off his playful side
Now the Kerry actor has told how he’d love to show off his more playful side on the big screen.
The A-lister said: “I try and sort of bring it in wherever I can.
“Like David (the android in his next role Alien: Covenant) as well, there are some fun moments there. It’s something that I have to do more of.”
9 Fassbender and girlfriend Alicia Vikander at the UK Premiere of "The Light Between Oceans" last year
He added: “I spoke to Seth Rogen (star of Knocked Up and Superbad) about it. We’d met before, I was a fan of his work.
“I think I threw a blueberry at him actually, it was at one of these dinners and he was at the table across the way and so that was our introduction and then I got talking to him. So, when we were on Steve Jobs he said, ‘I thought we’d work together at some point but I thought it would be in one of my movies.’ So yeah, maybe at some point.”
The 40-year-old hunk famously donned the black turtleneck of the Apple visionary in Danny Boyle’s 2015 biopic.
9 Seth Rogen, whose films Michael is a fan
But Fossa native Michael confessed he had major misgivings about the controversial role — and even considered breaking |
against the Phillies, whiffing eight over seven shutout innings. Now, through a quarter of the year, Richards has struck out one of every four batters he’s faced. One out of four is bigger than one out of six.
What Richards has posted is the second-greatest strikeout-rate increase in the bigs. Following, the top five, through this writing:
For Lester, he’s been around this strikeout level before. McCarthy has added oomph to his repertoire. Santana has developed a stronger changeup. Greinke has been around this strikeout level before. Richards didn’t get many strikeouts in 2013, or in 2012, or in 2011, and even his upper-level minor-league rates were underwhelming. Richards is doing something he hasn’t done, and when you combine the whiffs with his groundball tendencies, you get an almost-26-year-old with a mid-2s FIP. Or, you get the sort of breakout people have been predicting.
Interestingly, it’s not like Richards is exhibiting superior command or control. He’s always been a below-average strike-thrower, and so far this year he’s just shy of 60%. His goal in spring training was to cut down on the walks, and to this point his walks are up and his strikes are down. So if we want to try to explain Garrett Richards, we have to look somewhere else, and thankfully we have a few options.
We can start with the obvious. From Brooks Baseball, here’s Richards’ average pitch velocity:
Richards, in 2014, is throwing harder, even though he’s spent considerable time in the past in the Angels’ bullpen. With every pitch, he’s up a tick or two, and while velocity doesn’t mean the same thing to every pitcher across the board, it obviously benefits a guy to give a hitter less time to react, and Richards has added on to something that was already intimidating. This might be all the explanation we need. Richards is throwing harder. Throwing harder leads to more strikeouts.
But we might as well keep exploring, while we’re in here. This year, Richards has done a slightly better job of getting to two-strike counts. Yet the biggest difference is in what he’s done with those two-strike counts. Simple numbers:
2011-13: 35% strikeouts
2014: 51% strikeouts
Clearly, a guy whose strikeout rate is up is going to have numbers showing a better ability to convert two-strike counts, but this helps to clarify the message: Richards has been doing a much better job of putting hitters away, after pushing them to the brink. It’s been true for him against righties, and it’s been true for him against lefties, and his strikeout leap is massively significant.
So are we looking at a change in approach? Against lefties, Richards has trimmed his two-strike slider rate and increased his two-strike curveball rate. But against righties, his pitch mix is similar, so it could be beneficial to pay more attention to pitch location. For example, some numbers with two strikes:
Against LHB
2011-13: 49% pitches low (lowest third of zone or below)
2014: 66%
Against RHB
2011-13: 43% pitches away (outer third of zone or beyond)
2014: 60%
Richards has definitely been pitching to different spots, and while we can’t very well tie that to his increase in strikeouts, it seems like it’s probably not a coincidence. Against righties, he wasn’t having a ton of success getting strikeouts inside. Against lefties, he wasn’t having a ton of success getting strikeouts up. Now he’s still throwing a lot of balls and pitching frequently from behind, but when he gets to two strikes, he’s better able to finish the job with a whiff or a grounder.
And there’s another thing I’d like to note, something that could be playing a part in all this. Again, from Brooks Baseball, here’s a chart of Richards’ horizontal release points:
There’s a big shift in late June 2013, toward the first-base side of the mound. The trend has continued in 2014, and if this is confusing in chart form, maybe it’ll be easier to understand in image form. From last June, before the shift:
After the shift:
From this very month:
Richards is consistently pitching from a different spot on the rubber. It isn’t that easy to intuitively link a change like this to a change in performance, but Richards is far from the first guy we’ve seen attempt such a move, and it tends to be about improving angles and ability to pitch to the edges. As Richards has shifted toward the first-base side, his pitches to righties have shifted toward the first-base side, and he’s spending less time trying to work to lefties up and away. It’s also possible this in some way changes how easy or hard it is to see the ball right out of Richards’ hand.
Some things we know: Garrett Richards looks like he’s starting to fulfill his potential. His strikeouts are up, as he’s doing a much better job of converting two-strike counts into three-strike counts. He’s pitching both righties and lefties a little differently, and he’s moved on the rubber, and his velocity is up across the board. Maybe it all has to do with that last bit. Maybe there’s a mechanical adjustment in there that’s been made that I missed. But all anyone really cares about is that Richards has changed for the better, and now that he’s getting his strikeouts, it’s hard to envision him giving them back. We can all continue to talk about the Why, but the What is actively helping the Angels try to get back to the playoffs.Star studded ceremony
The audience was teeming with celebrities – the usual suspects, plus some fresh faces. Taylor Swift stole the show both on and off stage. The singer picked up not one, but two awards – 1989 was hailed album of the year while Bad Blood was named best music video. This might explain why she received over 88k mentions on the night. One of the biggest drivers was her subtle rebuttal to Kanye’s controversial lyrics in his album The Life of Pablo during her acceptance speech. Tay Tay was also responsible for the biggest spike in mentions of the night when she couldn’t contain her excitement over Ed Sheeran’s Song of the Year win.
At least Taylor Swift will probably get an Oscar nom for her excitement right now #GRAMMYs — Danny Murphy (@dannmurphy) February 16, 2016
Kanye was noticeably absent from the festivities, although that didn’t stop him raking up over 15k social mentions.
The best part of the #Grammys was when Kanye West wasn’t there. — Professor Snape (@_Snape_) February 16, 2016
Even though the internet almost melted at the sight of Justin Bieber’s younger brother on the red carpet we think the singer’s first ever Grammy win probably played quite a big part in him being the second most discussed celebrity, coming in with a solid 35k social mentions.
Lady Gaga’s tribute to the David Bowie earned her 20k mentions and rave reviews online.The Country Music Awards were last night, and it’s a great time to remember that people who hate country music are not to be trusted.
Now, let me be crystal clear here so that there’s no confusion. There’s a difference between not listening to country music and outright hating country music. The former is acceptable because we all have different tastes in music, but there is no excuse for the latter.
Country music is all about freedom, America, hanging with your buddies, crushing beers, beautiful women in cutoff shorts and cowboy hats, killing the terrorists, supporting the troops, sports and just living life. What is better than that? Absolutely nothing.
I dare anybody to listen to Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” and tell me they don’t want to run through a wall. It’s impossible.
And how could anybody forget about the lovely women of country music? Carrie Underwood is an American icon.
A post shared by Carrie Underwood (@carrieunderwood) on Sep 22, 2017 at 8:43pm PDT
The classics of Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, George Strait, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson and many more are a great reminder of where our roots come from. Those are the men that built the base of where we’re at today.
So, I think it’s fair to ask why anybody who hates country music should be trusted? They’re literally against all the things I previously mentioned. Is that somebody you’d want in your house or near your kids? I don’t think so.
It’s also worth mentioning that women who love country music are automatically hotter. It’s a science that few understand, but nobody disagrees with.
These are the reasons I refuse to trust anybody who openly hates country music. They might as well have a massive sign on their forehead that reads “untrustworthy.”
We can’t tolerate them for even a second.
Follow David on TwitterWhite matter (WM) involvement in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) was assessed using voxel‐based regressions of brain MRI against CFS severity scores and CFS duration in 25 subjects with CFS and 25 normal controls (NCs). As well as voxel‐based morphometry, a novel voxel‐based quantitative analysis of T 1 ‐ and T 2 ‐weighted spin‐echo (T1w and T2w) MRI signal level was performed. Severity scores included the Bell CFS disability scale and scores based on the 10 most common CFS symptoms. Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) depression and anxiety scores were included as nuisance covariates. By relaxing the threshold for cluster formation, we showed that the T1w signal is elevated with increasing CFS severity in the ventrolateral thalamus, internal capsule and prefrontal WM. Earlier reports of WM volume losses and neuroinflammation in the midbrain, together with the upregulated prefrontal myelination suggested here, are consistent with the midbrain changes being associated with impaired nerve conduction which stimulates a plastic response on the cortical side of the thalamic relay in the same circuits. The T2w signal versus CFS duration and comparison of T2w signal in the CFS group with the NC group revealed changes in the right middle temporal lobe WM, where impaired communication can affect cognitive function. Adjustment for depression markedly strengthened cluster statistics and increased cluster size in both T1w severity regressions, but adjustment for anxiety less so. Thus, depression and anxiety are statistical confounders here, meaning that they contribute variance to the T1w signal in prefrontal WM but this does not correlate with the co‐located variance from CFS severity. MRI regressions with depression itself only detected associations with WM volume, also located in prefrontal WM. We propose that impaired reciprocal brain–body and brain–brain communication through the midbrain provokes peripheral and central responses which contribute to CFS symptoms. Although anxiety, depression and CFS may share biological features, the present evidence indicates that CFS is a distinct disorder. © 2015 The Authors. NMR in Biomedicine published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Abbreviations used BMI body mass index CFS chronic fatigue syndrome CSF cerebrospinal fluid DTI diffusion tensor imaging FDR false discovery rate fMRI functional MRI FWHM full width at half‐maximum GM grey matter HADS Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale ILF inferior longitudinal fasciculus MNI Montreal Neurological Institute NC normal control neuro SS neurological symptom score PET positron emission tomography somatic SS somatic symptom score SPECT single‐photon emission computed tomography SPM statistical parametric mapping SS symptom score T1w T 1 ‐weighted spin‐echo T2w T 2 ‐weighted spin‐echo VBIS voxel‐based iterative sensitivity VBM voxel‐based morphometry VL ventrolateral WM white matter.
Introduction Chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), or myalgic encephalomyelitis, is a common, debilitating, multisystem disorder of uncertain pathogenesis, for which there exists evidence of dysregulation of the central nervous system, immune system and cellular energy metabolism 1. However, its differentiation from psychiatric disorders, especially anxiety and depression, remains controversial 2, 3. In this exploratory study, in view of the limited success of brain imaging in CFS so far, we shifted emphasis and performed voxel‐based regressions of brain MR images with scores of CFS severity and CFS duration. Two recent brain imaging studies have provided new insights into the aetiology of CFS, both implicating the midbrain. A voxel‐based morphometry (VBM) analysis demonstrated white matter (WM) volume loss with increasing disease duration in the midbrain 4, and a positron emission tomography (PET) study which labelled activated microglia and activated astrocytes detected neuroinflammation in several locations, with the midbrain having the strongest statistics 5. Earlier studies using single‐photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) and PET have reported brainstem and prefrontal changes 6-9. A PET study comparing subjects with multiple sclerosis with and without fatigue detected differences in extended prefrontal grey matter (GM) and WM 10. Voxel‐based image analysis of MRI in CFS with statistical parametric mapping (SPM) is limited. A PET study of CFS reported decreased glucose metabolism in the orbitofrontal cortex 9 and one VBM study detected decreased GM volume in the dorsolateral prefrontal GM 11, although another did not 12. WM hyperintensities were more prevalent in CFS in two studies 13, 14, but had normal incidence in our 4 and another 15 study. Two brain imaging studies have attempted to distinguish associations with CFS from associations with comorbid anxiety and/or depression. A PET study 9 detected correlations with depression (mesial orbitofrontal cortex), where differences from normal controls (NCs) were also detected, but could not determine: ‘whether depression is a triggering factor for CFS or the result of chronic suffering from fatigue’. However, a functional MRI (fMRI) study 16 reported activation in quite distinct brain locations for fatigue‐inducing and anxiety‐inducing scenarios. Non‐imaging studies have indicated that CFS is distinct from major depressive disorder 2, 17. In the current study, in addition to VBM, we performed a novel voxel‐based quantitative analysis of T 1 ‐weighted and T 2 ‐weighted spin‐echo (T1w and T2w) brain MRI images after intersubject signal level normalisation. T1w and T2w images are ideal for cross‐sectional studies because of their low noise, high resolution and minimal distortion from patient‐induced and instrumentation‐induced magnetic field inhomogeneities 18. In the absence of lesions, the T1w signal responds primarily to changes in the levels of myelin 19-21, making it suitable for the detection of subtle changes in WM over extended areas (large clusters of voxels). In the absence of lesions, the T2w signal responds primarily to regional blood volume 22 in the brain. From the T statistic map generated here by each voxel‐by‐voxel MRI regression, clusters of contiguous voxels with T above a nominal threshold (normally specified as the equivalent P value) were defined. Guided by the principle, ‘broad signals are best detected by low thresholds and sharp focal signals are best detected by high thresholds’ 23, we relaxed the cluster‐forming threshold from the conventional voxel P = 0.001 (‘high’ T threshold) used to detect focal signals to P = 0.005 (‘low’ T threshold) and tested the resulting clusters for significance. This article presents results from a cross‐sectional, voxel‐based, brain MRI study of CFS. A preliminary partial analysis of the same dataset 4 demonstrated involvement of midbrain and right middle temporal WM, and abnormal relationships between brain MRI and autonomic function. The involvement of prefrontal WM, reported by other authors, allowed us to invoke an a priori hypothesis for this location. Together with the earlier midbrain volume loss and neuroinflammation evidence, the location and nature of the WM brain associations detected here permitted us to propose a single coherent explanation – impaired nerve conduction in the midbrain – for our observations.
Methods Subjects Twenty‐seven subjects with CFS, aged 19–46 years, were recruited from community‐based specialist and general practice. They met both the Fukuda 24 and Canadian 25 criteria for CFS and were assessed as described in ref. 4. All medications including ‘natural therapies’ were discontinued 2 weeks prior to the study week, except for paracetamol and oral contraceptives. Subjects with a history of chemical sensitivity or a body mass index (BMI) > 30, or who were pregnant, postmenopausal, unable to undertake brain MR or cerebral SPECT scans, or unable to discontinue medication, were excluded. The study period was delayed for any viral or bacterial infection until recovery. Twenty‐seven NCs unrelated to the subjects with CFS were recruited by public advertisement, and were matched for gender, age to within 2 years and weight to within 5 kg. They were not taking any medications and had no previous serious illnesses. All participants were compensated for transport costs alone. All examinations were completed within 1 week. The study protocol was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, and all subjects gave informed written consent. Two subjects with CFS and their age‐ and sex‐matched NCs were removed from the analysis based on their MR scan. One man, aged 30 years, had an absent right cerebellum without cerebellar symptoms, and one woman, aged 20 years, had a large frontal angiomatous tumour, again asymptomatic with regard to the tumour. Thus, 25 subjects with CFS with a mean duration of fatigue of 7.4 years (range, 2–15 years) and 25 NCs were assessed, with six men and 19 women in each group. The mean ages were 32 years (range, 19–46 years) for subjects with CFS and 32.8 years (range, 20–46 years) for NCs. The precursor to CFS onset was an infection in 14 cases (seven caused by serologically proven Epstein–Barr virus), work and stress in three, post‐delivery in one and was unknown in seven. Three CFS severity scores were used: the Bell CFS disability scale (CFS disability) 26 and two scores derived from self‐scores of the 10 most significant symptoms 27, 28. These were the ‘somatic symptom score’ (somatic SS) and the ‘neurological symptom score’ (neuro SS). The somatic SS was the sum of the six self‐scores for severity of fatigue, change in sleeping pattern, dizziness on standing, pain in muscles, stomach symptoms and overall level of function. The neuro SS was the sum of the four self‐scores for change in concentration, change in short‐term memory, headaches and experience of emotional swings. All were scored such that lower scores indicated more severe symptoms. To determine the levels of depression and anxiety, all subjects completed the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) questionnaire 29. We performed correlations between scores of CFS duration, CFS disability, somatic SS, neuro SS, anxiety and depression (from first principles in MatLab, The Mathworks Inc, Natick MA). Haemodynamic scores were also acquired with a 24‐h ambulatory blood pressure monitor [see ref. 4 for correlations]. MR acquisition MR images were acquired on a Philips 1.5‐T Intera MR scanner (Philips, Eindhoven, the Netherlands) with a body transmit coil and birdcage receive coil. Three sequences were used: T1w (TR/TE/flip angle = 600 ms/15 ms/90º); T2w (TR/TE/flip angle = 4000 ms/80 ms/90º); and three‐dimensional spoiled gradient‐echo (TR/TE/flip angle = 5.76 ms/1.9 ms/9º). T1w and T2w images were transaxial with pixel sizes of 0.82 × 0.82 and 0.859 × 0.859 mm2, respectively, and a contiguous slice thickness of 3 mm. The three‐dimensional gradient echo voxel size was 0.938 × 0.938 × 1.0 mm3 [see ref. 4 for visual MRI scoring]. Preprocessing of images We limit ourselves here to VBM, T1w and T2w comparisons between CFS and NC groups, and regressions with measures of CFS severity and CFS duration, which detected associations in WM. SPM5 (www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm) was used throughout. First, the three‐dimensional gradient‐echo brain images were segmented into separate GM, WM and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) images which were spatially normalised to the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) template. Each voxel value was the probability (range, 0.0–1.0) that it belonged to the partition in question (e.g. WM). Non‐linear spatial normalisation of the grey and white partitions was then refined over six iterations using SPM5's DARTEL toolbox 30, each iteration using a template derived from the sum of the images from the previous iteration. This achieves greater accuracy than the standard SPM5 algorithm 30. An additional affine transformation of the final DARTEL GM template to the standard MNI GM template was computed and applied to the normalised partitions for each subject. The GM and WM partitions were then processed independently using VBM 32 which ‘modulated’ the voxel (probability) values to encode the local volume changes associated with the non‐linear spatial normalisation. Intersubject normalisation of total volumes was achieved by including the total GM (WM) volume as a nuisance covariate in the GM (WM) SPM statistical analysis. The T1w and T2w MR images for each subject were co‐registered to their raw three‐dimensional gradient‐echo scan, and the DARTEL deformations computed above were applied to render them in MNI space. Finally, the spatially normalised T1w and T2w images were smoothed using an 8‐mm full width at half‐maximum (FWHM) Gaussian kernel. Intersubject T1w (and T2w) signal level normalisation was performed using the mean voxel value in a mask (brain volume) generated using voxel‐based iterative sensitivity (VBIS) analysis 33. VBIS analysis is based on a preliminary CFS versus NC analysis using SPM's ‘proportional scaling’ and defines the mask as those voxels within brain parenchyma (GM + WM) with intersubject variance less than the median. These mean levels were then incorporated as a nuisance covariate in the SPM statistical analysis, effectively normalising the intersubject T1w (or T2w) signal levels. To reduce edge effects in the SPM statistical analyses, we excluded VBM (WM volume) voxels with values below 0.1 (for any subject), and T1w and T2w voxels with signal levels below 0.5 of the mean voxel value. Cluster‐forming thresholds SPM generates statistics for both single voxels and clusters of voxels. A cluster is formed by contiguous voxels with an uncorrected voxel P below a nominal threshold, and SPM reports a cluster P for each cluster detected. In this article, guided by the principle ‘broad signals are best detected by low thresholds and sharp focal signals are best detected by high thresholds 23, in addition to testing for corrected cluster P < 0.05 (corrected for multiple cluster comparisons) from the cluster‐forming uncorrected voxel P = 0.001 threshold, which is the convention for the detection of focal signals, we also relaxed the uncorrected voxel P to 0.005 to test for clusters larger in extent, but with generally less significant voxel P, which may have been insignificant with the stricter uncorrected voxel P = 0.001 threshold. Correction of cluster statistics for multiple cluster comparisons was performed using a non‐stationary permutation method in the SPM ‘ns’ toolbox, which caters for variable image smoothness and has been validated for uncorrected voxel P thresholds of both 0.001 and 0.01 34. For clusters in WM with an a priori hypothesis (prefrontal WM here), and for which the corrected cluster P was not significant, the uncorrected cluster P was also tested. Statistical designs The full analysis of this study consisted of n = [1 + (4 + 2) + 18] × 2 × 4 = 200 regressions. Here, in the square brackets, ‘1’ refers to the categorical (group) comparison of CFS with NC and 18 refers to autonomic regressors for blood pressure (systolic, diastolic and pulse pressure) and heart rate whilst seated and asleep 4, for which complete results will be reported elsewhere. For ‘(4+2)’, ‘4’ refers to the CFS duration and three severity regressors (CFS disability, somatic SS and neuro SS) considered here. All four were analysed with a one‐sided CFS‐only regression, whereas ‘2’, somatic SS and neuro SS, were also analysed with a two‐sided, CFS and NC interaction‐with‐group design which tested each voxel for CFS and NC regressions with opposite slopes. Two‐sided regressions were not applied to the CFS duration, because it was not applicable to NC, nor to CFS disability, because it had the same value for all NC subjects (see plot in Figure 2). The ‘×2’ accounts for both positive and negative regressions for each statistical design and ‘×4’ accounts for the four image types (GM volume, WM volume, T1w and T2w). This paper is confined to WM results from the analysis of WM volume and T1w and T2w images in group comparisons and regressions against CFS duration or CFS severity, that is [1 + (4 + 2)] × 2 × 3 = 42 regressions (‘×3’ here instead of ‘×4’ because GM volume regressions will not generate WM clusters). It should be noted that 200, not 42, was applied when correcting for multiple regressions (see below). All regressions were adjusted for age. Correction for multiple regressions Because we tested for significant clusters using two cluster‐forming thresholds, the number of designs tested was N = 2 × n = 400. Bonferroni‐corrected P values are obtained by multiplying corrected cluster P by N. However, because not all clinical measures are independent, the Bonferroni correction is too strict. We therefore used the false discovery rate (FDR), the expected proportion of false positives among all N designs tested 35. An upper bound, q = 0.05, was chosen for the expected FDR. The m strongest results with P values, P 1,…,P m, which satisfied P 1,…,P m < (m/N)q, were then deemed to be significant. If a cluster P was more significant after adjustment for depression, the adjusted value was used for the FDR assessment. Adjustment for anxiety and depression Regressions that yielded a cluster with corrected P < 0.05 were repeated with adjustment for the HADS depression and anxiety scores independently. In the preliminary report 4, adjustments were made by including both depression and anxiety as nuisance covariates. Here, because of the strong correlation detected between depression and anxiety, adjustment for depression only should be sufficient to adjust for both. However, because of the controversy around the role of depression and anxiety in CFS, regressions that yielded WM clusters with corrected cluster P < 0.05 were repeated separately with adjustment for depression and then anxiety. Because adjustment for depression had such a profound effect in some regressions, we also performed a satellite study of direct regressions between the MR images and depression itself, and then anxiety. To our knowledge, regressions of T1w and T2w against measures of anxiety and depression have not been performed previously. Image display All images were displayed using the ‘neurological’ convention (patient left is left on the image). The thalamic and inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF) edges superimposed on some images were derived from the masks defined in the TD and aal atlases incorporated in the Wake Forest University PickAtlas toolbox of SPM5. Colour‐coded overlays of clusters from multiple regressions on a background image were achieved using the ‘slover’ program (www.imaging.mrc‐cbu.cam.ac.uk/imaging/DisplaySlices).
Results For the six regressors examined here (CFS duration, CFS disability, somatic SS, neuro SS and HADS depression and anxiety), significant correlations were found between the clinical scores of CFS disability and somatic SS (R = 0.82, P = 6e‐7), CFS disability and neuro SS (0.66, 0.0003), CFS disability and depression (–0.49, 0.013), somatic SS and neuro SS (0.59, 0.002), somatic SS and depression (–0.50, 0.011), and anxiety and depression (0.69, 0.0001), although not for CFS disability or somatic SS and anxiety. An FDR of 0.05 for the 200 regressions performed and the two cluster‐forming thresholds tested was achieved by setting a corrected cluster P threshold of 0.008. Five WM clusters created with a voxel threshold of 0.005 from the MRI comparisons between CFS and NC or MRI regressions with CFS duration and CFS severity were significant by this criterion, although, in one case, only after adjustment for depression. Two new clusters were detected in T1w regressions with the severity measures CFS disability and somatic SS, and one new cluster from the T2w comparison between CFS and NC. The remaining two, from WM volume versus CFS duration and T2w versus CFS duration regressions, have been reported previously 4, and were included here to provide a complete summary of WM associations with CFS severity and duration. Figure 1 provides an overview of the cluster locations and extent for the T1w regressions, before and after adjustment for depression. They were located bilaterally in the prefrontal WM. The T1w association with CFS disability was stronger than with somatic SS. Adjustment for depression markedly increased cluster size, particularly on the left. Figure 1 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint Axial and coronal projections of T statistic maxima showing cluster location and extent in prefrontal white matter (WM) for T 1 ‐weighted spin‐echo (T1w) versus chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) disability (top) and T1w versus somatic symptom score (SS) (bottom), before (left) and after (right) adjustment for depression. The voxel P threshold for cluster formation was 0.005. Table 1 lists the corrected cluster P values and sizes for all five regressions for cluster‐forming uncorrected voxel P = 0.005 and 0.001, and with adjustment for depression and anxiety. Adjustment for depression greatly enhanced the clusters from regressions A, B and E, although, for A and E, this was partly a result of the merging of adjacent clusters. Initially, cluster B did not survive FDR correction for multiple tests (only clusters with P < 0.006 survived), but easily met this criterion after adjustment for depression. It was striking that, when the stricter uncorrected voxel P = 0.001 cluster‐forming threshold was applied for regression A (after depression adjustment) and regressions C and D, their clusters, although reduced in size by a factor of 2–3, became more significant. Depression and anxiety adjustments had little effect on clusters from regressions C and D, although, for D, anxiety weakened P, which suggests that the effects of CFS duration on T2w correlate with the effects of anxiety on T2w. The cluster P values in Table 1 are corrected for multiple cluster comparisons. However, regression A and B clusters were located where an a priori hypothesis applied. Therefore, their uncorrected cluster P values are relevant and, for regression B threshold 0.005 clusters, were 0.013 (right), 2.4e‐6 and 0.0013 (left and right) depression adjusted, and 0.004 and 0.005 anxiety adjusted. Table 1. Corrected cluster P and cluster size k (voxels) for MRI regressions with chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) severity and CFS duration, and CFS to normal control (NC) group comparisons that yielded significant clusters in white matter (corrected cluster P < 0.05). Voxel size was 2 × 2 × 2 mm3. Results are also listed after separate adjustment for depression and anxiety (‘d’ and ‘a’ in ‘adj’ column). Only clusters with P < 0.008 survived the rigorous false discovery rate correction for multiple regressions. For regression A, values separated by ‘&’ are for separate bilateral clusters, although, for the depression‐adjusted 0.005 threshold case, the two clusters merged at the genu of the corpus callosum MR image Regressor adj Cluster P and size (k) for two voxel thresholds Cluster location 0.005 0.001 P k P k – 0.0044 & 0.0056 901 & 978 0.035 131 ventrolateral thalamus, A T1w –CFS disability d 1.5e‐5 6062 6.4e‐6 & 0.016 1905 & 307 internal capsule, a 2.5e‐4 & 0.004 1962 & 1282 0.0010 435 prefrontal WM – ns* ns B T1w –Somatic SS d 1.0e‐4 1697 1.4e‐4 364 Prefrontal WM a ns* ns – 1.7e‐4 4067 2.9e‐5 2228 C WM volume –CFS duration d 2.2e‐4 4077 4.3e‐5 2153 Midbrain a 1.5e‐4 4237 3.3e‐5 2234 – 0.0041 950 0.0032 356 Right middle D T2w –CFS duration d 0.0050 918 0.0031 351 temporal a 0.011 414 0.011 228 WM – 0.05 793 ns Right middle E T2w CFS > NC d 2.2e‐4 1464 0.05 91 temporal a ns ns WM Figure 2 shows clusters on selected sections for the four regressions and one group comparison from Table 1. The T1w versus CFS disability clusters extended bilaterally from the ventrolateral thalamus (y = –16, z = +12 in Fig. 2) through the posterior limb, genu and anterior limb of the internal capsule. The T1w versus somatic SS clusters shown were adjusted for depression and occupied more rostral frontal WM. (Refer to Fig. 3 to resolve the overlap with T1w versus CFS disability at x = –24 and z = +18.) The plot shows T1w values for individual subjects versus CFS disability at the most significant voxel, and demonstrates that many of the CFS values exceeded the maximum value in the controls, although the difference in means was insignificant. The peak in the midbrain cluster in which the WM volume decreased with CFS duration was in the crus cerebri (see z = –16), although volume changes extended to the thalamus. Three voxels were significant after correction for multiple comparisons 4. The adjacent clusters from the two T2w designs mostly occupied the right middle temporal WM within the right ILF. Figure 2 Open in figure viewerPowerPoint T 1 ‐weighted spin‐echo (T1w) versus chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) disability (A), T1w versus (depression adjusted) somatic symptom score (somatic SS) (B), white matter (WM) volume versus CFS duration (C) and T2w versus CFS duration (D). (E) From the T2w group comparison with CFS > normal controls (NCs). (A–E) cross‐reference to Table P threshold of 0.005 (T = 2.8), except for WM volume versus CFS duration (P = 0.001, T = 3.5). Red edges outline the thalamus and yellow edges the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF). The peak voxel for the CFS disability cluster is at the junction of the left ventrolateral thalamus and internal capsule (see x = –14, y = –16, z = +12) and the plot shows individual T1w values of that voxel for both subjects with CFS and NCs. The inset for y = –4 reverses the order of the T2w overlays to clarify the extent of overlap. The background image is the mean WM image from this study. Clusters from regressions of‐weighted spin‐echo (T1w)chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) disability (A), T1w(depression adjusted) somatic symptom score (somatic SS) (B), white matter (WM) volumeCFS duration (C) and T2wCFS duration (D). (E) From the T2w group comparison with CFS > normal controls (NCs). (A–E) cross‐reference to Table 1. The clusters shown were formed with a voxelthreshold of 0.005 (= 2.8), except for WM volumeCFS duration (= 0.001,= 3.5). Red edges outline the thalamus and yellow edges the right inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILF). The peak voxel for the CFS disability cluster is at the junction of the left ventrolateral thalamus and internal capsule (see= –14,= –16,= +12) and the plot shows individual T1w values of that voxel for both subjects with CFS and NCs. The inset for= –4 reverses the order of the T2w overlays to clarify the extent of overlap. The |
,” she says.
But Vicki Cowart, CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, has come to expect threats. She is one of the few of the group’s staff members who uses her name publicly, and she pays a price. “The Antis get a name and they will hound you until the end of your days,” she says. “They come to my house.” She owns a bulletproof vest.
There have been bombings, arson, and even murder of abortion providers in the past. Things only got worse last year when anti-abortion activist David Daleiden released heavily edited videos purporting to show Planned Parenthood staff arranging for the sale of fetal tissue for profit, which would be illegal. Multiple investigations have since exonerated Planned Parenthood. Still, hundreds of protesters assembled near the Colorado Springs building after the videos’ release.
According to the National Abortion Federation, which has been tracking violence against abortion clinics since the 1970s, 2015 was an unparalleled year, with rises in stalking, burglary, arson, vandalism, and more. Clinics reported 25,839 instances of hate e-mail and internet harassment — up from 91 in 2014. The FBI warned of possible attacks against clinics last September. “It was going to happen somewhere,” says
a nurse practitioner at the Colorado Springs clinic, who we will call Deborah. “There is so much animus, so much misunderstanding, so much energy in the anti-choice movement. It seems to build and build and feed on itself.”
Colorado Springs attorney Kirk McCormick argues that given the threats, Planned Parenthood could have been more prepared. He is suing the organization on behalf of several victims and their relatives. Whitney Phillips, a spokesperson for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains, said the group couldn’t comment on any ongoing litigation.
"We are going to be there for this community because they need us."
For survivors, the need to remain anonymous can be painful. In January, Mayor Suthers gave awards to six people who helped others during the shooting. Planned Parenthood workers were excluded for safety reasons. Karen says she found out about the ceremony on the radio and later saw it reported on local TV. “I was just really hurt,”she says. “It’s not like I want an award, but it was shocking to see all these people I was with for eight hours get these awards.”
Cowart is frustrated that these women can’t speak freely about their experiences like some other survivors of mass shootings. “They were heroes,” she says. “They saved lives, and we will never tell those stories. We have been really careful about not putting any names out because we don’t want to put anyone in the crosshairs."
Because the clinic workers must hide their identities, Deborah and Karen say the other side, the people they call the Antis, have the louder megaphone. Karen thinks that may be one of the reasons the organization is easily stigmatized. “I want people to know I am a nice, normal person, and that can go hand in hand with being an abortion provider,” she says. “So many times, patients come in and say ‘Everyone was so nice.’ Obviously, they were expecting worse, for people to judge them or treat them like cattle.”
The nurses say they must bow their heads, suffer the insults, and quietly go about their work. It’s not only the threats — there’s also a sense that the work they do is not really theirs to discuss. “The work in reproductive health and abortion is so deeply meaningful, takes so much commitment and compassion and skill, yet you can’t talk about it,” Deborah says. “You can never tell the specifics about someone who comes to Planned Parenthood for care. It wouldn’t be appropriate, but part of me feels like it needs to be told."
A protest at the clinic in August 2015, prior to the attack.
Last May, Planned Parenthood held an event in the clinic’s parking lot to celebrate its complete reopening. Security guards dressed in black were off to the side of the podium. Protesters held signs near the road. Karen, her husband, and coworkers sat on chairs on the asphalt. Her young son fell asleep on her lap. “It was super intense for me, and I was shaking,” she says. She was so touched by her son, upset by the scene, inspired by the speakers — “like all of these emotions all at the same time” — that she actually began to laugh.
The Colorado Springs clinic is busy these days. Although a few workers have left, among many others there is a powerful rededication to their purpose. “We have come through this and are stronger,” says Amber, the manager. “We are going to be there for this community because they need us.”
Yet the visceral fear can flood back without warning. “I had a big old shooter nightmare last week,” Karen told me nearly seven months after the shoot- ing. And when a gunman opened fire in a nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killing 49 people, it all came rushing back. Karen took her son out to an arcade, hoping for a fun diversion. The crowds triggered a panic attack and she had to leave.
Still, it has never occurred to her to quit her job or to find a different line of work. “Looking into the eyes of our patients and just seeing that there is a whole universe behind their eyes, a whole other world, we need to be here, you know,” she says, tearing up again. “We need to be here.”
This article was originally published as "The Heroes You Can’t Hear About" in the November 2016 issue of Cosmopolitan. Click here to subscribe to the digital edition.The governments of Russia and Iran concluded Tuesday an agreement on visa-free trips for tourist groups.
© AFP 2018 / ATTA KENARE Moscow and Tehran Tear Down Visa Walls, Pave Way for Mutual Tourism Influx
MOSCOW (Sputnik) – The document was signed following the talks of Russian and Iranian presidents, Vladimir Putin and Hassan Rouhani, respectively.
An agreement signed during the fifth session of the commission on consular cooperation between Russia and Iran last November simplifies the visa regime for tour groups travelling between the two countries.
According to the Federal Agency for Tourism, the flow of tourists from Iran to Russia in 2016 was expected to exceed the record levels of last year.
In 2016, the Iranian Vice President said that the country wants to attract 1-2 million visitors by removing tourist visas for Russian nationals.Why Open-Source Platforms Could Change the Electric Vehicle Landscape
The electric vehicle movement is revolutionizing the automotive industry. With that said, the EV industry itself may be about to turn on its head. This is down to the fact that more open-source electric vehicles are hitting the market.
What Are Open-Source Vehicles
Renault recently launched an open-source EV, called the POM, at the CES. An open-source EV is essentially a basic, modular EV that you can develop after you buy. The basics are already there, like the chassis, battery, and motor – but you decide what happens from there.
The POM is based on the hardware from Renaults Twizzy EV. It comes with either a 4kW or 13kW motor. The idea behind an open-source EV is that a lot of the costly research and development is already done.
The Tabby EVO is another open-source EV platform, which you can buy for between $12,480- $19,980. OSVehicle partnered up with Renault for the production of the Tabby EVO. This is what OSVehicle estimated a developer could save on research and development by using the Tabby EVO platform:
$2 million
3 years for development
Revolutionizing the EV Industry
You can buy open-source EVs for personal use or an EV developer can buy them for development. If bought for personal use they offer an alternative to converting an old gas guzzler. But if businesses start buying up batches and developing open-source EVs we could see real developments in the market.
Check out some designs from OSVehicle’s clients, they range from two seater roadsters to pickups. Multiple businesses have been able to get in on developing EVs using this platform, and they’re making them fast. If this trend continues we could see a number of different EVs on the road skyrocket.
Consumers might have a lot more to choose from in the not so distant future.
New Trends
The designs based on the Tabby platform aren’t ones that would compete with Teslas or even the Chevrolet Bolt. They’re small and cheap but they’re a very practical form of transportation.
This trend of small, cheap practical EVs is taking off in China at the moment. With some Chinese dealers reporting 60% sales increases quarter on quarter. Could this be where the EV industry is heading?
The types of EVs we see daily may be about to change in terms of shape, size, and price.
Whatever happens, the future of the electric car industry is exciting. Would you buy one of these open-source platform EVs? Do you think they’d be useful in the US?MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The Wisconsin Supreme Court refused Wednesday to reconsider its decision to end the so-called John Doe investigation into Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s recall campaign, but backed off an order to destroy evidence in the probe.
No one was charged in the probe, which focused on whether Walker’s campaign illegally coordinated with outside conservative groups on issue ads, but it generated plenty of ugly headlines for the governor as he prepared to launch his now-abandoned presidential bid.
The state Government Accountability Board and Milwaukee prosecutors launched the investigation in 2012, but the Supreme Court ended it in July, ruling that coordination on issue ads was permissible under state law.
The justices ruled then that the state’s ban on campaigns coordinating with outside groups was so vague that it infringed on free-speech rights. The justices said the coordination ban applied only to express advocacy, which are ads that directly call for a named candidate’s election or defeat, and ordered prosecutors to return all the evidence they had collected from witnesses and destroy any copies.
The special prosecutor leading the investigation, Francis Schmitz, filed motions in August asking the Supreme Court to reconsider its decision and stay its order to return and destroy evidence.
The particulars of his motions are unknown because John Doe proceedings are secret. Almost all the court filings in the case, including Schmitz’s motions, remain under seal.
But the justices wrote Wednesday that Schmitz had wanted the court to let him continue to investigate whether Walker’s campaign and the outside groups coordinated on express advocacy.
The justices ruled 4-1 that Schmitz never raised that argument before Judge Gregory Peterson, who was overseeing the proceedings until he stalled the investigation last year over questions about the prosecutors’ legal theories. Since Schmitz didn’t bring the point up then, he’s barred from raising it on appeal, they ruled.
“We conclude that Attorney Schmitz’s motion does not present any grounds to reconsider our prior decision,” the majority, including conservative-leaning Michael Gableman, David Prosser, Pat Roggensack and Annette Ziegler, wrote.
Schmitz said he hadn’t seen the opinion Wednesday morning and couldn’t comment.
The court did modify its order to return and destroy evidence. The justices gave Schmitz 30 days to return all the documents, electronic files and computer hardware to their rightful owners. He must gather all documents, electronic data and copies relating to the investigation from anyone who was granted access to them, index all the evidence and submit everything to the Supreme Court’s clerk under seal.
The justices said the revised order gives prosecutors enough time to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the case.
Schmitz had asked that Gableman and Prosser recuse themselves because their campaigns for the high court benefited from millions of dollars spent by at least three groups that were under investigation. The court denied the request, forming the basis for a potential appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
They also wrote that the July opinion effectively terminated Schmitz’s appointment as a special prosecutor, although he had a right to file his motions for reconsideration and a stay because that ruling didn’t order him to stop acting as the lead prosecutor.
Under Wednesday’s clarification, the “prosecution team” can appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Justice Shirley Abrahamson wrote in dissent that the opinion doesn’t define “prosecution team,” leaving it unclear as to who can petition the nation’s highest court.
She added that the investigation should continue to determine whether coordination on express advocacy took place, saying prosecutors focused on ferretting out coordination and never limited themselves to issue advocacy.
“What a mess this court has wrought!” Abrahamson wrote.
Walker signed a bill in October prohibiting prosecutors from using John Doe to investigate political wrongdoing. He’s poised to sign another measure soon that would eliminate the Government Accountability Board and replace it with two commissions made up of partisan appointees.
Copyright © 2019 The Washington Times, LLC.Seizures, immune failure and death
Vets in 'denial'
(NaturalNews) Dog owners and veterinary associations in the United Kingdom have been warning of a rash of dangerous and even lethal side effects from a popular vaccine designed to protect dogs from a rare and mild illness.The disease in question, leptospirosis, can be serious in both dogs and humans, but most cases are mild. It is spread via the urine of infected wild and domestic animals, typically mice and rats, and is most common in poor and rural regions of tropical countries or Eastern Europe. It is not common in the United Kingdom. For this reason, the vaccine is considered optional, rather than required or even recommended.The leptospirosis vaccine, Nobivac L4, is produced by Merck subsidiary MSD Animal Health, which says that despite its optional status, it is one of the most widely used dog vaccines. More than a million doses of L4 are used in the United Kingdom each year. According to the company, the shot should only be given to dogs older than nine weeks, with a followup dose a month later and a yearly booster.The World Small Animal Veterinary Association (WSAVA) disagrees with this recommendation, warning that the vaccine is particularly hazardous for puppies younger than 12 weeks. The L4 vaccine is "associated with as many or more adverse reactions than occur for any other" optional vaccine, the WSAVA says.According to the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) of the British government, since the newest version of the vaccine was introduced three years ago, there have been more than 2,000 reports of serious adverse effects, including more than 120 deaths. The VMD is now monitoring the vaccine, but has not said whether it will consider pulling it from the market.Known adverse effects from the vaccine include blindness, swollen glands, seizures and anaphylactic or immune reactions. In 2014, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) added a warning label to the vaccine highlighting the risk of "anaphylaxis and various immune-mediated conditions such as anaemia, thrombocyte-penia and arthritis." The WSAVA recommends the shot not be given to dogs younger than 16 weeks.However, British vets are regularly giving the shot to dogs as young as seven weeks – younger than recommended by the EMA, the WSAVA or even the manufacturer – without warning of the potential hazards.According to spaniel breeder Bridgette Evans, every dog she has given the L4 vaccine to has suffered an adverse reaction. Out of one litter of six pups, every single one developed swollen glands, in some cases as big as tennis balls. One of the dogs died within three weeks of the shot.Carol Blackburn-Harvey, another breeder, said her dog became "overbalanced" and unable to walk three weeks after getting the shot, and died soon after."Vets are not willing to admit or are in denial about the risk posed by the vaccine – it can kill perfectly fit and healthy dogs," Evans said.Many pet owners believe that the VMD is concealing the scale of the problem by under-reporting the number of dogs affected, and that it isn't taking a hard enough line against manufacturer MSD.In fact, MSD itself seems to have admitted some fault, since it is known to have paid at least one customer's vet bills for damage resulting from the shot.Foot-dragging by the VMD makes it all the more important that dog owners report any suspected negative effects from the L4 shot."It is critical that pet owners report any suspected adverse reactions to their vets so they can be thoroughly and scientifically investigated and reported to the veterinary medicines regulators," said Gudrun Ravetz, junior vice president of the British Veterinary Association.Taking care of your pet doesn't just mean protecting it from unnecessary vaccines, but also protecting it from harsh and dangerous chemicals. The Health Ranger's Pet Shampoo, available at theStore, is made just from saponified high-grade oils, essential oils and plant-based extracts, with no artificial chemicals.Prefab heaven in Canada
You can take it anywhere
Remote mountaintop? Private island? Ancient woodland? Not a problem.
Today’s prefab structures allow you to commune with nature in high style with a minimal environmental footprint. Here are a few examples from an article in the National Post:
Pavilion House modular home from Toronto’s Mafco (www.mafcohouse.com)
Where and why: Developed for Ontario’s lakeshore properties (especially ones with no road access), the newest model incorporates a boathouse. Size 256 square feet
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Benefits: The concrete-piers design means it can be built on high-bank waterfront without disturbing the forest floor. Roof withstands heavy snow loads.
Challenges: Erecting one is not a stealth manoeuvre: Building codes, permits, soil types all require consideration.
Frills: Just look at it.
The verdict: Somewhat site-specific to Ontario, it’s the perfect solution to the “between a rock and a hard place” build.
Habitats Legers creative retreats from Quebec City’s Pierre Thibault architecture (www.pthibault.com)
Where and why: It was originally developed as a creative shelter for the late choreographer Jean-Pierre Thibault. Size 350 square feet with discrete eating, sleeping and living areas
Benefits: It’s highly portable, cost-effective and easy to disassemble in winter. Challenges From the outside, it looks like a dilapidated lean-to. Frills The Thibault name The verdict A tad too eccentric for commercial production, this one is better left to the annals of architectural lore.
The Yurta, a modern Mongolian tent from Ottawa’s Bakery Group (bakerygroup.com)
Where and why: They are great for base camps, yoga retreats, festival tents, back-country ski chalets. There are a number of Canadian companies selling prefab yurts. We chose this one because yurtas are lighter, more portable and come in cool colours like bright yellow.
Size: 226 square feet Benefits Weighing under 300 pounds, it can be assembled by two people in 40 minutes.
Challenges: Circles are notoriously difficult to furnish.
Frills: Skylight and wood-burning stove
The verdict: Resorts made entirely of yurts are popping up in areas like Big Sur and B.C. ski resorts such as Sun-peaks. Expect a proliferation.
All-Terrain Cabin from Vancouver’s Bark Collective (barkbark.ca)
Where and why: Developed as a prototype to showcase Canadian design and innovation, it is currently on a four-year world tour of design expos. Size 480 square feet, kitted out for a family of four and pet
Benefits: It can be dropped anywhere by helicopter as a self-contained standard shipping container.
Challenges: Not currently in production, but everything in the cabin can be purchased and all the suppliers are on the Web site.
Frills: Solar-powered shower, composting toilet, water filter, environmentally friendly paints, bio-diesel stove, concrete sink, designer furniture, hemp bedding, mountain bike– you name it.
The verdict: Shipping-container architecture (call it cargotecture) is the way of the future.
Bamboo domicile tents from Los Angeles’s Raj Tents (rajtents.com)
Where and why: Think of summer retreats, party rooms, temporary homes on building lots, kids’ spaces. Size Any
Benefits: Lightweight and portable, they can be stored in a lock box over winter. Challenges Wet climates. Raj substitutes an aluminum frame and vinyl or canvas tenting engineered to withstand wind and damp.
Frills Can be fitted with custom furnishings and soft-goods along an Indian, Moroccan or French Colonial theme.
The verdict: Ever since Daryl Hannah set up house in a teepee, glamping has become the epitome of bohemian chic.
Prefab outbuilding from San Francisco’s Modern Cabana (modern-cabana. com)
Where and why: Backyard office, sleeping cabin
Size 120 square feet, standard model Benefits $85 a square foot with no waste; insulated and wired
Challenges: Shipping within the U.S. can set you back $1,500.
Frills: Working windows and sliding doors can be added.
The verdict: Upgrade to bamboo floors: In the U.S., this could suddenly become your primary residence.
Black & White Photo: / Interior of the All-Terrain Cabin, a.k.a. shipping container architecture, by Vancouver’s Bark Collective. ; Black & White Photo: / The pre-fab Modern Cabana by Mork-Ulnes Design in San Francisco. ; Black & White Photo: / Transporting the All-Terrain Cabin. ; Black & White Photo: Courtesy Of Manufacturers / TK the Yurt. ;
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Our Our fastest solar ovenBake, roast or steam a meal for two people in minutes, reaching up to 550°F (290°C). GoSun Sport sets the bar for portable solar stoves.
Buy our book - OFF THE GRID - a tour of American off-grid places and people written by Nick Rosen, editor of the off-grid.net web siteDevoted followers of QULT,
With pride we retrospect to more than three years of musical experiments. A journey containing fifteen memorable editions at the WesterUnie and the Transformatorhuis, as well as various national and international festival hostings. Subground became our blueprint, grew into a movement to be taken seriously and a community emerged.
At our church, dedicated ravers gathered to embrace the new wave. We got the chance to get to know you, and we feel honored that we did. However, the time has come to close a chapter, the end of our very own Genesis. On the 26th of September, you’re all invited to join us for QULT – ’The Last Supper’ at the good old WesterUnie. This is where we will preach our final sermon.
The line-up of QULT – ‘The Last Supper’ is soon to be released, so keep a sharp eye on our socials.
Ticket sales start on Saturday the 8th of August at 13:00 (CEST) on joinqult.com/tickets.
We look forward to unite with you all for the very last time on the 26th of September at the WesterUnie.
Amen,
QULTNEW YORK — John Brademas, a political, financial, and academic dynamo who served 22 years in Congress and more than a decade as president of New York University in an all-but-seamless quest to promote education, the arts, and a liberal agenda, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 89.
His death was announced by NYU.
Dr. Brademas liked to say that being a university president was not much different from being a congressman: You shake hands, make speeches, remember names and faces, stump for a cause, and raise money relentlessly. The difference, he said, is that you do not have to depend on voters to renew your contract every two years.
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As a Democratic representative from Indiana from 1959 to 1981, he became known as Mr. Education and Mr. Arts. He sponsored bills that nearly doubled federal aid for elementary and secondary education in the mid-1960s and that created the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. He was also instrumental in annual financing of the arts and humanities and in the passage of Project Head Start, the National Teachers Corps, and college tuition aid and loan programs.
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He opposed the Vietnam War and many defense measures, rebuked President Nixon in the Watergate scandal, and voted for civil rights legislation, environmental protections, day-care programs and services for the elderly and people with disabilities. He became majority whip, the House’s third-ranking official, and was reelected 10 times in a mostly conservative district, winning up to 79 percent of the vote.
But he was swept out of office in the 1980 Republican landslide that elected Ronald Reagan president. Dr. Brademas lobbied hard for the NYU job and, as president from 1981 to 1992, transformed the nation’s largest private university from a commuter school into one of the world’s premier residential research and teaching institutions.
When he took over, Dr. Brademas had no experience running a large organization. The university had seven undergraduate colleges, 10 graduate and professional schools, 13,000 employees, and a $500 million annual budget. There were 45,000 students and housing for only a few thousand, in crowded Greenwich Village and scattered sites around New York City.
But he was a gregarious leader with voluminous contacts in government and corporate life. His skills as a politician and fund-raiser had been honed in a whirlwind of congressional and civic responsibilities. And, as his admirers came to believe, he was — if there is such a thing — a natural university president.
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“No one hit the ground running as well as Brademas,” said L. Jay Oliva, NYU’s vice president for academic affairs, who became chancellor and succeeded his boss 11 years later, and who died in April 2014. “All his instincts were university presidential.”
Looking collegiate in tweeds and sweaters, displaying boundless energy, Dr. Brademas plunged into meetings with deans, trustees, students, and faculty members to learn NYU’s strengths and weaknesses. He joined the boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (he later became chairman), the New York Stock Exchange, the Rockefeller Foundation, RCA, and the Loews Corp. He courted investment bankers, foundation executives, real estate moguls, and philanthropists, and he reached out to NYU alumni around the world.
He also cultivated relationships with Mayor Edward I. Koch, Governor Mario M. Cuomo, leaders of the state Legislature and the City Council, newspaper publishers and other media VIPs, union officials, leaders in the arts, and the heads of museums, cultural institutions, and other colleges and universities. He was often in Washington, conferring with education officials and members of Congress. He stoutly opposed the Reagan administration’s education cutbacks and attempts to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts.
By the end of his tenure — he stepped down in late 1991 but retired as president emeritus in 1992 after a sabbatical — he had raised $800 million for NYU and nearly doubled its endowment, to $540 million. He had recruited top scholars from around the country to join the faculty; added new fields of study, including the Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies; enlarged the campus; and added 11 residence halls, providing housing for half of the undergraduates.
“I find in Washington Square a tremendous sense of diversity, vitality, and excitement, products of the enlivening mixture of New York University and New York City,” Dr. Brademas said in his farewell address to 6,500 graduates. “With all its troubles, New York City is still the place to be. And NYU is still the place to get an education.”
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John Brademas was in Mishawaka, Ind. His father, a Greek immigrant, ran a restaurant and quoted Socrates to him: “Things of value come only after hard work.” He enrolled at the University of Mississippi. After his freshman year, he won a scholarship and transferred to Harvard, a change he called head-spinning. He became a top student and president of the Wesley Foundation, the campus Methodist student group. In successive summers, he worked at an auto plant in South Bend, lived among tribes in Mexico, and served as an intern at the United Nations temporary headquarters in Lake Success, N.Y.
After graduating from Harvard in 1949, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and in 1954 earned a social studies doctorate.
Back home in northern Indiana, he resolved to run for Congress in a largely Republican district with diverse demographics: farmers, small-town retailers, auto-industry workers, members of East European ethnic groups, and college communities that included the University of Notre Dame.
It took three tries. After losing races in 1954 and 1956, he gained experience as an aide to two members of Congress and in Adlai E. Stevenson’s 1956 presidential campaign. In 1958 finally won the seat for Indiana’s 3rd Congressional District.
Dr. Brademas was single for most of his political career, but in 1977 he married Mary Ellen Briggs, a third-year medical student at Georgetown University. He leaves her and three stepchildren; a sister, Eleanor Brazeau; and six step-grandchildren.UPDATE: Fire TV devices are also blocked in the latest updated.
We are receiving wide spread reports that the Sling TV app for Android now blocks Android TV boxes like the G-Box Q. After installing the app on a G-Box Q you receive the following error message “This version of Sling TV is not supported on this device. Please try re-installing from the app store (2-49)”.
We can confirm that the app use to work as seen in our review of Sling TV from a few weeks ago.
We can also confirm if you have an older version of the app it will still work. This does not seem to be a live update to all apps just new downloads of the Sling TV app. Our G-Box Q allowed us to use the app as well as sign out and back in.
The update seems to have happened sometime in the last week. Sling TV has not made official announcement and they have not replied to our request for comment yet. (Being the weekend we don’t expect to hear back until Monday.)
Are you having this issue with the G-Box Q or other Android based boxes? Please let us know in the comments.
Please follow us on Twitter, or like us on our new Facebook Page for updates on this issue.Gatestone Institute reported:
A new report by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), the federal government’s central institution for monitoring and preventing diseases, confirms an across-the-board increase in disease since 2015, when Germany took in an unprecedented number of migrants.
The Infectious Disease Epidemiology Annual Report — which was published on July 12, 2017 and provides data on the status of more than 50 infectious diseases in Germany during 2016 — offers the first glimpse into the public health consequences of the massive influx of migrants in late 2015.
The report shows increased incidences in Germany of adenoviral conjunctivitis, botulism, chicken pox, cholera, cryptosporidiosis, dengue fever, echinococcosis, enterohemorrhagic E. coli, giardiasis, haemophilus influenza, Hantavirus, hepatitis, hemorrhagic fever, HIV/AIDS, leprosy, louse-borne relapsing fever, malaria, measles, meningococcal disease, meningoencephalitis, mumps, paratyphoid, rubella, shigellosis, syphilis, toxoplasmosis, trichinellosis, tuberculosis, tularemia, typhus and whooping cough.
Germany has — so far at least — escaped the worst-case scenario: most of the tropical and exotic diseases brought into the country by migrants have been contained; there have no mass outbreaks among the general population. More common diseases, however, many of which are directly or indirectly linked to mass migration, are on the rise, according to the report.
The incidence of Hepatitis B, for example, has increased by 300% during the last three years, according to the RKI. The number of reported cases in Germany was 3,006 in 2016, up from 755 cases in 2014. Most of the cases are said to involve unvaccinated migrants from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. The incidence of measles in Germany jumped by more than 450% between 2014 and 2015, while the number of cases of chicken pox, meningitis, mumps, rubella and whooping cough were also up. Migrants also accounted for at least 40% of the new cases of HIV/AIDS identified in Germany since 2015, according to a separate RKI report."I've never had a gun drawn on me, but the notion that this is the reality of it broke my heart," star Marque Richardson told THR.
[Warning: This story contains spoilers through season one, episode five of Dear White People.]
The fifth episode of Netflix's new comedy Dear White People, based on the 2014 movie of the same name, is a turning point of sorts for the show. The hour, directed by Oscar winner Barry Jenkins, follows a typical collegiate Saturday in the life of student and activist Reggie (Marque Richardson) — wandering around on campus with his friends and winding up at a party, where he dominates a drinking game with his white classmate (Nolan Funk).
But after the two have a nonviolent disagreement about using the n-word while singing along to a song, things escalate rapidly when a campus cop pulls a gun on the unarmed Reggie, demanding he show his student ID. And no, the cop didn't ask his white classmate the same question.
While the first five episodes of the series introduce the characters and how they deal with a group of white students throwing a blackface party on campus, the second five deal with the aftermath of a very real, very dangerous incident.
"The character Joelle says,'sometimes being black and free is activism in itself,'" star Richardson tells The Hollywood Reporter. "You see that on a Saturday, Reggie just going through his life and then all of a sudden, by the end of it, he realizes that he's not free. And that's heartbreaking."
Creator Justin Simien said that he'd always planned to have a big tonal shift in the fifth episode.
"There were differences about which characters should be involved and also the severity of the incident, but episode five was always a turning point and was always about the ways in which being black could be fatal," he explains. "Lulling you into this comedy and into loving these people and then bam, hitting you with their realities. That absolutely was intentional. That was in many, many versions of my season outline. It just came together so perfectly. It was a fusion of a series of scenes that didn't make the movie, but had always stayed in my heart, that always epitomized what I love about this world and wanting to do something really dynamic in that middle episode."
While Simien wasn't able to direct the episode, he wanted a "frickin' genius" to do it — and that genius happened to be Jenkins. "For me, it was always Barry that had to do the walk-and-talk episode," he said. "I learned about Barry from [the 2008 film] Medicine for Melancholy. I just wanted to work with him."
Each episode of Dear White People tells the story from a different character's point of view, but Richardson didn't read Reggie's episode until he was with the cast at the table read.
"I read it at the table read; I processed it like an hour later," says Richardson. "I'm riding my bike, and I just started crying. And I thought about it again like two hours later, and I start crying. Then I read it again, and I start crying again only because I've never had a gun drawn on me, but the notion that this is the reality of it broke my heart."
While shooting a later episode, Richardson became emotional again. "I just literally kept thinking about my nephew, who's like 1 1/2 and the fact that he'll have to grow up and this will be his reality. And that f—ing broke my heart," he says.
Co-star Antoinette Robertson, who isn't in the pivotal scene but is in several other tense ones throughout the season, says she and the rest of the cast were very passionate about portraying uncomfortable moments onscreen.
"We took this subject matter very seriously, with the understanding that there are people who don't walk away from these altercations at all. These people don't have a voice because they're no longer with us, so we need to do it justice, and we did," she says. "I feel like people are going to definitely have a moment when they watch it."
Ultimately, says Richardson, he is hoping the episode — and the scene — will at least spark a conversation.
"Dear White People is so authentic and that's why I think it resonates with so many people," he says. "You can't work on this and go home put your blinders on and act like nothing is happening. When you do your research, when you read all the stuff that's happened, you have to go out there and do something. So for me, this is like art as activism."
Dear White People season one is available on Netflix now.MILAN – Disgruntled Italian Catholics are increasingly turning to the internet to leave the Church by getting "debaptized" – but typically, the Pope isn't making the process web friendly.
Cyberspace is one of the few places lapsed Catholics can get a copy of the formal letter called "actus defectionis" that is required by Church officials to leave the faith.
One such letter, downloaded 30,000 times, is the main attraction at the Italian Union of Rationalists and Agnostics, or UAAR, website.
The 2,000-member group, which won a David-and-Goliath legal battle over debaptism in 2002, has no brick-and-mortar office. It relies on e-mail and the occasional phone call to keep things moving.
"We see a traffic spike every time the Pope says something unpopular," said UAAR site manager Raffaele Carcano, who is also a banker, adding that the site recently hit new heights during a recent fray over civil unions.
Church officials, however, view debaptism as a matter of bookkeeping. Priests are incapable of washing off the holy water that tots were dipped in for the rite.
The actus defectionis must be snail-mailed to the parish where baptism took place. Priests note in the register that the flock member has permanently strayed – and that's one less believer to bulk up statistics.
There are no statistics on how many Italians have defected. |
a result of the actions of others.” He wouldn’t elaborate.
Gun enthusiasts were skeptical and turned to social media to vent their anger.
“The RCMP has shown contempt for the rights of Canadians by their actions, and we expect the Government of Canada to take steps and introduce measures to rein in the RCMP,” the National Firearms Association said in a statement posted on its website.
President Sheldon Clare later said by phone that the association would mount a legal challenge of the reclassification.
“The government needs to understand that people who pay $3,000 (for a gun) are not using it to stick up 7-Elevens,” he said. “These are honest Canadian firearms owners who are being converted into a criminalized class.”
The RCMP review of the imported rifles was triggered last year after Cox contacted authorities to report that someone had brought into his store what he believed to be a counterfeit Swiss Arms rifle.
But Cox’s complaint had the unintended consequence of snowballing into a broader probe of the entire line of Swiss Arms rifles — including the ones he had imported to Canada.
Cox could not be reached for comment Thursday.
Dquan@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/dougquanIan Cameron Esslemont
You asked and Ian Cameron Esslemont responded! In conjunction with the conclusion of the Return of the Crimson Guard Malazan reread, we’ve got the answers to your questions about the Malazan series, Return of the Crimson Guard, and more. (Just a small note before we begin, submitted questions were condensed and collected by username.) Click through to start reading!
Tufty: There’s been a lot of rumours/anecdotes that RotCG was originally written quite a while before it was published. Would you care to explain what truth there is to this, what (if anything) was changed between the original writing and release, etc?
Ian C: Sure, I’ll address this. Knives and RotCG were written way back. They were among the earliest (if not the first) prose explorations in the world, contemporaneous with Steve and my screenplay writing, including Gardens of the Moon (if I remember correctly). When these two works were accepted for publication I had to rewrite RotCG to bring it up to speed and to adjust the main narrative lines, including certain events and character lines, etc. Other than this however, the broad thrust of it, its arc and main events, remained as originally envisioned.
Tufty: One particular aspect of this is that it seems that the Old Guard characters rebelling against Laseen would have connected well with GotM’s sub-plot of eliminating the Old Guard, and this may have not connected as smoothly with RotCG being released after tBH instead of after GotM.
Ian C: Things just fell the way they fell with the publication acceptances and contracts as they came. C’est la Guerre.
Tufty: Lastly, do you ever get annoyed that people seem to spell your name as Esselmont a lot instead of Esslemont?
Ian C: Just a bit. There are lots of Esselmonts out there as well, an established variation on Esslemont. I think Esslemont is the original: just look at the map of Scotland north of Aberdeen, you’ll find Esslemont castle and village.
Tabbyfl55: I am wondering if, as co-creators of a world, you and Steven ever have any significant disagreements about how you want world-changing events to progress, and if you do, how do you resolve them? Or if not, how do you avoid them?
Ian C: In actual fact, Steve and I have had no significant disagreements over any element in the world from either of our writing. (Knock on wood). Surprising, I know, given how writing is often characterized as the world of bloated egos and over-sized heads.
I believe it all stems from us working out together the over-all thematic arc of this particular project. Once that was established, everything else had to follow in timbre and tone. Anything that would disagree with this controlling tone was simply not artistically considered by either of us.
Nimander: We’ve gotten glimpses of the Quon Talian continent in the prior malazan books, but up until this book it was just that -glimpses. Do you feel any pressure to deliver on all the build up? I’m thinking more of Korel and Jacuruku here, and speaking of which you’re -hopefully- currently writing “Assail” (and oh how that place has been built up in -at least my- imagination).
Is it daunting to tackle the new continents/cultures with all that buildup seeing as Steve set “Book of the Fallen” on three continents (don’t know about the crippled god) and you having to deliver on basically a new one every book (and one of them is Assail…)
Ian C: Yeah, build up sucks. But remember the sources, here. Most of the characters don’t really know what they’re talking about (kinda like real life …).
As to “delivering”, well, the readers will decide. These continents and locales are as they are. They and their events are in no way dependent upon how built-up they have been (at least that’s the goal). What I really hope to echo is the truth that when travelers come to a new land what they encounter almost never meets their expectations… (these expectations being based upon myths, hearsay, garbled histories, lies, delusions, and outright fabrications).
Nimander: And as an aside, what are your favourite films?
Ian C: Not surprisingly, my favourite films all have elements of science fiction and/or the fantastic to them: such as Kill Bill, Blade Runner, plus most post-apocalyptic films made.
Toster: On writing ‘naive’ characters – here i’m getting at Ghelel. she comes across as pretty naive several times in the story, and her instinctive reactions are almost glaringly naive sometimes. as you were writing her POV, did you sense that her character was in any way dislikable, and if so, did that affect how you wrote the character going forward, or did you continue to let the character ‘be themselves’, so to speak?
Ian C: I wrote Ghelel to be Ghelel. She came out of a highly controlled environment in which she was very sheltered. Therefore, she shouldn’t be blamed for being “sheltered.” Once her character was set in my mind I tried to be as true to it as I could in all her reactions and opinions. It fell out that she could be called naïve. So be it. Naïve people exist in this world, and others. It would be absurdly unrealistic to portray a world that contained no naïve people. (Sort of like television shows that purport to portray contemporary America yet contain no fat or ugly people—no, wait…)
As to likeable or unlikeable—irrelevant to writing. You write the character to be true to her or him self. Whether you or the reader will like or not like the character is beside the point. Talk instead about whether you engaged with the character, found him or her compelling or believable, whether his or her emotions/reactions felt consistent. Flaws in character portrayal should be talked about as whether the character’s actions felt “forced” by the author, or appeared “unmotivated”, inconsistent (contrary), or “parachuted” (inexplicable).
Toster: sticking with character, there seems to be a select group of people who figure more prominently in your books, and a group who are prominent in SE books. obviously the Crimson Guard are your realm, but specifically, i’m asking about osserc. it feels to me like osserc is much more your character than SE’s, and so i wondered if the two of you ever had correspondence respecting how SE would write ossercs back-story in Forge of Darkness, and how that should play out.
Ian C: Yeah, Osserc is “mine” in as much as Anomander is Steve’s. They came out of our gaming. Anomander needed a foil, an “enemy.” Yet through the gaming it turned out that they weren’t really enemies… anyway, enough of that as we’ll see how it turns out in Steve’s vision in the coming books.
We have talked over the back-story, and it’s still a little vague, as creation needs that kind of a vacuum in which to form.
Aaronthere: 1) is the short winged creature that mops around Oserc’s feet in the shadow warren Iskaral Pust?
Ian C: Here I can say decidedly that the creature is not Pust. As should be figured out by now, the Azath allow entities to live as “squatters” among them, provided said entities do some work, or errands, now and then.
Aaronthere: 2) Is there a connection between the Elder race of the Thel Akai and the Jade statues?
Ian C: I don’t think so. I don’t see it, and I don’t think Steve’s implied such. Is there something there in the text for you to make an argument for it?
Jragghen: RotCG is definitely larger in terms of scope and length than Night of Knives – how did this change your approach to writing the novel?
Ultimately, in the course of RotCG, Ghelel’s plotline didn’t really overlap with any of the other main plotlines, and ended up feeling tangential to the rest of the book (something which I’ll note also seems to happen in your other novels, but in the other cases they seem to be used more to set up more central plotlines to future books, which – at least thsu far – doesn’t appear to be the case with Ghelel). Was there any particular point or theme which you were attempting to approach or discuss with her inclusion?
Ian C: Ghelel, or more accurately, the people manipulating her, are engaged in scheming for control of an empire. It would therefore be prudent to cultivate numerous options, back-ups, and back doors. Realistically speaking, most of these options will come to nothing, or be abandoned, or suddenly changed at the last minute (just peruse a history of political machinations in Greek city states, or any Roman Imperial succession). Ghelel’s plotline then represents just one of the many schemes and stratagems in play during all this tumult. It wouldn’t be credible if all these plans and contingencies bore fruit. Therefore, the old guard had to abandon, or were undercut, in this particular plan. Also, for me personally, she represents a very hopeful possibility for all the characters: she escapes the machinations victimizing her. One of the most hopeful notes in the novel, I think.
Jragghen: From Erikson’s talks, it’s been established that a certain number of the plotlines of his books were gamed with you or with others amongst your friends. Is that also the case in your books, or are the stories more free-form? On a similar note, I know that Erikson has answered previously who you and he played at various times from your various character sets. RotCG deals with a number of the “Old Guard” whose adventures took place before the setting of the book series – are these other characters (Toc the Elder, Lassen, Urko, Caratheon, etc) the characters of other members of your original gaming group?
Ian C: Almost all our books of the main arc were gamed, his and mine, to greater and lesser degrees, all during our organization of the world. The books draw upon all the time we spent gaming, and so far, they represent only a fraction of all that material. When I say “to greater or lesser degrees” I mean that some were drawn from actual played-through moments (Gardens), while others derive from talked-through sketches and events (Blood and Bone)
As to Lasseen, Urko, and Cartheron (and so many others)—these constitute the team of characters through which Steve and I dramatized the creation of the Malazan “Empire” in its campaign to win Quon Tali. This back-story that hasn’t been touched yet: the early empire history. All gamed through by us long ago. Right now, I’m the one designated to tell these stories (I believe)—should we get to them.
Jragghen: Is it possible to get a Word of God as to how Ryllandaras the Jackal in RotCG relates to the wolf D’ivers in Deadhouse Gates? I’m aware of the prevailing fan theory, but it’d be interesting to get confirmation one way or another.
Ian C: Steve might disagree here, given that he has a backstory in mind for the wolf D’ivers in Deadhouse, however, to my mind, the two are separate in their final form, though the might relate in their origin.
Jragghen: And finally, I was wondering if you might be willing to enlighten us as to how Mallick Rel and Taya got into their business arrangement. This kinda ties into OST talk, so I’m not going to get into more detail than that (we may revisit it when we get to OST). Just curious, is all.
Ian C: Thanks for asking this question! This is just one example of what Steve and I think is extremely necessary to any fully realized world: things are constantly happening off-stage. Just because the flood-lamp of attention has swung away doesn’t mean that things stand still around any locale. My instincts say that Taya sought him out as a powerful enemy of the status quo. I won’t say anything specific here because there might be a novella there!
BDG91: I have three questions and hopefully you can answer them. First Quon Tali seems to have just about every phenotype known to people (and some that we don’t) and I am wonder if this was a conscious choice or did it simply naturally happened as you and SE were gaming?
Ian C: Nice observation. Again, here Steve and I were deliberately reacting against what had come before. Remember, this was a while ago, but for some time the fantasy offerings were drearily similar in presenting European faux-mediaeval peoples and societies (with some notable exceptions), meaning, in effect: a bunch of Nordic types. Steve and I decided to go deliberately in the opposite direction in presenting to the reader a bewildering variety of “shades” and types. There are, in fact, almost no Nordic types to be found (though some appear later). Interestingly, here the “fantasy” novel comes closest to presenting the true to life reality: most people in the world are non-Europeans, or “brown” or however you wish to frame it. Similarly so in Malaz.
BDG91: Second, throughout your books there seems to be only a few characters that are carried through to the next book, unlike SE whose takes several characters through his run. Why is this? This is not a complaint, I’ve always enjoyed your variety of characters in all of your books, but I would like to know if were every going to see Nait again or is his story finished?
Ian C: Yeah, looks like I’m ruthless in leaving characters to go their own way. In Nait’s case I believe the suggestion is clear enough that he is now well on his way to becoming a new rising legendary personality in the Malazan army. New faces are always needed to replace all the aging old guard.
As to carrying on characters, I believe readers will find that I’ve shifted in this towards the end. The through-lines increase as we move to Blood and Bone, and on to Assail. Some of these plot element through-lines will surprise the readers, I think.
BDG91: And finally third. Are you planning write anymore Malazan books after your sixth? If so would you mind detailing them somewhat? If not please just write a horror novel! I’ve always enjoyed your horror sections.
Ian C: I’m currently not under contract for any more. However, looking ahead, (as discussed above) Steve and I had divided up the fields of exploration in the manner that I might do the Imperial back-story, while he would do the Imperial after-stories. I would really enjoy telling these stories. We’ll see—it may happen.
As to horror, very interesting. Horror? Really? I see no horror in what I’ve done so far (and isn’t that frightening). I understand that Steve’s novellas have been categorized as horror—I would enjoy doing something analogous.
IrwinJon: Why Kyle? Stalker, Badlands, Coots and…Kyle? It’s not exactly the most fantastical of names.
Ian C: Variety. Again, Steve and I loathe the cliché names and naming schemes one finds in much of the fantasy offerings. Names that are attempting to be overtly “fantastic,” or edgy, typically end up sounding absurd. Because of this, I decided to choose a use name that was a little uncommon, not utterly strange, such as for example “Daldorian.” If your name was Daldorian, it would quickly be shortened in use to “Dal.” So too with “Kyle.” We will find that, as with most names, it is just a handy shortened version for everyday use. Alternatively, Badlands, and Coots, being two and one syllables, can’t easily be shortened. Stalker, you will note, is sometimes referred to as “Stalk.”
Djk1978: How does one person keep everyone out of the Imperial Warren, even if that one person is Topper? Isn’t the Imperial Warren huge?
Ian C: You are correct, the Imperial Warren is huge (theoretically limitless). However, its all about natural choke points and geography. He only cared about trespassers from Malaz. Mages entering the Warren from the regions of Malazan territories had to move through certain passes, or use a limited set of access points. Topper hung around these with his senses raised and anyone entering set off alarms like a stone thrown into a pond. Not to mention he could probably tell Claw magics from everyone else’s.
GoodOldSatan: My question relates to the handling of shared characters … Kiska, Tay, Traveller, Bars, etc. (and I wouldn’t be surpised if thee were more to come … at least for me … in OST and B&B). Given the way these characters appear throughout the two bodies of work, there must have been significant allignment going on between you and SE regarding what each of you could (and could not) do to/with them. So, was that a negotiation? Gamed? Or where these characters included primarily to provide continuity?
Ian C: GoodOldSatan? Really? The question above asks about the name Kyle and you give the name… well, never mind (sigh). Okay, shared characters. Not too much of a problem, actually. We saw how each of us played, or wrote these characters, and then merely worked to continue their arc as established. For example, Bars. Steve introduced him and I looked at him as a character, saw how he was so concerned about the people he commanded and, well, that was that. I decided to test that commitment—and there we are.
So, no negotiation at all, actually. We each look at what has been done, then try our best (I believe) to continue that character’s journey. I do not know if you have read OST yet, but in this regard I faced my greatest challenge in taking up Kruppe. It was terrifying, but I hope I managed not to embarrass myself. At least Steve hasn’t complained (but then he wouldn’t, as he’s so damned supportive and generous).
Jordanes: Just who was the girl Ragman/Topper fought in the Imperial Warren? Was it Apsalar or someone else? Lots of speculation on this but no definitive answer I’m aware of.
Ian C: Ah, yes. She represents another one of these off-stage potentialities that Steve and I hint at to suggest all the “other stuff” going on off-stage all about the world. She is thus a possibility, a potential that he or I might return to (and thus answer these questions).
KallorAndAshes: When can we expect Assail? And would you write more about Malazan after that book? I really would love to read more about Kallor.
Ian C: Is this because of your name? Have you read Blood and Bone yet? (just a hint). As to when Assail is coming out, well, I’m working on it now and it’s proving a real challenge. Don’t know when I’ll be done, but I’d expect to see the book out end of this year or so—but this depends upon Bantam, and their schedule. After this, I expect I would return to the world if I find a story that really pulls at me (see above).
KallorAndAshes: How has that sword Vengeance/Grief augmented Dassem’s skill? Would he have defeated Kallor without that sword that easily? Or was Kallor just overconfident? And he did defeat Skinner with ease. Skinner was reputed to have fought Dassem to a standstill.
Ian C: Vengeance/Grief would invariably augment the wielder’s ability. However, at the level of such masters as these, my instincts say that it comes down to who is more ‘on their game’ that day, or who is more up for the confrontation. Kallor is given to overconfidence; Dassem can be slow to be roused to his full ability; while Skinner can be impatient and dismissive of his opponents. These tendencies, plus their current goals and commitment to any duel would all contribute.
KallorAndAhes: Will we see Ghelel again? Does Moss get her? Moss does seem to have appeared in Stonewielder.
Ian C: Again, as above, Ghelel and Moss have been sent off into the wide world to meet what fate they may. My instincts work against any chance encounter to “show” them again, as that would smack of too convenient coincidences in plotting—which I hate to trip over in books.
KallorAndAshes: Has it ever happened that between you and Mr. Erikson, one of you had disliked a character the other liked?
Ian C: As I write above, like and dislike doesn’t enter into things. There are characters I have written, and Steve has written, that I wouldn’t like if I met them in real-life, but in the fiction what matters is how well conceived the characters are. And in this regard I’m lucky as all Steve’s are very well conceived and portrayed. I can only hope a few of mine are as well.
BillCap: I was wondering about the genesis of the Nait/Jumpy storyline (one of my favorites in the series, let alone this book). It seems that it is a kind of “origin” story of the sort of squads we’ve already seen in the Malazan world already fully formed. I was curious if you see it that way as well and if it was intended to be such from the start or if it sort of grew in the telling.
Ian C: Nice question. Yeah, like all good things in novels it just kinda took off in the telling and became an origin story. Its great when something like that happens in writing. I think it shows that the author is in “sync” with the material (at that moment), and what’s needed, or possible, emerges for the novel.
Billcap: Laseen. She is, in many ways, a cipher to readers. Personally, I love how much that is true, but I had a few questions about that. One is did the two of you have any discussions over that aspect of her—the lack of a pov from her, the idea of keeping her a mystery to readers? And if so, did either of you ever chafe at that? How did it get decided whether/how/when to kill of such a prime character? Was that negotiated? Had you always planned that for this novel?
Ian C: Ah yes, Laseen. Keeping her a mystery just emerged naturally from our handling of the “old guard”. Her death was determined by the material. The thematics demanded it at that point. By then she’d been abandoned/betrayed by everyone she had worked to advance and now had nothing left. She is one of our most tragic characters, I think. I wanted her death to be savage, brutal, and abrupt. I suppose I could have softened it with a few more touches, but in the end I just decided not to play with it too much (and risk messing it in some yet new way).
BillCap: There seemed a general consensus among our readers that the battle scenes were a particularly strong aspect of the novel. Do you take any particular approach to these scenes?
Ian C: I can’t say that I have any general manner of approach. I just try to portray the truth of the confrontation (which really has more to do with perceptions, than statistics) I’m very gratified to hear that these scenes are regarded as “working.” That means an awful lot to me as a writer, thank you. I guess what I should do is just keep doing what I’m doing in this regard.
BillCap: I’m driving to Alaska this summer (picking up the would-rather-fly family in Fairbanks). Beyond the three days we have scheduled camping in Denali, what’s your top suggestion (knowing we’re driving a Toyota Prius and not an off-roader)?
Ian C: Hmmm. The summer, you say? Depending upon how long you have. I would recommend a drive on south to the Kenai Peninsula. Homer, perhaps. (two days down) Or a drive to Seward (two days down), which is a great place.
Djk1978: When’s the last time you were in Winnipeg and what area of the city did you frequent (I live there myself). Any chance you are a Jets fan? What are your thoughts about a city that some people who have never been there like to slight?
Ian C: Go Jets, hey? Well, I’ve been away from the city for too long now to claim any allegiance to the Jets. When I lived there I was in the very south end, close to St. Norbert. And it’s too bad that the city gets bad press—it’s actually a very livable city. An ideal place to have grown up. I do miss it.
Stevenhalter: Was Laseen’s death here a planned or a played scenario. In other words, was there a chance of her surviving?
Ian C: I don’t believe it was gamed (though I may be misremembering). However, Steve and I talked it all through and this end was agreed to by both of us as necessary at this point (if everything went as planned).
IskaralPust: I’ve been wondering about this for some time, but it is more of a general question that a RotCG question. Many different sources indicate that yourself and Mr. Erikson originally created the Malaz world for gaming and that you’ve gamed some of the story. My question is – would we be reading a completely different story if the dice bounced a different direction?
Ian C: Ha, the bounce of the dice. Well, the truth was that we drove the true gamers mad with our blatant disregard for the mechanics of the game. We neither of us cared for what the dice said and preferred instead the unfolding of poetic truth. Excellent, inspired, or entertaining role-playing always won out over the dictates of the rules. In other words, Malazan gods were as Greek gods who always reserved the right to intervene to cheat the fates for inspired moves or speeches. The short answer then, is that the poetic truth of a tragedy is that the tragic hero or heroine must die, and this was how we saw Laseen.In October, the White House released a report and recommended guidelines on the development of AI. Today, a Senate hearing will bring in top AI experts to examine the current state of AI.
Image: ZDNet
In a Senate office building at 2:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday, experts and policymakers will convene to discuss one of the most important and complex technology developments today: Artificial intelligence.
The meeting, hosted by the subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness Hearing, is part of the Senate's committee on commerce, science, and transportation.
Chaired by Sen. Ted Cruz, the hearing aims to take a broad look at the current state of artificial intelligence, the questions it raises about policy, and its implications on commerce. Andrew Moore, dean at the school of computer science at Carnegie Mellon, outlined three goals for the meeting: "First, what AI is and what it isn't. Second,why things are changing so rapidly right now, and how this can play out over the coming decade. And third, what keeps me awake at night regarding the U.S. position in the AI race—the pivotal technology race of this century.
Image: screenshot
The meeting comes after President Obama announced his public initiatives to address artificial intelligence in October, including the report Preparing for the Future of Artificial Intelligence, a guest column in Wired magazine, and the White House Frontiers Conference, a first-of-its-kind gathering, co-hosted by the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University.
The White House report on AI offered a thorough examination of how this high tech can improve our lives—as well as the importance of safety when it comes to research and development.
At today's Senate hearing, which will be livestreamed, five experts will be present:
Eric Horvitz, interim co-chair, Partnership on AI; managing director, Microsoft Research Lab
, interim co-chair, Partnership on AI; managing director, Microsoft Research Lab Andrew Moore, dean, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University
Andrew Futreal, professor, Department of Genomic Medicine, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center
, professor, Department of Genomic Medicine, University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center Greg Brockman, co-founder and CTO, OpenAI
, co-founder and CTO, OpenAI Steve Chien, senior research scientist, Autonomous Space Systems and Technical Group supervisor, Artificial Intelligence Group, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology
While it is unclear how the experts were chosen—it should be noted, there are no women included—a source at Carnegie Mellon said that the invitation to Andrew Moore was motivated by his appearance on 60 Minutes.
While President Obama's grasp of AI, and understanding of its significance, has been generally praised by the AI community, some experts have questioned what might happen to AI when it comes to education, funding for scientific research, and the safe development of autonomous weapons under President-elect Trump. "The White House went to a lot of effort engaging with the AI community over the last year, understanding the issues, and produced an excellent report with some good recommendations," said Toby Walsh, AI professor at the University of South Wales. "It will be a great pity if this all turns into smoke."
SEE: AI experts weigh in on the White House approach to artificial intelligence (TechRepublic)
Still, he said, the hearing shows that "government is waking up to the considerable changes ahead as we move to a new economy powered by automation. These are challenging times. The Senate Committee will no doubt receive some very level headed advice from some of the most respected members of the AI community."
Vince Conitzer, professor of computer science at Duke University, agrees. "President Obama has taken AI very seriously, and it will be interesting to see the Senators' view on this, especially with both houses of Congress controlled by the Republican party," he said. "Given the themes that emerged in the recent election, I imagine the topic of AI taking over jobs will be especially prominent."
Stay tuned as TechRepublic continues to pursue the latest developments in the White House's plans for AI.
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Also seeA Bedford, N.S., has become only the third person in the country to donate blood and plasma 1,000 times to Canadian Blood Services.
Jim Lord, who visits the Canadian Blood Services clinic on Bayers Road in Halifax every week, said he's been donating blood since high school.
He's the first person in Atlantic Canada to reach the milestone.
"It's such a good feeling inward to donate blood. Some people are afraid of needles but it's not that traumatic an experience," Lord told CBC News.
"It's a very positive place to be, everybody's up and it's just a really good feeling to make that donation."
Deb Arsenault, a nurse at the clinic, said the 61-year-old man is an inspiration.
"We have a couple that are trying to get really close to him. There are actually a couple that are close," she said Tuesday.
"One donor said the other day, 'Well, I expected this ancient man to be walking in,' and he's not."
David Fletcher, who has donated blood about 280 times, said he's impressed by Lord's numbers and commitment.
"I think that donors come because they have a sense that they want to do something good for other people," he said.
"You need to commend people who are that dedicated and who can come in that often."
Lord said he's not stopping any time soon — he wants to donate 2,000 times, though he thinks he may be in his mid-80s by the time he reaches his goal.
"They have an award ceremony with the Canadian Blood Services once a year and at that ceremony they had testimonials of people — usually cancer patients or patients that require blood transfusions," he said.
"When you hear those testimonials, that's enough to keep anybody going."
Canadian Blood Services said it's hoping Lord's story will inspire more people to donate blood. They're aiming to get 450 new donors in Nova Scotia next month.Screenshot This is a not-so-great development...
From my perch at the crossroad s I've been watching the formation of several tribes materializing around some of the highest-flying cult stocks, predominantly within the tech sector. There is a Tesla Tribe and a Google Tribe and an Amazon Tribe and a Facebook Tribe and a Netflix Tribe and probably a handful of others right now.
Merrian-Webster defines the word 'tribe' as "a group of persons having a common character, occupation, or interest." This description would be a fairly apt one in terms of the way traders and "investors" seem to be rallying 'round their favorite ticker symbol's flag these days. The stories behind these stocks are becoming canonical to those who've made a lot of money with them. The valuation justifications for their share prices are requiring an increasing amount of ideological contortion with every ten percent rally.
"Don't bet against Elon Musk, if he can just capture 10% of the global auto market by 2018 and we can use a healthy discount rate on cashflow looking five years forward..."
Believing in the business plans and their eventual profitably has become something of an article of faith amongst the tribes. Questioning whether or not they will ever be profitable enough to justify the current enthusiasm is enough to get you voted off the island during the next earnings call / tribal council.
"Hasn't Jeff Bezos already proven himself over and over again?"
I'm seeing "Facebook People" squaring off against the "Google People" about which company has the better mobile strategy. The Musk-ites are tilting at the Page-ists, who are sneering at the Bezos-ians who are bristling at the idea that Reed Hastings isn't the most innovative in all the land. If Steve Jobs were still around, his acolytes would surely be engaged in this cult-of-personality jihad up to their elbows.
If you substituted a few of the proper nouns and names from these squabbles with those of professional athletes and sports franchises, they would almost be identical.
The thing to keep in mind is that this undying loyalty toward stocks that have rewarded their tribes so well is not a feature of a calm and orderly bull market. Tailgating before an quarterly earnings call is the kind of thing we typically see toward the latter stages of a bull market, not in the beginning phase or even the middle.
"Traditional valuation metrics have never been able to capture the competitive position that Netflix has built for itself!"
This is not to say that Facebook and Chipotle and Amazon and Buffalo Wild Wings are automatic sells - the key to remaining long these names is probably just an awareness of the phenomenon. It is essential that investors in these story stocks don't allow the narrative to possess their hearts and minds. Enthusiasm is good, but fandom can be a killer when it affects one's objectivity as new information emerges, good or bad.
Can you stick with the stock but stay out of the tribe?
Read Also:
My Edge and the Crossroads (TRB)© Reuters. FILE PHOTO - An eBay sign is seen at an office building in San Jose, California
By Jeffrey Dastin and Anya George Tharakan
(Reuters) - EBay Inc (O: ) reported a 3.1 percent rise in revenue for the fourth-quarter holiday period, offering signs of improvement at the company's traditional marketplace business and sending shares up more than 8 percent in extended trading on Wednesday.
EBay, once synonymous with online auctions, has been revamping its platform to help it compete better with Amazon.com Inc (O: ), the world's largest online retailer, as well as with brick-and-mortar sellers. That has meant a shift toward fixed-price sales and product landing pages, easier to navigate than the dozens of listings sellers could generate for a single good.
"It is a turnaround process for the company," said BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis.
Against a backdrop of dismal holiday sales from Macy's Inc (N: ) and Kohl's Corp (N: ), eBay met analysts' expectations for quarterly profit and revenue, as shoppers ordered more items online.
EBay, based in San Jose, California, forecast revenue would rise to $9.5 billion in 2017, versus analysts' average estimate of $9.36 billion, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.
"They are clearly confident about the way the business is trending," said Edward Jones Research analyst Josh Olson. "It's going to be a question of whether they can execute."
The guidance suggested that eBay's marketplace sales growth would accelerate, Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian said in a note.
The company's outlook was not entirely rosy.
EBay forecast first-quarter adjusted profit of 46 cents to 48 cents per share, below analysts' average estimate of 50 cents. Its forecast for full-year earnings of up to $2.03 per share also fell short.
"The various improvements the company is making are not, as of yet, generating significant traction with consumers," said Neil Saunders, managing director of retail research firm Conlumino. "They are really about correcting deficiencies rather than putting eBay on an innovative footing."
EBay's marketplace sales grew 4 percent in the fourth quarter, accounting for changes in currency exchange rates - well below the growth of e-commerce overall, analysts said.
"We are making progress. That progress will take time," Chief Executive Devin |
domes of the sky were fused into one hollow sphere, star-peopled, black, even beside the blinding sun. The young moon was a curve of incandescent wire. The completed hoop of the Milky Way encircled the universe. In a strange vertigo, I looked for reassurance at the little glowing windows of our home. There they still were; and the whole suburb, and the hills. But stars shone through all. It was as though all terrestrial things were made of glass, or of some more limpid, more ethereal vitreosity. Faintly the church clock chimed for midnight. Dimly, receding, it tolled the first stroke. Imagination was now stimulated to a new, strange mode of perception. Looking from star to star, I saw the heaven no longer as a jeweled ceiling and floor, but as depth beyond flashing depth of suns. And though for the most part the great and familiar lights of the sky stood forth as our near neighbors, some brilliant stars were seen to be in fact remote and mighty, while some dim lamps were visible only because they were so near. On every side the middle distance was crowded with swarms and streams of stars. But even these now seemed near; for the Milky Way had receded into an incomparably greater distance. And through gaps in its nearer parts appeared vista beyond vista of luminous mists, and deep perspectives of stellar populations. The universe in which fate had set me was no spangled chamber, but a perceived vortex of star-streams. No! It was more. Peering between the stars into the outer darkness, I saw also, as mere flecks and points of light, other such vortices, such galaxies, sparsely scattered in the void, depth beyond depth, so far afield that even the eye of imagination could find no limits to the cosmical, the all-embracing galaxy of galaxies. The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe. Gazing at the faintest and remotest of all the swarm of universes, I seemed, by hypertelescopic imagination, to see it as a population of suns; and near one of those suns was a planet, and on that planet's dark side a hill, and on that hill myself. For our astronomers assure us that in this boundless finitude which we call the cosmos the straight lines of light lead not to infinity but to their source. Then I remembered that, had my vision depended on physical light, and not on the light of imagination, the rays coming thus to me "round" the cosmos would have revealed, not myself, but events that had ceased long before the Earth, or perhaps even the Sun, was formed. But now, once more shunning these immensities, I looked again for the curtained windows of our home, which, though star-pierced, was still more real to me than all the galaxies. But our home had vanished, with the whole suburb, and the hills too, and the sea. The very ground on which I had been sitting was gone. Instead there lay far below me an insubstantial gloom. And I myself was seemingly disembodied, for I could neither see nor touch my own flesh. And when I willed to move my limbs, nothing happened. I had no limbs. The familiar inner perceptions of my body, and the headache which had oppressed me since morning, had given way to a vague lightness and exhilaration. When I realized fully the change that had come over me, I wondered if I had died, and was entering some wholly unexpected new existence. Such a banal possibility at first exasperated me. Then with sudden dismay I understood that if indeed I had died I should not return to my prized, concrete atom of community. The violence of my distress shocked me. But soon I comforted myself with the thought that after all I was probably not dead, but in some sort of trance, from which I might wake at any minute. I resolved, therefore, not to be unduly alarmed by this mysterious change. With scientific interest I would observe all that happened to me. I noticed that the obscurity which had taken the place of the ground was shrinking and condensing. The nether stars were no longer visible through it. Soon the earth below me was like a huge circular table-top, a broad disc of darkness surrounded by stars. I was apparently soaring away from my native planet at incredible speed. The sun, formerly visible to imagination in the nether heaven, was once more physically eclipsed by the Earth. Though by now I must have been hundreds of miles above the ground, I was not troubled by the absence of oxygen and atmospheric pressure. I experienced only an increasing exhilaration and a delightful effervescence of thought. The extraordinary brilliance of the stars excited me. For, whether through the absence of obscuring air, or through my own increased sensitivity, or both, the sky had taken on an unfamiliar aspect. Every star had seemingly flared up into higher magnitude. The heavens blazed. The major stars were like the headlights of a distant car. The Milky Way, no longer watered down with darkness, was an encircling, granular river of light. Presently, along the planet's eastern limb, now far below me, there appeared a faint line of luminosity; which, as I continued to soar, warmed here and there to orange and red. Evidently I was traveling not only upwards but eastwards, and swinging round into the day. Soon the sun leapt into view, devouring the huge crescent of dawn with its brilliance. But as I sped on, sun and planet were seen to drift apart, while the thread of dawn thickened into a misty breadth of sunlight. This increased, like a visibly waxing moon, till half the planet was illuminated. Between the areas of night and day, a belt of shade, warm-tinted, broad as a sub-continent, now marked the area of dawn. As I continued to rise and travel eastwards, I saw the lands swing westward along with the day, till I was over the Pacific and high noon. The Earth appeared now as a great bright orb hundreds of times larger than the full moon. In its center a dazzling patch of light was the sun's image reflected in the ocean. The planet's circumference was an indefinite breadth of luminous haze, fading into the surrounding blackness of space. Much of the northern hemisphere, tilted somewhat toward me, was an expanse of snow and cloud-tops. I could trace parts of the outlines of Japan and China, their vague browns and greens indenting the vague blues and grays of the ocean. Toward the equator, where the air was clearer, the ocean was dark. A little whirl of brilliant cloud was perhaps the upper surface of a hurricane. The Philippines and New Guinea were precisely mapped. Australia faded into the hazy southern limb. The spectacle before me was strangely moving. Personal anxiety was blotted out by wonder and admiration; for the sheer beauty of our planet surprised me. It was a huge pearl, set in spangled ebony. It was nacrous, it was an opal. No, it was far more lovely than any jewel. Its patterned coloring was more subtle, more ethereal. It displayed the delicacy and brilliance, the intricacy and harmony of a live thing. Strange that in my remoteness I seemed to feel, as never before, the vital presence of Earth as of a creature alive but tranced and obscurely yearning to wake. I reflected that not one of the visible features of this celestial and living gem revealed the presence of man. Displayed before me, though invisible, were some of the most congested centers of human population. There below me lay huge industrial regions, blackening the air with smoke. Yet all this thronging life and humanly momentous enterprise had made no mark whatever on the features of the planet. From this high look-out the Earth would have appeared no different before the dawn of man. No visiting angel, or explorer from another planet, could have guessed that this bland orb teemed with vermin, with world-mastering, self-torturing, incipiently angelic beasts. CHAPTER 2 INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL WHILE I was thus contemplating my native planet, I continued to soar through space. The Earth was visibly shrinking into the distance, and as I raced eastwards, it seemed to be rotating beneath me. All its features swung westwards, till presently sunset and the Mid-Atlantic appeared upon its eastern limb, and then the night. Within a few minutes, as it seemed to me, the planet had become an immense half-moon. Soon it was a misty, dwindling crescent, beside the sharp and minute crescent of its satellite. With amazement I realized that I must be traveling at a fantastic, a quite impossible rate. So rapid was my progress that I seemed to be passing through a constant hail of meteors. They were invisible till they were almost abreast of me; for they shone only by reflected sunlight, appearing for an instant only, as streaks of light, like lamps seen from an express train. Many of them I met in head-on collision, but they made no impression on me. One huge irregular bulk of rock, the size of a house, thoroughly terrified me. The illuminated mass swelled before my gaze, displayed for a fraction of a second a rough and lumpy surface, and then engulfed me. Or rather, I infer that it must have engulfed me; but so swift was my passage that I had no sooner seen it in the middle distance than I found myself already leaving it behind. Very soon the Earth was a mere star. I say soon, but my sense of the passage of time was now very confused. Minutes and hours, and perhaps even days, even weeks, were now indistinguishable. While I was still trying to collect myself, I found that I was already beyond the orbit of Mars, and rushing across the thoroughfare of the asteroids. Some of these tiny planets were now so near that they appeared as great stars streaming across the constellations. One or two revealed gibbous, then crescent forms before they faded behind me. Already Jupiter, far ahead of me, grew increasingly bright and shifted its position among the fixed stars. The great globe now appeared as a disc, which soon was larger than the shrinking sun. Its four major satellites were little pearls floating beside it. The planet's surface now appeared like streaky bacon, by reason of its cloud-zones. Clouds fogged its whole circumference. Now I drew abreast of it and passed it. Owing to the immense depth of its atmosphere, night and day merged into one another without assignable boundary. I noted here and there on its eastern and unilluminated hemisphere vague areas of ruddy light, which were perhaps the glow cast upwards through dense clouds by volcanic upheavals. In a few minutes, or perhaps years, Jupiter had become once more a star, and then was lost in the splendor of the diminished but still blazing sun. No other of the outer planets lay near my course, but I soon realized that I must be far beyond the limits of even Pluto's orbit. The sun was now merely the brightest of the stars, fading behind me. At last I had time for distress. Nothing now was visible but the starry sky. The Plough, Cassiopeia, Orion, the Pleiades, mocked me with their familiarity and their remoteness. The sun was now but one among the other bright stars. Nothing changed. Was I doomed to hang thus for ever out in space, a bodiless view-point? Had I died? Was this my punishment for a singularly ineffectual life? Was this the penalty of an inveterate will to remain detached from human affairs and passions and prejudices? In imagination I struggled back to my suburban hilltop. I saw our home. The door opened. A figure came out into the garden, lit by the hall light. She stood for a moment looking up and down the road, then went back into the house. But all this was imagination only. In actuality, there was nothing but the stars. After a while I noticed that the sun and all the stars in his neighborhood were ruddy. Those at the opposite pole of the heaven were of an icy blue. The explanation of this strange phenomenon flashed upon me. I was still traveling, and traveling so fast that light itself was not wholly indifferent to my passage. The overtaking undulations took long to catch me. They therefore affected me as slower pulsations than they normally were, and I saw them therefore as red. Those that met me on my headlong flight were congested and shortened, and were seen as blue. Very soon the heavens presented an extraordinary appearance, for all the stars directly behind me were now deep red, while those directly ahead were violet. Rubies lay behind me, amethysts ahead of me. Surrounding the ruby constellations there spread an area of topaz stars, and round the amethyst constellations an area of sapphires. Beside my course, on every side, the colors faded into the normal white of the sky's familiar diamonds. Since I was traveling almost in the plane of the galaxy, the hoop of the Milky Way, white on either hand, was violet ahead of me, red behind. Presently the stars immediately before and behind grew dim, then vanished, leaving two starless holes in the heaven, each hole surrounded by a zone of colored stars. Evidently I was still gathering speed. Light from the forward and the hinder stars now reached me in forms beyond the range of my human vision. As my speed increased, the two starless patches, before and behind, each with its colored fringe, continued to encroach upon the intervening zone of normal stars which lay abreast of me on every side. Amongst these I now detected movement. Through the effect of my own passage the nearer stars appeared to drift across the background of the stars at greater distance. This drifting accelerated, till, for an instant, the whole visible sky was streaked with flying stars. Then everything vanished. Presumably my speed was so great in relation to the stars that light from none of them could take normal effect on me. Though I was now perhaps traveling faster than light itself, I seemed to be floating at the bottom of a deep and stagnant well. The featureless darkness, the complete lack of all sensation, terrified me, if I may call "terror" the repugnance and foreboding which I now experienced without any of the bodily accompaniments of terror, without any sensation of trembling, sweating, gasping or palpitation. Forlornly, and with self-pity, I longed for home, longed to see once more the face that I knew best. With the mind's eye I could see her now, sitting by the fire sewing, a little furrow of anxiety between her brows. Was my body, I wondered, lying dead on the heather? Would they find it there in the morning? How would she confront this great change in her life? Certainly with a brave face; but she would suffer. But even while I was desperately rebelling against the dissolution of our treasured atom of community, I was aware that something within me, the essential spirit within me, willed very emphatically not to retreat but to press on with this amazing voyage. Not that my longing for the familiar human world could for a moment be counterbalanced by the mere craving for adventure. I was of too home-keeping a kind to seek serious danger and discomfort for their own sake. But timidity was overcome by a sense of the opportunity that fate was giving me, not only to explore the depths of the physical universe, but to discover what part life and mind were actually playing among the stars. A keen hunger now took possession of me, a hunger not for adventure but for insight into the significance of man, or of any manlike beings in the cosmos. This homely treasure of ours, this frank and spring-making daisy beside the arid track of modern life, impelled me to accept gladly my strange adventure; for might I not discover that the whole universe was no mere place of dust and ashes with here and there a stunted life, but actually beyond the parched terrestrial waste land, a world of flowers? Was man indeed, as he sometimes desired to be, the growing point of the cosmical spirit, in its temporal aspect at least? Or was he one of many million growing points? Or was mankind of no more importance in the universal view than rats in a cathedral? And again, was man's true function power, or wisdom, or love, or worship, or all of all these? Or was the idea of function, of purpose, meaningless in relation to the cosmos? These grave questions I would answer. Also I must learn to see a little more clearly and confront a little more rightly (so I put it to myself) that which, when we glimpse it at all, compels our worship. I now seemed to my self-important self to be no isolated individual, craving aggrandizement, but rather an emissary of mankind, no, an organ of exploration, a feeler, projected by the living human world to make contact with its fellows in space. At all cost I must go forward, even if my trivial earthly life must come to an untimely end, and my wife and children be left without me. I must go forward; and somehow, some day, even if after centuries of interstellar travel, I must return. When I look back on that phase of exaltation, now that I have indeed returned to earth after the most bewildering adventures, I am dismayed at the contrast between the spiritual treasure which I aspired to hand over to my fellow men and the paucity of my actual tribute. This failure was perhaps due to the fact that, though I did indeed accept the challenge of the adventure, I accepted it only with secret reservations. Fear and the longing for comfort, I now recognize, dimmed the brightness of my will. My resolution, so boldly formed, proved after all frail. My unsteady courage often gave place to yearnings for my native planet. Over and over again in the course of my travels I had a sense that, owing to my timid and pedestrian nature, I missed the most significant aspects of events. Of all that I experienced on my travels, only a fraction was clearly intelligible to me even at the time; and then, as I shall tell, my native powers were aided by beings of superhuman development. Now that I am once more on my native planet, and this aid is no longer available, I cannot recapture even so much of the deeper insight as I formerly attained. And so my record, which tells of the most far-reaching of all human explorations, turns out to be after all no more reliable than the rigmarole of any mind unhinged by the impact of experience beyond its comprehension. To return to my story. How long I spent in debate with myself I do not know, but soon after I had made my decision, the absolute darkness was pierced once more by the stars. I was apparently at rest, for stars were visible in every direction, and their color was normal. But a mysterious change had come over me. I soon discovered that, by merely willing to approach a star, I could set myself in motion toward it, and at such a speed that I must have traveled much faster than normal light. This, as I knew very well, was physically impossible. Scientists had assured me that motion faster than the speed of light was meaningless. I inferred that my motion must therefore be in some manner a mental, not a physical phenomenon, that I was enabled to take up successive viewpoints without physical means of locomotion. It seemed to me evident, too, that the light with which the stars were now revealed to me was not normal, physical light; for I noticed that my new and expeditious means of travel took no effect upon the visible colors of the stars. However fast I moved, they retained their diamond hues, though all were somewhat brighter and more tinted than in normal vision. No sooner had I made sure of my new power of locomotion than I began feverishly to use it. I told myself that I was embarking on a voyage of astronomical and metaphysical research; but already my craving for the Earth was distorting my purpose. It turned my attention unduly toward the search for planets, and especially for planets of the terrestrial type. At random I directed my course toward one of the brighter of the near stars. So rapid was my advance that certain lesser and still nearer luminaries streamed past me like meteors. I swung close to the great sun, insensitive to its heat. On its mottled surface, in spite of the pervading brilliance, I could see, with my miraculous vision, a group of huge dark sun-spots, each one a pit into which a dozen Earths could have been dropped. Round the star's limb the excrescences of the chromosphere looked like fiery trees and plumes and prehistoric monsters, atiptoe or awing, all on a globe too small for them. Beyond these the pale corona spread its films into the darkness. As I rounded the star in hyperbolic flight I searched anxiously for planets, but found none. I searched again, meticulously, tacking and veering near and far. In the wider orbits a small object like the earth might easily be overlooked. I found nothing but meteors and a few insubstantial comets. This was the more disappointing because the star seemed to be of much the same type as the familiar sun. Secretly I had hoped to discover not merely planets but actually the Earth. Once more I struck out into the ocean of space, heading for another near star. Once more I was disappointed. I approached yet another lonely furnace. This too was unattended by the minute grains that harbor life. I now hurried from star to star, a lost dog looking for its master. I rushed hither and thither, intent on finding a sun with planets, and among those planets my home. Star after star I searched, but far more I passed impatiently, recognizing at once that they were too large and tenuous and young to be Earth's luminary. Some were vague ruddy giants broader than the orbit of Jupiter; some, smaller and more definite, had the brilliance of a thousand suns, and their color was blue. I had been told that our Sun was of average type, but I now discovered many more of the great youngsters than of the shrunken, yellowish middle-aged. Seemingly I must have strayed into a region of late stellar condensation. I noticed, but only to avoid them, great clouds of dust, huge as constellations, eclipsing the star-streams; and tracts of palely glowing gas, shining sometimes by their own light, sometimes by the reflected light of stars. Often these nacrous cloud-continents had secreted within them a number of vague pearls of light, the embryos of future stars. I glanced heedlessly at many star-couples, trios, and quartets, in which more or less equal partners waltz in close union. Once, and once only, I came on one of those rare couples in which one partner is no bigger than a mere Earth, but massive as a whole great star, and very brilliant. Up and down this region of the galaxy I found here and there a dying star, somberly smoldering; and here and there the encrusted and extinguished dead. These I could not see till I was almost upon them, and then only dimly, by the reflected light of the whole heaven. I never approached nearer to them than I could help, for they were of no interest to me in my crazy yearning for the Earth. Moreover, they struck a chill into my mind, prophesying the universal death. I was comforted, however, to find that as yet there were so few of them. I found no planets. I knew well that the birth of planets was due to the close approach of two or more stars, and that such accidents must be very uncommon. I reminded myself that stars with planets must be as rare in the galaxy as gems among the grains of sand on the sea-shore. What chance had I of coming upon one? I began to lose heart. The appalling desert of darkness and barren fire, the huge emptiness so sparsely pricked with scintillations, the colossal futility of the whole universe, hideously oppressed me. And now, an added distress, my power of locomotion began to fail. Only with a great effort could I move at all among the stars, and then but slowly, and ever more slowly. Soon I should find myself pinned fast in space like a fly in a collection; but lonely, eternally alone. Yes, surely this was my special Hell. I pulled myself together. I reminded myself that even if this was to be my fate, it was no great matter. The Earth could very well do without me. And even if there was no other living world anywhere in the cosmos, still, the Earth itself had life, and might wake to far fuller life. And even though I had lost my native planet, still, that beloved world was real. Besides, my whole adventure was a miracle, and by continued miracle might I not stumble on some other Earth? I remembered that I had undertaken a high pilgrimage, and that I was man's emissary to the stars. With returning courage my power of locomotion returned. Evidently it depended on a vigorous and self-detached mentality. My recent mood of self-pity and earthward-yearning had hampered it. Resolving to explore a new region of the galaxy, where perhaps there would be more of the older stars and a greater hope of planets, I headed in the direction of a remote and populous cluster. From the faintness of the individual members of this vaguely speckled ball of light I guessed that it must be very far afield. On and on I traveled in the darkness. As I never turned aside to search, my course through the ocean of space never took me near enough to any star to reveal it as a disc. The lights of heaven streamed remotely past me like the lights of distant ships. After a voyage during which I lost all measure of time I found myself in a great desert, empty of stars, a gap between two star-streams, a cleft in the galaxy. The Milky Way surrounded me, and in all directions lay the normal dust of distant stars; but there were no considerable lights, save the thistle-down of the remote cluster which was my goal. This unfamiliar sky disturbed me with a sense of my increasing dissociation from my home. It was almost a comfort to note, beyond the furthest stars of our galaxy, the minute smudges that were alien galaxies, incomparably more distant than the deepest recesses of the Milky Way; and to be reminded that, in spite of all my headlong and miraculous traveling, I was still within my native galaxy, within the same little cell of the cosmos where she, my life's friend, still lived. I was surprised, by the way, that so many of the alien galaxies appeared to the naked eye, and that the largest was a pale, cloudy mark bigger than the moon in the terrestrial sky. By contrast with the remote galaxies, on whose appearance all my voyaging failed to make impression, the star-cluster ahead of me was now visibly expanding. Soon after I had crossed the great emptiness between the star-streams, my cluster confronted me as a huge cloud of brilliants. Presently I was passing through a more populous area, and then the cluster itself opened out ahead of me, covering the whole forward sky with its congested lights. As a ship approaching port encounters other craft, so I came upon and passed star after star. When I had penetrated into the heart of the cluster, I was in a region far more populous than any that I had explored. On every side the sky blazed with suns, many of which appeared far brighter than Venus in the Earth's sky. I felt the exhilaration of a traveler who, after an ocean crossing, enters harbors by night and finds himself surrounded by the lights of a metropolis. In this congested region, I told myself, many close approaches must have occurred, many planetary systems must have been formed. Once more I looked for middle-aged stars of the sun's type. All that I had passed hitherto were young giants, great as the whole solar system. After further searching I found a few likely stars, but none had planets. I found also many double and triple stars, describing their incalculable orbits; and great continents of gas, in which new stars were condensing. At last, at last I found a planetary system. With almost insupportable hope I circled among these worlds; but all were greater than Jupiter, and all were molten. Again I hurried from star to star. I must have visited thousands, but all in vain. Sick and lonely I fled out of the cluster. It dwindled behind me into a ball of down, sparkling with dew-drops. In front of me a great tract of darkness blotted out a section of the Milky Way and the neighboring area of stars, save for a few near lights which lay between me and the obscuring opacity. The billowy edges of this huge cloud of gas or dust were revealed by the glancing rays of bright stars beyond it. The sight moved me with self-pity; on so many nights at home had I seen the edges of dark clouds silvered just so by moonlight. But the cloud which now opposed me could have swallowed not merely whole worlds, not merely countless planetary systems, but whole constellations. Once more my courage failed me. Miserably I tried to shut out the immensities by closing my eyes. But I had neither eyes nor eyelids. I was a disembodied, wandering view-point. I tried to conjure up the little interior of my home, with the curtains drawn and the fire dancing. I tried to persuade myself that all this horror of darkness and distance and barren incandescence was a dream, that I was dozing by the fire, that at any moment I might wake, that she would reach over from her sewing and touch me and smile. But the stars still held me prisoner. Again, though with failing strength, I set about my search. And after I had wandered from star to star for a period that might have been days or years or aeons, luck or some guardian spirit directed me to a certain sun-like star; and looking outwards from this center, I caught sight of a little point of light, moving, with my movement, against the patterned sky. As I leapt toward it, I saw another, and another. Here was indeed a planetary system much like my own. So obsessed was I with human standards that I sought out at once the most earth-like of these worlds. And amazingly earth-like it appeared, as its disc swelled before me, or below me. Its atmosphere was evidently less dense than ours, for the outlines of unfamiliar continents and oceans were very plainly visible. As on the earth, the dark sea brilliantly reflected the sun's image. White cloud-tracts lay here and there over the seas and the lands, which, as on my own planet, were mottled green and brown. But even from this height I saw that the greens were more vivid and far more blue than terrestrial vegetation. I noted, also, that on this planet there was less ocean than land, and that the centers of the great continents were chiefly occupied by dazzling creamy-white deserts. CHAPTER 3 THE OTHER EARTH 1. ON THE OTHER EARTH AS I slowly descended toward the surface of the little planet, I found myself searching for a land which promised to be like England. But no sooner did I realize what I was doing than I reminded myself that conditions here would be entirely different from terrestrial conditions, and that it was very unlikely that I should find intelligent beings at all. If such beings existed, they would probably be quite incomprehensible to me. Perhaps they would be huge spiders or creeping jellies. How could I hope ever to make contact with such monsters? After circling about at random for some time over the filmy clouds and the forests, over the dappled plains and prairies and the dazzling stretches of desert, I selected a maritime country in the temperate zone, a brilliantly green peninsula. When I had descended almost to the ground, I was amazed at the verdure of the country-side. Here unmistakably was vegetation, similar to ours in essential character, but quite unfamiliar in detail. The fat, or even bulbous, leaves reminded me of our desert-flora, but here the stems were lean and wiry. Perhaps the most striking character of this vegetation was its color, which was a vivid blue-green, like the color of vineyards that have been treated with copper salts. I was to discover later that the plants of this world had indeed learnt to protect themselves by means of copper sulphate from the microbes and the insect-like pests which formerly devastated this rather dry planet. I skimmed over a brilliant prairie scattered with Prussian blue bushes. The sky also attained a depth of blue quite unknown on earth, save at great altitudes. There were a few low yet cirrus clouds, whose feathery character I took to be due to the tenuousness of the atmosphere. This was borne out by the fact that, though my descent had taken place in the forenoon of a summer's day, several stars managed to pierce the almost nocturnal sky. All exposed surfaces were very intensely illuminated. The shadows of the nearer bushes were nearly black. Some distant objects, rather like buildings, but probably mere rocks, appeared to be blocked out in ebony and snow. Altogether the landscape was one of unearthly and fantastical beauty. I glided with wingless flight over the surface of the planet, through glades, across tracts of fractured rock, along the banks of streams. Presently I came to a wide region covered by neat, parallel rows of fern-like plants, bearing masses of nuts on the lower surfaces of their leaves. It was almost impossible to believe that this vegetable regimentation had not been intelligently planned. Or could it after all be merely a natural phenomenon not known on my own planet? Such was my surprise that my power of locomotion, always subject to emotional interference, now began to fail me. I reeled in the air like a drunk man. Pulling myself together, I staggered on over the ranked crops toward a rather large object which lay some distance from me beside a strip of bare ground. Presently, to my amazement, my stupefaction, this object revealed itself as a plow. It was rather a queer instrument, but there was no mistaking the shape of the blade, which was rusty, and obviously made of iron. There were two iron handles, and chains for attachment to a beast of burden. It was difficult to believe that I was many light-years distant from England. Looking round, I saw an unmistakable cart track, and a bit of dirty ragged cloth hanging on a bush. Yet overhead was the unearthly sky, full noon with stars. I followed the lane through a little wood of queer bushes, whose large fat drooping leaves had cherry-like fruits along their edges. Suddenly, round a bend in the lane, I came upon a man. Or so at first he seemed to my astounded and star-weary sight. I should not have been so surprised by the strangely human character of this creature had I at this early stage understood the forces that controlled my adventure. Influences which I shall later describe doomed me to discover first such worlds as were most akin to my own. Meanwhile the reader may well conceive my amazement at this strange encounter. I had always supposed that man was a unique being. An inconceivably complex conjunction of circumstances had produced him, and it was not to be supposed that such conditions would be repeated anywhere in the universe. Yet here, on the very first globe to be explored, was an obvious peasant. Approaching him, I saw that he was not quite so like terrestrial man as he seemed at a distance; but he was a man for all that. Had God, then, peopled the whole universe with our kind? Did he perhaps in very truth make us in his image? It was incredible. To ask such questions proved that I had lost my mental balance. As I was a mere disembodied view-point, I was able to observe without being observed. I floated about him as he strode along the lane. He was an erect biped and in general plan definitely human. I had no means of judging his height, but he must have been approximately of normal terrestrial stature, or at least not smaller than a pigmy and not taller than a giant. He was of slender build. His legs were almost like a bird's, and enclosed in rough narrow trousers. Above the waist he was naked, displaying a disproportionately large thorax, shaggy with greenish hair. He had two short but powerful arms, and huge shoulder muscles. His skin was dark and ruddy, and dusted plentifully with bright green down. All his contours were uncouth, for the details of muscles, sinews and joints were very plainly different from our own. His neck was curiously long and supple. His head I can best describe by saying that most of the brain-pan, covered with a green thatch, seemed to have slipped backwards and downwards over the nape. His two very human eyes peered from under the eaves of hair. An oddly projecting, almost spout-like mouth made him look as though he were whistling. Between the eyes, and rather above them, was a pair of great equine nostrils which were constantly in motion. The bridge of the nose was represented by an elevation in the thatch, reaching from the nostrils backwards over the top of the head. There were no visible ears. I discovered later that the auditory organs opened into the nostrils. Clearly, although evolution on this Earth-like planet must have taken a course on the whole surprisingly like that which had produced my own kind, there must also have been many divergencies. The stranger wore not only boots but gloves, seemingly of tough leather. His boots were extremely short. I was to discover later that the feet of this race, the "Other Men," as I called them, were rather like the feet of an ostrich or a camel. The instep consisted of three great toes grown together. In place of the heel there was an additional broad, stumpy toe. The hands were without palms. Each was a bunch of three gristly fingers and a thumb. The aim of this book is not to tell of my own adventures but to give some idea of the worlds which I visited. I shall therefore not recount in detail how I established myself among the Other Men. Of myself it is enough to say a few words. When I had studied this agriculturalist for a while, I began to be strangely oppressed by his complete unawareness, of myself. With painful clearness I realized that the purpose of my pilgrimage was not merely scientific observation, but also the need to effect some kind of mental and spiritual traffic with other worlds, for mutual enrichment and community. How should I ever be able to achieve this end unless I could find |
a wide and balanced range of Halloween costumes that are inspired by, celebrate and appreciate numerous cultures, make believe themes and literary figures. Understanding certain sensitivities, we always strive to present our costumes in a responsible and respectful manner. While we respect the opinion of those who are opposed to the sale of any cultural or historical costumes, we are proud of our costume selection for men, women and children. We continue to offer this broad assortment of costumes in the future, while we maintain our commitment to our diverse customer base.
We have not directed any of our stores to remove Indigenous themed costumes from our shelves, nor do we plan to have these costumes removed.By Pete Harrison and Gerard Wynn
BRUSSELS/LONDON, Jan 22 (Reuters) - Rich nations could raise $200 billion in climate funds through a levy on their greenhouse gases from 2013-2020 to help poor countries prepare for global warming, the European Union will say next week.
The plan is set out in an EU paper outlining the bloc’s position ahead of U.N.-led climate talks in Copenhagen in December, meant to agree a new, global climate treaty.
The fund-raising idea is the most specific yet from any rich country or bloc on how to persuade developing nations to agree binding, concrete steps to slow their greenhouse gas emissions — one of the key obstacles in climate talks so far.
The draft paper to be published next week, and seen by Reuters, calls on rich countries to pay for developing countries to cut their greenhouse gases, called mitigation, and prepare for unavoidable warming, called adaptation. "All developed countries will need to contribute to financial resources for adaptation and mitigation in developing countries via public funding and the use of carbon crediting mechanisms," it said.
Rich countries should commit to binding limits on their greenhouse gas emissions through 2020. They could then pay a set price for every tonne of emissions, the paper said, under one of "two principal options to generate funding".
The other option would be to pay at rates per tonne on a global carbon market, and so not guarantee a price.
If widely agreed the plan could encourage the world’s top carbon emitter, China, to agree to internationally binding climate measures. That in turn could satisfy a general pre-condition made by the second biggest emitter, the United States, for signing up to a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
The United States did not ratify Kyoto because the pact contained no concrete commitments by developing countries, a position the new Obama administration is likely to maintain regarding a successor pact after 2012.
The EU paper said that if the main developed countries paid 1 euro per tonne of greenhouse gases in 2013 rising to 3 euros in 2020, that would raise 164 billion euros ($213 billion) over the period.
It called for a gradual phasing out of carbon offsetting, which allows rich nations to lay off their greenhouse gas emisisons by paying for cuts in developing countries.
The EU is the world’s biggest buyer of carbon offsets, and last month agreed climate targets which allowed EU states and companies to offset up to 3 billion tonnes of their greenhouse gas emissions from 2008-2020, or more than the annual emissions of the Netherlands.
Carbon offsetting allows developing countries, which at present face no binding climate targets, to earn money in return for curbing greenhouse gases.
The EU wants to phase out that option for "advanced developing countries", which the paper said should face binding caps instead. But it gave no timeline for the change.Immigrant women are at serious risk in the UK – Nathalie Greenfield considers how we can help
Last month, the case of Lola Ilesanmi made the national press, when the Prime Minister halted her and her daughter’s deportation to Nigeria. Ms Ilesanmi said that her daughter would face female genital mutilation (FGM) if they returned to Nigeria and Theresa May, speaking out against FGM, withdrew the refusal of Ms Ilesanmi’s Leave to Remain. The case has been referred to the Immigration Minister, Brandon Lewis, for review.
Ms Ilesanmi was in the UK on a joint visa with her husband, but fled her home with her small daughter because of the abuse she suffered there. She says she was beaten and forced to have an abortion because she refused to subject their daughter to FGM, a practice which tragically persists in the UK. It is estimated that 137,000 women and girls have been affected by FGM in England and Wales. Ms Ilesanmi’s husband is believed to have reported that they were estranged to Home Office officials, and the Home Office subsequently refused her leave to stay in the UK.
Ms Ilesanmi left her home to escape domestic abuse and found herself facing deportation. Her treatment raises important questions regarding the ability of women to speak out and seek help regarding abuse in the domestic sphere. How many women are tied to abusive partners under threat of deportation?
A recent study found that nearly half of women in Europe have experienced humiliation at the hands of a male partner
Globally, intimate partner violence at the hands of a male constitutes the most common form of violence against women and affects one in three women across the world. In the EU, it is the most widely reported form of gender-based violence: over one in five European women has experienced physical and/or sexual violence from a current or former male partner and in the UK, the numbers rise to one in four.
This abuse can take a variety of forms: physically harmful violence, with or without a sexual aspect, can accompany economic deprivation, psychological manipulation and emotional abuse. A recent study found that nearly half of women in Europe have experienced humiliation at the hands of a male partner, one in seven have had a partner threaten them with physical violence and one in twenty have had a partner forbid them to leave the house, take away their keys, or lock them up.
We know that many women stay with abusive partners and the reasons for this are myriad and complex. At the heart of an abusive relationship is an assertion of power and in the case of male violence against a female partner, this power imbalance is facilitated by continued gender inequality in political, economic and social spheres. Fear of a partner, normalising violence, low self-esteem, emotional manipulation, culturally-imposed gender roles, protecting a child and economic dependency are just some of the reasons that women cannot or do not leave abusive relationships (the domestic violence charity Refuge provides further information about this).
Women are vulnerable to threats of being reported to the UK Border Agency
Added to this list, as shown by Ms Ilesanmi’s case among others, is immigration status: if a victim of domestic violence is undocumented, or reliant on her partner for her or her children’s immigration status, she may well fear that reporting the abuse will affect her right to remain in the country – lack of confidence or ability in English can sometimes compound this situation. The above mentioned power dynamic at the root of male violence against women is only magnified by complete reliance on a partner for the very right or ability to be in the country. This puts such women at risk of extensive abuse.
The unique challenges that immigrant victims of violence face vary from woman to woman, but some of the more common forms of violence that these women are vulnerable to include economic abuse, such as being forced to work illegally, having to withstand threats of being reported to the UK Border Agency, deliberate isolation from friends and family members and withdrawal, or threats of withdrawal, of immigration papers filed for her residency. Deprivation of schooling or training at the hands of a partner, particularly to refuse English tuition, is another prevalent form of abuse faced by immigrant women in the UK.
The legal aid and advice often required can be exceptionally difficult for immigrant women to obtain
So what can be done? Existing political strategies rely on women’s ability to have recourse to public services and to seek help. The domestic violence rule of Indefinite Leave to Remain applications is one such example. This stipulates that a woman who is in the UK on a spousal or partner visa can apply to settle here if the relationship has broken down because of domestic violence. Unfortunately, the application holds a fee of £1051 unless a woman is entitled to public funding (also known as legal aid). Similarly, a woman can apply for Leave to Remain if her children are British citizens under article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights and if she meets linguistic and financial eligibility requirements.
The legal aid and advice often required to activate both of these processes can be exceptionally difficult for immigrant women to obtain. What is more, Lola Ilesanmi’s case shows that applications for Leave to Remain under the domestic violence rule can be refused. Recognising these challenges, the women’s charity Rights of Women provides free, confidential legal advice and information by specialist women lawyers to enable domestic violence survivors to understand and benefit from their legal rights. Evidently, the potential procedural, linguistic and financial barriers to gaining Leave to Remain can prevent immigrant women from being able to access safety, stability and justice.
One of the most important steps in addressing violence against women in immigrant communities is awareness of their particular vulnerabilities
Governmental actions continue in the same vein. Increasing refuge spaces, committing public funds to supporting domestic violence charities and ratifying the Istanbul Convention, though positive and sorely needed, do not necessarily aid those women who find it most difficult to access help. The specific needs of different survivor groups must be taken into account. Immigrants to the UK should be protected from jeopardising their legal status when they come into contact with public services, such as the health care system or the police.
It is important, therefore, that work is done to ensure that women are able to seek help. Empowering vulnerable women is essential to this mission and the work of NGOs and charities is particularly important in this domain. As the domestic violence charity PHOEBE notes, one of the most important steps in addressing violence against women in immigrant communities is awareness of their particular vulnerabilities. PHOEBE works to educate advocates on the needs of immigrant and refugee women and undertakes extensive work with immigrant groups to empower women to become leaders in their communities. Through the provision of tools, resources, and intervention strategies on domestic violence in immigrant communities, they aim to improve access to opportunity for these women. This Ipswich-based charity relies on volunteers to help with English tuition, youth work, fundraising, or individual project work, as well as on donations; more information can be found on their website.
The demonisation of immigrant populations in the media does little to facilitate an environment in which vulnerable populations can more easily access public services
Women for Refugee Women similarly works to empower immigrant communities. The London-based organisation helps women who have sought asylum in the UK to speak for themselves and organise. They support two grassroots groups in London (Women Asylum Seekers Together London and the London Refugee Women’s Forum), to which more than 70 women attend weekly for English classes, advice, arts projects and social events. Joining their mailing list to keep informed, organising an event to share the stories of the women with whom they work, or providing financial aid if feasible are all actions that can greatly support their work.
On a societal level, the stigmatisation of both immigrant communities and domestic violence victims contributes to the deprivation of protections and resources available to immigrant women. The demonisation of immigrant populations in the media (as exemplified by the Daily Mail on a regular basis), in addition to the Government’s less than favourable treatment of migrants (be they Middle Eastern asylum seekers or EU citizens), does little to facilitate an environment in which vulnerable populations can more easily access public services. Spreading awareness of the real narratives of immigrant communities and the realities of domestic violence can help to counter this. Women’s Aid’s campaigns aim to do exactly that and are easy to support, whether by signing petitions, sharing content on social media, or becoming a regional Women’s Aid Campaign Champion.
The case of Lola Ilesanmi highlights the particular challenges faced by immigrant survivors of domestic violence. Her case is under review, and she needs Leave to Remain in order to continue her life in the UK with her daughter, which her MP has described as “vital for the safety of Lola and her young family.” Let us hope that Ms Ilesanmi and her daughter can rebuild their lives in the UK free from harm, and let us continue to work towards a world where women – no matter their background – can be free from violence.
If you or someone you know may be experiencing abuse and is in of help, you can call the Freephone 24 Hour National Domestic Violence Helpline: 0808 2000 247
Image credit: Shared by Alisdare Hickson under a Creative Commons license.
Image description: A black and white image of a person in a hijab, looking forward with a neutral expression, holding a cardboard sign that says ‘How do you ban people from coming to a country you stole?’.
Nathalie currently works in women's policy, and has a background in the international not-for-profit sector. In her free time, Nathalie writes on topics relating to violence against women and women's rights, and works with media outlets to further conversations on sexual violence in the UK. @nath_greenfieldTo the Editor:
Re “Is Warfare in Our Bones?” (editorial, Jan. 24):
The military theorist B. H. Liddell Hart taught, “If you want peace, understand war.” The recent discovery of 10,000-year-old skeletons in northern Kenya, with every sign of being killed in battle, has revived the debate over the origins of warfare.
There is other archaeological evidence of humans killing humans, including Native Americans long before Europeans brought guns or horses to this continent. We are not only a violent animal, but also a uniquely violent animal.
Only a few mammalian species systematically and deliberately kill their own species. Bears don’t do this, tigers don’t, cats and dogs don’t, but chimpanzees, hyenas and — without any shadow of doubt — human beings do. It is a predisposition that evolved among these intelligent and highly social animals because the winning side gained more resources and, ultimately, more of their progeny survived — the basic metric of Darwinian evolution.
The good news is that we don’t have to live out our inherited predispositions of team aggression against our fellow human beings. While ISIS expresses the default behavior for much of human history, the huge majority of the 7.4 billion people in the world today are not killing their neighbors.Lonnie Thompson, senior research scientist at Ohio State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center, and his colleague Paolo Gabrielli, have just been awarded a three-year $588,000 grant from the NSF’s Division of Atmospheric and Geophysical Sciences “to assess the human impact on the chemical characteristics of the glaciers in the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau from the pre-industrial era to the present time”:
Gabrielli and Thompson will use an existing set of unique ice cores retrieved from Guliya (Western Tibetan plateau), Naimona’nyi and Dasuopu (Central Himalaya), Puruogangri and Dunde (Central and Northern Tibetean plateau, respectively) to analyze for a large suite of trace elements. These data will allow discrimination of the natural background components (e.g. crustal, volcanic constituents) from the anthropogenic components (e.g. fossil fuel combustion and non-ferrous metal production) of aerosol deposited to these glaciers over time. The spatial and temporal characterization of atmospheric pollution at high elevations in the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau is very much needed because recent studies suggest that atmospheric “brown clouds” deposition to the Himalayan glaciers may affect their energy balance, resulting in an acceleration of ablation. Knowledge of the initial quality of the meltwater, resulting from the ongoing shrinking of the glaciers in the Himalaya, is also important for planning the availability of water resources for millions of people who live downstream from these glaciers. Ultimately, this study will serve as a source of fundamental information for policy makers trying to mitigate the impact of trace metals in the environment.
See the press release for further details.
Under previous NSF grants, Thompson has collected a truly amazing amount of valuable data on ice cores. However, he has also been notoriously lax about providing definitive archived versions of his measurements. See, for example, IPCC and the Dunde Variations, Juckes, Yang, Thompson and PNAS: Guliya, Gleanings on Bona Churchill, and Mann on Irreproducible Results in Thompson (PNAS 2006).
Fortunately, since Jan. 2011, all NSF proposals must now include a Data Management Plan detailing how any data collected will be archived for public access, so that we can expect any findings under the new grant to be promptly archived. However, according to an NSF representative who recently spoke at OSU, this requirement merely formalizes a long-standing policy that the results of NSF research, including any “metadata” standing behind the bottom line results, must be made public so that others can use it and/or replicate the final results. Thompson is therefore still obligated to archive the results of his past NSF studies.
Perhaps just by coincidence, in the last 10 months Thompson has archived long-overdue data for Guliya on 2/08/12, for Dasuopu Core 3 on 6/16/11, and two cores from Puruogangri on 8/24/11, on NOAA’s paleoclimatic data website at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/trop/.
(Thompson also reloaded data for Quelccaya Core 1 on 1/13/12. However, it’s not clear whether this a revision of the original file dating back to 1997, or if it is just a new upload of the original file. )
Update: Steve has observed that the new Quelccaya file states right up front,
Note: This file was reformatted 13 January 2012 to provide column
separation between columns 4 and 5. No data values were changed.
The previous version of this file lacked separation between columns
4 and 5 (at AD 871 and at AD 615 through AD 617), potentially
causing errors reading the data.
Update 4/27
Per the request below by Kenneth Fritsch, Here are graphs of the data on 6 cores back to 1000AD that was used in Thompson’s 2003 Climatic Change article. The newly archived Puruogangri data was used in the PNAS 2006 7-core index that goes back to 0AD, but not in the CC index.
(Click on image for larger view.)
These graphs are from my paper “Posterior Confidence Intervals in Linear Calibration Problems: Calibrating the Thompson Ice Core Index,” which was discussed in my earlier CA post, “Calibrating ‘Dr. Thompson’s Thermometer'”.
Update 4/29:
Here are Ken’s plots of the new Puruogangri Core 1 and 2 data:
While Core 2 is rather flat, Core 1 shows a Current Warm Period, but also suggests a Medieval Cool Period, preceded by a Dark Ages Warm Period. It would have been useful if Thompson had provided a concordance of inferred age versus depth so that the dating assumptions could be reviewed.
Update 5/2
Ken has also plotted for comparison the data from Quelccaya Core 1 and Summit Core, as shown below:
The d18O readings from the two Quelccaya cores clearly tell a more coherent story than the two cores from Puruogangri shown above. Their average (as used in MBH99) would presumably have less noise than either series by itself (as in Thompson’s CC03 article).
Both cores also show the attenuation of noise before 1000 AD that characterizes Core 1. This leads me to suspect that the H2O molecules may be able to migrate slowly through the ice. In the later layers this doesn’t make much difference, but in the earlier layers, which are both thinner and have been around longer, it may be causing differences in d18O to average out, creating the appearance of flatter temperatures than really occurred.
Also, if H2O molecules can migrate slowly through ice, it would be interesting to know whether CO2 can also be absorbed from air bubbles into ice, given enough time. This would greatly distort estimates of atmospheric CO2 from ice core records if true.France is telling students that trans people are just ‘cross-dressers’ in its schools guidance on dealing with homophobia.
The pamphlets, issued by the Ministry of Education, is ‘hoping’ to give college and high school students and teachers the tools to fight back against discrimination against LGBTI individuals.
It has failed to make the grade, with one trans rights group calling it ‘transphobic’, ‘insulting’ and ‘ignorant’.
According to Association Nationale Transgenre (ANT), the 28-page document – ‘Fighting Against Homophobia: The Struggle For All And For All’ – contains little to no accurate facts about trans people.
The little trans-related content there is misrepresentative and misleading, and they want it withdrawn immediately. The document was put together by the Ministry of Education in collaboration with its ‘preferred partner’, Inter-LGBT.
The document begins with the suggestion a ‘trans person may be a transvestite (they have not changed their biological sex, but dress in clothes more usual to the opposite sex) or transsexual’.
The focus is immediately on cross-dressing, stating ‘there is currently no biological or psychological recognized basis for trans identity’, before going on to consider trans exclusively in terms of sexuality.
ANT has condemned the Ministry of Education’s use of the term ‘transsexual’, which is widely rejected by France’s trans community for linking trans identity to sexuality.
They also question the document’s obsession with ‘changing biological sex’. This reflects the French state’s requirement of compulsory surgical sterilization, before it will recognize the rights of trans individuals, and is a policy that has been denounced several times by the Commissioner for Human Rights of the Council of Europe.
ANT are also concerned at the lack of positive proposals for supporting trans persons within the education system: where, they ask, is any suggestion that schools and universities should put in place policies that respect trans identity? Even simple measures, such as allowing trans persons to use their preferred first name are ignored.
In consequence, ANT is demanding that the Ministry of Education recognize its own transphobia and take real action to support the rights of trans people.
That includes withdrawing this ‘insulting and destructive’ document with immediate effect, and replacing it with one that uses language that is not directly associated with trans-haters – and focusing less on pathologisation of trans people, more on practical steps that educational establishments can take to support them.
Delphine Ravisé-Giard, the president of the ANT, said: ‘The ANT is increasingly disturbed by the inaction of the government on transgender rights.
‘We ask the Ministry of Education to take all necessary measures to respect the gender identity of transgender students throughout their schools, to take all necessary measures to respect the gender identity of transgender teachers, and the outright withdrawal of this insulting, transphobic document.’This original and insightful study explores the points at which theater and propaganda meet. Defining propaganda as a form of "activated ideology," George H. Szanto discusses the distortion of information that occurs in dramatic literature in its stage, film, and television forms.
Szanto analyzes the nature of "integration propaganda," which is designed to render the audience passive and to encourage the acceptance of the status quo, as opposed to "agitation propaganda," which aims to inspire the audience to action. In Szanto's view, most popular western theater is saturated, though usually not intentionally, with integration propaganda. The overall purpose of Theater and Propaganda is twofold: to analyze the nature of integration propaganda so that it becomes visible to western readers as a tool of the dominant class in society, and to examine the manner by which unself-conscious propagandistic methods have saturated dramatic presentation.
In discussing the importance of propaganda within and between technological states, the author examines the seminal work of Jacques Ellul. In this chapter he analyzes the function of integration propaganda in a relatively stable society. The following chapter defines and analyzes three theaters (in the sense of performance) of propaganda: the theater of agitation propaganda, of integration propaganda, and of dialectical propaganda. In this section he uses examples from a variety of plays, movies, and television commercials. In succeeding chapters Szanto discusses the role of integration propaganda in the medieval Wakefield mystery plays and the plays of Samuel Beckett. The appendix, "Contradiction and Demystification," provides a general model that suggests ways of breaking down and overcoming the propagandistic intentions of an artwork and discusses theater's possible role in this breakdown.Tim Southee is fast rising up the sixes charts in Tests; if he maintains his current pace, he is on track to set new records
Tim Southee has hit 270 of his 876 Test runs from sixes © AFP
Tim Southee was handed his Test debut against England in 2008 in Napier and immediately responded with a haul of 5 for 55 before smashing 77 off 40 balls in the second innings. That innings included nine sixes, the most hit by a batsman on Test debut. The next highest in that list is Michael Clarke with four sixes during his dazzling 151 in Bangalore. In terms of six-hitting, there was no looking back for Southee.
While a batsman like Nathan Astle - who holds the record for the fastest double century in Tests, off 153 balls - has hit only 39 sixes during his 81-Test career, Tim Southee has already hit 45 sixes* from his 32 Tests. Even renowned batsmen like David Warner, Allan Border, Shane Watson, Ian Bell, Michael Clarke and Mark Waugh have all hit fewer sixes than Southee in Tests. In fact, no batsman apart from Shahid Afridi has played fewer than 50 Tests and hit more sixes than the New Zealand seamer.
Most sixes by players who have played 50 or less Tests Player Mat Inns Runs Ave 50+ 6s Shahid Afridi 27 48 1716 36.51 13 52 TG Southee 32 51 876 19.46 2 45 Misbah-ul-Haq 46 80 3218 48.75 30 35 Mohammad Rafique 33 63 1059 18.57 5 34 DJG Sammy 38 63 1323 21.68 6 34
In the list of players who have hit the most number of sixes while batting at No. 8 or below, only Wasim Akram has hit more sixes. However, Akram's 50 sixes came from 110 innings, while Southee has played only 51 innings till date.
Most sixes hit by players batting at number eight or below in Tests Player Mat Inns Runs Ave 50+ 6s Wasim Akram 87 110 2160 22.26 8 50 TG Southee 32 51 876 19.46 2 45 Harbhajan Singh 101 140 2182 18.49 11 42 MA Holding 59 72 879 14.17 6 36 Sk Warne 141 186 3008 17.79 11 36
Among his countrymen, Southee is already among the top five six-hitters of all time, with all those above him having played a significantly higher number of Tests. Players such as Richard Hadlee, Martin Crowe, Ross Taylor and Jacob Oram have all hit fewer sixes than Southee. At his current rate, it won't be too long before Southee finds himself at the top of this list.
Most sixes hit by New Zealanders in Tests
Player Mat Inns Runs Ave 50+ 6s CL Cairns
62
104
3320
33.53
27
87 BB McCullum 85 146 5226 37.86 37 68 CD McMillan 55
91
3116
38.46
25
54
TG Southee 32
51
876
19.46
2
45
NJ Astle
81
137
4702
37.02
35
39
Southee has faced 994 balls in Test cricket and hit 45 of those for six, which essentially means that he hits a six every 22 balls or so. Post 2000 (consistent balls-faced data is not available prior to that), no player who has faced at least 500 balls in Test cricket hit sixes as frequently as Southee. Shahid Afridi, who hits a six every 32 balls, is the next best.
Balls-per-six ratio for batsmen since 2000 (min. 500 balls) Player Mat Inns Runs Ave Balls 50+ 6s Balls/6 TG Southee 32 51 876 19.46 994 2 45 22.09 Shahid Afridi 21 37 1362 37.83 1461 11 45 32.47 CL Cairns 18 30 1265 45.17 1717 8 42 40.88 M Muralitharan
85 102 780 10.98 1029 1 25 41.16 Mohammad Rafique 33 63 1059 18.57 1630 5 34 47.94
Southee has scored a 876 runs in Tests and has hit 45 sixes, which means that around 30% of his career runs have come in sixes. Among players who have scored at least 500 runs in Test cricket, Southee has hit the largest percentage of his runs in sixes.
Highest % of career Test runs scored in sixes (min. 500 career runs) Player Mat Inns Runs Ave 50+ 6s Percentage of runs in sixes TG Southee 32 51 876 19.46 2 45 30.82 Shoaib Akhtar 46 67 544 10.07 0 22 24.26 MA Holding 60 76 910 13.78 6 36 23.74 Umar Gul 47 67 577 9.94 1 20 20.80 Mohammad Rafique 33 63 1059 18.57 5 34 19.26
The top five six-hitters of all time are Adam Gilchrist, Jacques Kallis, Virender Sehwag, Chris Gayle and Brian Lara. By the time Lara had hit his 45th six, he had already scored almost 8000 Test runs. Southee on the other hand has scored less than 1000. Below is a table showing what stage of their career the top five six-hitters were at when they hit their 45th six.
Career records of the top five six hitters when they hit their 45th six (end of game) Rank Career sixes Player Inns Runs Ave 100 50 6s 1 100 AC Gilchrist 64 3073 60.25 9 16 45 2 97 JH Kallis 145 6689 54.82 19 34 45 3 91 V Sehwag 92 4760 53.48 14 13 49 4 90 CH Gayle 134 5109 39.60 8 30 47 5 88 BC Lara 161 7921 50.45 20 38 47 35 45 TG Southee 51 876 19.46 0 2 45
Adam Gilchrist, who holds the record for the most sixes in Tests, hit 100 sixes from 137 innings. If Tim Southee were to continue hitting sixes at his current rate, he would hit 121 sixes by the time he played 137 Test innings, making him the greatest six-hitter of all time.
* Stats are as at the end of the first innings, West Indies v New Zealand at Kingston, 1st Test, Jun 8-12, 2014
Bishen Jeswant is a stats sub editor at ESPNcricinfo. He tweets here.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.Netflix already announced release dates for a slew of new shows today, but it's not stopping there: the company has acquired worldwide distribution rights to the newest film from the director of True Detective. Written and directed by Cary Fukunaga, the project tells the story of a young boy that's made to join a group of soldiers in West Africa. Netflix reportedly paid nearly $12 million to snap up the film, which stars Idris Elba (Luther, Pacific Rim). According to Deadline, the film will be streamed worldwide on Netflix, but will also be released theatrically, with an eye towards promoting the film heavily for awards consideration.
It's just the latest movie Reed Hastings' streaming giant has made into a theatrical motion picture over the past several months. Last year the company announced that it would be putting out a sequel to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon as a combination Netflix and IMAX release, but exhibitors quickly protested at the notion of undercutting the traditional theatrical window with a simultaneous release. The furor didn't cause Netflix to miss a step, however. In January, the company signed a deal with Mark and Jay Duplass for four new Netflix films that would also receive theatrical distribution; a month later it picked up a new film starring Fifty Shades of Grey star Jamie Dornan, and a week after that came word that the company would be producing a new sequel to Pee-wee's Big Adventure.
Netflix is playing the long game to wear down theater chains
Netflix appears to be very aware of the pushback it will face from theater chains and is building out its theatrical strategy accordingly. The films it has stated it will release in theaters thus far are niche, awards-friendly films that will be extremely attractive to small, independent movie theatre chains — the same kind of theaters that haven't been dissuaded by day-and-date releases the way that that larger chains like AMC have been. And while Netflix is jumping in to produce broader, more mainstream fare like the Pee-wee sequel and several upcoming Adam Sandler movies, those films have been primarily earmarked as projects that will skip theaters altogether and go straight online. Should Netflix's original films end up being as consistently good as its series have been, it could put larger theater chains in an unfortunate bind come awards season: decide to play ball with the company's strategy, or miss out on the movie's everybody is talking about.The Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has announced that it is back in business checking out the new habitable exoplanets recently discovered by NASA's Kepler space telescope to see if they might be home to alien civilisations. The cash needed to restart SETI's efforts has come in part from the US Air Force Space Command, who are interested in using the organisation's detection instruments for "space situational awareness".
"This is a superb opportunity for SETI observations," said Jill Tarter, the Director of the Center for SETI Research, in a statement issued yesterday. "For the first time, we can point our telescopes at stars, and know that those stars actually host planetary systems - including at least one that begins to approximate an Earth analog in the habitable zone around its host star. That's the type of world that might be home to a civilization capable of building radio transmitters."
NASA has just announced the discovery of many exoplanets orbiting other stars by its Kepler spacecraft, inclusing the world Kepler-22b - described as Earth's "twin" by the space agency - which orbits a Sun-like G type star some 600 lightyears away at such a distance that it could well have liquid water on its surface and thus be home to life along Earthly lines.
Intriguingly, SETI notes that its resurgence and new mission of examining the Kepler-discovered planetary systems is partially funded by the US military:
The restart of SETI work at the ATA has been made possible thanks to the interest and generosity of the public who supported SETI research via the http://www.SETIStars.org website. Additional funds necessary for observatory re-activation and operations are being provided by the United States Air Force as part of a formal assessment of the instrument's utility for Space Situational Awareness...
Could it be that the Pentagon are doing something useful for once and making sure that if there are any potentially hostile alien civilisations out there, they'll find out early on?
Well no, sadly for those who like their aliens. In fact Space Command are much more concerned about tracking satellites in orbit around Earth, and consider that the innovative Allen Array could be handy in picking up transmissions from spacecraft so as to help the existing military Space Surveillance Network keep a handle on where they are.
Even so, should SETI detect signs of radio-using life at any of the newly pinpointed potentially habitable star systems, Space Command will probably be very glad they helped to fund the Institute's restart. ®At the heart of the problem is Europe’s unwillingness more than a decade ago to choose either unification or separation. It wanted economic unification and continued political independence of nation states.
In short, it wanted the best of both worlds, and for a time it seemed to have succeeded in that goal. The success amazed many economists, most of them from Britain and the United States, who had argued that a single currency would require much more political unification.
There remains a widespread view that the fringe countries can count on their more prosperous neighbors for a bailout if one is necessary.
But such a bailout, if it comes, will raise the question of terms. How much political sovereignty will the bailed-out countries be forced to surrender? Will they be forced to cut spending, or raise taxes, more than the local voters are willing to accept? Will the rest of Europe force major changes in government pension plans, or the firing of state workers? How can they do that, even if they wish to do so, if national Parliaments will not concur?
There would also be political questions within the core. Many West Germans were appalled by the cost of national unification when East Germany merged into the current German state. If they did not like subsidizing people who in some cases were their cousins, how will they like subsidizing Greeks or Portuguese?
Perhaps of more importance, how can the troubled economies regain competitiveness within Europe? Before the use of the euro, when Europe tried to maintain exchange rate stability but kept separate currencies, there were periodic sharp devaluations of some currencies, most notably the Italian lira. That made those countries competitive again, for a time.
Europe’s Growth and Stability Pact, which sets the rules for euro membership, limits the size of budget deficits. It was supposed to prevent such problems. But it was largely toothless, especially after Germany and France found it convenient to violate its terms when it suited their economic needs.
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Political union would not cure the underlying economic problems, but it would make it easier for a European government to provide assistance to ailing areas |
block scale, and can make several rows of the stage fall away. The player will then have to face the same set of cubes again (except if the puzzle is the last set on the wave).
Bonuses [ edit ]
After each set of blocks is destroyed, if the player did so without destroying any forbidden cubes and cleared all normal and advantage cubes then they are rewarded a bonus for perfection, and an additional row is added to the end of the stage (thereby increasing the number of rows the cubes have to travel to fall off the end of the stage). This is accompanied by a booming "Perfect!" from the game's announcer. Solving puzzles perfectly becomes increasingly important as the game progresses because later puzzles require more rolls, and hence more rows of running space, to complete successfully.
The perfection bonus takes into account how many cube rolls it took to clear all the cubes. From the time the first cube is cleared until the time the last cube is cleared, the counter increments. The immediate consequence of this is that one can mark a spot on the stage and wait to clear it until several rows of cubes roll over top of it. An initial number of rolls is set as being an ideal number to clear. If the player clears the cubes in exactly this number of rolls (Perfect in Kurushi Final), they are given a "Brilliant" bonus of 5,000 points. If the player clears the cubes in more than this number of rolls (Great in Kurushi Final), they are given a bonus of 1,000 points. If the player clears the cubes in fewer number of rolls (Excellent in Kurushi Final), they are given a "True Genius" bonus of 10,000 points.
Scoring [ edit ]
Clearing an individual cube is worth 100 points. Cubes cleared while an advantage cube is being detonated are worth 200 points each, regardless of if they are being cleared by the player or the advantage cube. At the end of each level, the number of the rows left on the stage is multiplied by 1,000 and added to the score—this score typically has a maximum of 40,000 (Except for the 1st, 3rd and Final Stages, their maximum scores are 27000, 39000 and 29000 respectively).
When the game is over, either by finishing all the levels or by falling off the stage, the total score is displayed, as well as an I.Q. This I.Q (a play on the term "intelligence quotient") is ostensibly the player's efficiency in clearing cubes, on a scale of 0 to 999 (for instance, beating the game without using a continue gives you an I.Q of at least 350); however, it is simply a percentage of the score.[2] Total scores for a well-played game without the use of continues are in the order of 1 million points. If the player falls of the stage, the player's progress of the game is displayed and at the same time will be asked if he or she will continue playing.
By beating the game multiple times, additional characters that move faster than the default character, are unlocked. Characters include Eliot (the default), Cynthia (Cherry in Kurushi), and Spike the dog. Each complete play through of the game takes approximately two hours at Level 0 speed, or about 75 minutes at Level 4 speed. Also, by beating the game once, players can unlock the Original Mode where a player can create their own puzzles. However, IQ and roll counters are not calculated.
Kurushi Final [ edit ]
In 1999, a sequel to I.Q.: Intelligent Qube was released known as Kurushi Final: Mental Blocks. The game play is similar to the first game, but there are several differences in terms of design, and new challenges are added such as 100 Attack, Survival Mode, and Create. In this game, the new default character is Abel. Unlike the first game, there are different unlockable characters in the game, including the original characters from I.Q.: Intelligent Qube. New unlockables include Kimti (a cave man), April (a nurse), Morgan (a military man), Dickson (a basketball player), and Atlas (a polar bear).
Kurushi Final [ edit ]
This is the normal game mode of the titular game. However, by beating the game with an IQ of 500 or above, the player unlocks Tektonics. If the player gets a game over, instead of asking to continue playing, the game allows the player to select a stage from the first up to the farthest stage where the player dies.
Tektonics [ edit ]
As mentioned above, the Tektonics is an extra mini-game unlocked after beating the game with an IQ above 500. This mode tests your skills in Kurushi. This is a game mode where the player must face a huge puzzle which lasts for only one set in 20 waves.
100 Attack [ edit ]
A game mode where a player faces 100 singular puzzles with the aim of clearing them within a set number of rotations.
Survival Mode [ edit ]
Similar to the normal game play. However, the game has no end. The player must survive as long as he can to unlock several characters.
Create [ edit ]
Similar to the Original Mode of the original IQ (see above) the only difference is that the total number of rotations are calculated.
Development [ edit ]
I.Q.: Intelligent Qube was designed by Masahiko Sato, a professor at the Tokyo University of the Arts.[3] Reviewers often remark on Takayuki Hattori's soundtrack, which opts for an eerie orchestral score rather than a typical 'bouncy' puzzle game fare. It was released by Sony Music under the title IQ Final Perfect Music File on January 21, 1999.[4]
Reception and legacy [ edit ]
According to Media Create sales data, I.Q.: Intelligent Qube was a financial success in Japan, having sold 500,000 copies by June 1997 and nearly 750,000 copies by the end of 1997.[5][6] The game currently has an aggregate score of 72% on GameRankings.[7]
A few sequels were made including I.Q. Final (Kurushi Final: Mental Blocks in Europe) for the Sony PlayStation and I. Q. Remix+: Intelligent Qube for the PlayStation 2.[8][9] In 2006, I.Q. Mania for the PlayStation Portable, which contains puzzles from all three previously released Intelligent Qube games, was released in Japan.[10]
I.Q.: Intelligent Qube was re-released on PlayStation Network in Japan and Europe.[11][12] Another mobile phone incarnation was announced by Upstart Games in 2005, but it is unknown if it was ever released.[13] I.Q.: Intelligent Qube is one of twenty games included on Sony's PlayStation Classic.[14]
See also [ edit ]Pakistan has summoned the US ambassador to protest the drone strike that killed Tehreek-e-Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud, describing the killing as a US bid to derail planned peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban.
The country's Foreign Office said in a statement on Saturday that the strike was "counter-productive to Pakistan's efforts to bring peace and stability to Pakistan and the region".
The interior minister echoed that sentiment and said that the drone strike was a "murder of peace".
"The government of Pakistan does not see this strike as a strike on an individual, but on the peace process," Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar told Pakistan's Express-Tribune newspaper.
Nisar accused the US of double-crossing Pakistan after the US ambassador to Islamabad assured him that the US would support a dialogue that Pakistan had initiated with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP).
The US ambassador had also assured Islamabad that there would be no attacks on Pakistani territory, before Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif visited Washington for talks last month, said Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder.
"This is definitely causing considerable anger," our correspondent reported from Islamabad, adding that Imran Khan, the leader of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) party that rules the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province along the Afghan border, had vowed on Monday to stop NATO supplies from going through the territory into Afghanistan.
Peace talks
Mehsud's death on Friday came at a crucial moment in Pakistan's efforts to end the group's bloody six-year insurgency that has left thousands of soldiers, police and civilians dead.
Sharif had been expected to send a delegation to open contacts with the group, after winning backing for dialogue from political parties last month.
The government said on Saturday that it was determined to pursue talks with the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan. The TTP had appeared ambivalent on the issue, saying that they were open to dialogue but would not back down from certain demands, including not laying down arms.
Pakistani Taliban fighters secretly buried their leader on Saturday and quickly moved to replace him while vowing a wave of revenge suicide bombings.
"Every drop of Hakimullah's blood will turn into a suicide bomber," said Azam Tariq, a Pakistani Taliban spokesman.
"America and their friends shouldn't be happy because we will take revenge for our martyr's blood."
Security forces were put on red alert after the attack just outside Miranshah, the capital of North Waziristan province, bordering Afghanistan.
Al Jazeera's Kamal Hyder said that there were very few people on the streets because there were apprehensions of a wave of punitive reprisal attacks by the TTP.
"Security forces had beefed up their positions in all the major cities - and in some areas, the military has taken over the post from the police, while the Pakistani public in general are bracing for a fresh wave of attacks," said Hyder.
Also on Saturday, the Shura, or consultative body of the TTP, appointed Khan Said as the new of head of the Pakistani Taliban after Mehsud's death.
Said, also known as "Sajna", was previously responsible for TTP operations in South Waziristan, and a trusted lieutenant of Mehsud.
The Pakistani Taliban was behind some of the most high-profile attacks in Pakistan in recent years, including the 2008 bombing of the Islamabad Marriott hotel, several attacks against major Pakistani military installations and the attempt to kill schoolgirl activist Malala Yousafzai last year.Founding a site from your tiny apartment in 2005 and watching it grow to 2 billion page views per month would give most people an utter sense of completion, but not Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. He talks exclusively to Gizmodo about the future of the platform, why it won't go the way of the Digg dinosaur and the state of the free and open internet.
Previously On...
Alexis Ohanian is busy. When you email him to confirm an interview, you get an automatic reply saying that he's head down on his book and might not be able to reply straight away. He's probably busy writing it as you read this, if he's not working on a venture, donating his time to charitable causes or founding another incredible start-up. Despite all his exploits, he still has time to sit on the newly spun-off board of Reddit — the social news site he created in 2005 that has now become the de facto front page of the internet.
You may not have heard of Alexis before, but you've definitely seen his work. Whether it's through a link shared on a social network or a story pointing to it on this site, you've certainly seen references to Reddit even if you haven't used it actively. He co-founded it in 2005 with his friend and college roommate Steve Huffman and it was acquired by Condé Nast around a year later for an undisclosed sum.
Since Reddit, Alexis has gone on to do amazing online charity work, founding the "uncorporation" known as Breadpig that sold geeky stuff and gave the proceeds to charity and working as a venture funding guy for micro-finance site Kiva. In 2010 he helped launch an online travel search engine known as Hipmunk, all the while being an evangelist, investor and advisor for technology start-ups.
Like I said, Alexis is a busy guy.
The Future Of Reddit
I spoke to Alexis via Skype where he was kind enough to take half an hour out of his day to talk all things internet. (BTW: if you have to have an important conversation, don't have it on Skype. Use Google Plus instead.)
While Alexis officially left Reddit in a full-time capacity in 2010, the man still contributes at a board level as an advisor now that Condé Nast has spun the site off as a subsidiary.
"I never left the mailing lists and when I got back to the States I was still trying to be helpful in an informal advisory role and as the months continued to go on, I knew that I wanted to keep helping because Reddit has always been a very big part of my life, and I had the opportunity now...a year ago almost...as Reddit was being spun off as an independent company...as Reddit Incorporated again [I joined] the board of that new company," he tells me.
It's not a full time role, though. That would get in the way of all the other stuff he has on. But on a daily basis, he sees the emails that bounce around between members of the team that run the front page of the internet.
Reading those emails everyday puts a smile on Alexis' dial, simply because he notices that the current gatekeepers are making the same decisions he would have made with Steve if they still owned the site.
But that's not enough, he tells us. Reddit still needs to evolve.
Evolve.
Hearing anyone say the word evolve should be fine; it means that a product or service is taking on the advice they have received previously from users and reviewers and incorporating it to make the user experience better. The problem with evolving online communities, however, is that you have to add new things in without driving away all the users that currently make your site special. A social network is only as good as its users, after all.
Just ask Digg founder Kevin Rose what an evolved design meant to attract new users did for the social network (hint: it was recently sold for a pittance), or ask Rob Malda, co-founder of Slashdot, about his biggest regrets with the site. They all stem back to not respecting the community during an evolutionary stage.
So when I heard that Reddit is trying to change stuff to better cater to new users, I started getting that sick feeling that we are nearing the end of a great thing.
What's Coming?
Reddit works right now by having a front page dedicated to the best content currently being shared, discussed and viewed on the network. That content gets there by a mix of views and user votes, known as upvotes.
Beyond the front page, though, lays a teeming mass of niche communities known as sub-reddits. If there's a topic you're interested in, Alexis explains, there's a sub-reddit for it.
"[Reddit's success lies in that fact that] it is not one community. Steve and I...debated this a month into Reddit. The first iteration of the site did not have sub-reddits. It was one front page to be as simple as possible."
Much like a blog, Alexis wanted to add tags so that users could quickly fill out categories on the site. For example, someone could submit a story about Syria, and tag it with "World News" and "Global Politics". The idea to create distinct communities, or sub-reddits, was Steve's idea, and Alexis freely admits that at the time, neither of them realised just how popular the idea for identifiable communities would be.
"I'm happy he won [that] debate," Alexis says, enjoying the benefit of hindsight.
Sub-reddits are the key to Reddit's success: where other sites are fighting to grow one community, Reddit organically grew itself hundreds, even thousands, of different communities.
But the success of the niche communities is a double-edged sword for Alexis and the team, because right now, Alexis tells us, that there needs to be a change in the user experience.
"We can do this better," he starts off confidently.
"First and foremost, we want to be good to our users on Reddit, that's why there are no annoying ads, that's why we always make sure everything loads fast and that there's a high density of information, but we need to do a better job onboarding new users."
"Onboarding new users"? What does that even mean? Well, according to Alexis, it's about greater accessibility for new users. Reddit's ability to retain new users will depend on making it as simple to use as Twitter, Alexis explains.
"A new user comes to Reddit and realises that she can customise the front page, subscribe to sub-reddits much like they would subscribe and unsubscribe from new followers on Twitter. We have not..." he pauses, then continues: "a lot of this is on me for not articulating it well over the years, we need to make it clear that...there is a Reddit for you if you just like talking to Corgi owners, and you can also use Reddit if all you want to talk about is the New York Yankees. Twitter have actually done a great job of articulating this. Their platform can easily be used for fans of Kim Kardashian, or for people who just want to follow the tweets of the President of the United States. They're not mutually exclusive, but they just operate [well] on the same platform."
"We don't articulate this well for users; for example, there are redditors who don't even know that they can customise their frontpage by subscribing and unsubscribing from sub-reddits. We just haven't done a good enough job exposing them."
Alexis has sat in on conversations with senior staff who, he admits, are far better decision-makers than he is, and he's confident that this change can be executed without jeopardising the trust or experience of existing users. As a matter of fact, the site experienced its greatest success when Alexis and Steve stepped back from the platform and let the team do their jobs. Each and every one of them lives and breathes Reddit, and they're not about to screw up on the job, explains Alexis.
"The spirit of Reddit hasn't changed since Steve and I founded it back in that little apartment in 2005," he says.
Our interview spiralled off into a deep conversation about the effect of lobbyists on internet legislation and the state of the internet right now and we'll cover those next week.
For now though, what do you think of Reddit's accessibility changes? Is it going to piss off existing users or is the new audience going to offset the backlash?RayBeans Profile Joined July 2011 Germany 329 Posts Last Edited: 2012-09-13 23:09:15 #1
We are proud to present another Barcraft in Aachen @ cafe & bar zuhause.
For the first time ever we are organizing a barcraft for the whole weekend, so you don't have to miss any of the action
Come over and cheer for your favorite european player, be it Socke, Stephano, JonnyREcco or anyone else, the list of good players is incredible long!
Here are all the facts:
Date: Saturday, Sep 15 6:00pm GMT (GMT+00:00) (15.09.2012 16:30 Uhr )
Sunday, Sep 16 5:30pm GMT (GMT+00:00) (16.09.2012 18:00 Uhr )
(15.09.2012 16:30 Uhr ) (16.09.2012 18:00 Uhr ) Event shown: WCS Europe Finals (http://wiki.teamliquid.net/starcraft2/2012_StarCraft_II_World_Championship_Series/Europe/Finals)
Location: café & Bar Zuhause, Sandkaulstraße 109/111 52062 Aachen http://www.zuhause-aachen.de
age: 18+
Specials: Sc2 Cocktails, raffles, bets
Facebook events:
Day 1:
Day 2:
more information soon!
Follow us on
We are proud to present another Barcraft in Aachen @ cafe & bar zuhause.For the first time ever we are organizing a barcraft for the whole weekend, so you don't have to miss any of the actionCome over and cheer for your favorite european player, be it Socke, Stephano, JonnyREcco or anyone else, the list of good players is incredible long!Here are all the facts:Facebook events:Day 1: https://www.facebook.com/events/273756892724426/ Day 2: https://www.facebook.com/events/523315884350912/ more information soon!Follow us on Facebook Twitter or our blog eSports with friends & HSV esports e.V. - Hamburg!Advertised in 1938 for $3.95, this ring engraved with the wearer's Social Security number and personalized with a birthstone was meant to help people remember their number without having to rely on an easily-lost card. S.A. Meyer Co., Washington, PA, in the Washington Observer, March 3, 1938.
On August 14, 1935, Social Security was born. And as with any newborn, it changed lives. “Sailors, stevedores, and sideshow freaks no longer have a corner on the tattoo market,” an Associated Press story reported in April 1937.
People were flocking to tattoo parlors to have their numbers inscribed on their arms, chests, and backs.
Respectable people—even women—overwhelmed by the need to remember their new Social Security numbers were flocking to tattoo parlors to have their numbers, embedded in elaborate flag and eagle designs, inscribed on their arms, chests, and backs. (Lest we think these reports were merely satirical, later stories in papers such as the New York Times described cases in which Social Security tattoos helped identify murder victims.)
Tattoos were not the only creative solution overburdened Americans devised—other newspapers repeated the story of the New Jersey man who solved his memory problems by etching his Social Security number on the upper plate of his dentures.
Remembering those crucial eight digits was not the only aspect of the new numbers that had Americans somewhat baffled. Confusion reigned over how many Social Security numbers an individual needed—a new one for each job? Could family members share a number? And responding to the seemingly widespread notion that more cards meant more benefits, gamblers allegedly turned to rolling the dice for opponents’ cards instead of money.
But somewhere along the line, things changed, and innocent befuddlement and get-rich schemes began to be replaced by suspicion and paranoia. By the early 1970s, Social Security numbers were so widely used in a variety of transactions that fear over the number becoming a national ID helped fuel the passage of the 1974 Privacy Act.
But many state and federal assistance programs continued to require Social Security numbers for all applicants, and these requirements flushed out into the open obscure religious beliefs that the Social Security number was the mark of the beast (as described in Revelations 13:17—“and that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name”) and possession of one would bar a child from Heaven. By the 1990s, this small group of religious objectors had been joined by radical individualists who wanted to conduct their lives “off the grid” (in a 2005 newspaper interview, one such objector described his refusal to use a Social Security number as a “good versus evil thing”). And the rise of identify theft fueled fears not just about what the number might signify or how the government could track you with it, but over any request to use the number as identification.
We now regard our Social Security number as one of our most closely regarded secrets even as we know we are continually tracked. And now that SSNs have become de facto national identity numbers, the number itself can be evidence for wild theories. Take President Obama’s Social Security number, for example. Or his 25 numbers, as some of the Internet’s most dedicated conspiracy theorists would have it.
Using a mixture of public records and the Social Security Death Index, this group claims Obama has used multiple Social Security numbers over the course of his life and favors a number that, when closely analyzed, should belong to someone born in 1890 from Connecticut. Although the methodology used by this group is highly suspect, their claims have bounced all over the Internet. It’s clear we’ve come a long way from the innocent days of an eagle tattoo.Down on the border Twenty-four hours.
Four provinces.
Seven towns.
What one day on the Canada-U.S. line says about refugees, Canadian tolerance and Trump’s America
It’s a Saturday mid-morning in Emerson, a town of 678 on Manitoba’s southern border. Vince’s dog barks at the front window of his home. A man, dark-skinned with bare feet sticking out of his yellow pants, is crossing the front yard. Vince, who didn’t want his real name used, knew about Emerson’s border-jumpers, that their numbers were way up this year and that they usually cross illegally overnight. The RCMP’s new patrols normally catch refugee claimants before they wander into the community, but they must have missed this daytime visitor. A refugee who walked through “Vince’s” yard barefoot; Vince later drove him to a Canadian Border Services Agency facility. Taken at approximately 11:30am on June 18th, 2017. Vince calls the local RCMP detachment, but when there’s no answer, he jumps in his pickup truck and finds the barefooted visitor, who’s headed toward the highway that leads 110 km to Winnipeg. “Can I help you?” he hollers. “I’m looking for the police,” the man replies. Vince is suspicious—why didn’t the man just wait at the RCMP station rather than hitting the highway? But he is willing to help, or at least go as far as letting the refugee claimant sit in his truck’s bed—not the comfort of the passenger or back seats. “I would never let him in. Never pick up a hitchhiker either,” Vince reasons. Canadian border agents, with their security check, will determine if his worries were founded. Since the turn of the last century, the largely undefended boundary between Canada and the United States has been an example to the world of peace and shared prosperity—something Canadian schoolchildren are taught to cherish, and that leaders of our two countries must praise when they meet. For generations, trade has flowed ever more freely across the line, while we venerated its relative invisibility—when we want to cross for a day of shopping or a road trip, we do that most Canadian of things: we line up. A single White House occupant, though, has revealed how precarious those notions were. While Donald Trump threatens a thicker border for goods movement, demanding renegotiations to NAFTA while threatening Canadian industries, people in this country have been struck by the boundary’s porousness in the face of migrating humans. Set in motion by Trump’s anti-refugee rhetoric and crackdown on undocumented residents, about 27 northbound migrants per day are now traversing the border illegally, forced to enter via remote, unguarded stretches because the Safe Third Country Agreement allows authorities to turn away asylum seekers who arrive at established ports of entry. By mid-April, the number of border-hopping asylum seekers arriving in Canada had surpassed last year’s total of 2,464. The flow remains steady, which has compelled authorities and border-town residents to adjust to a new reality, reassessing their values and assumptions. In a major national poll conducted this spring by Abacus for Maclean’s, 71 per cent of Canadians called for increased security along the U.S. border—a steady sentiment across the country’s regions and age groups. Border crossings visited by Maclean’s reporters. Lauren Cattermole On a mid-June weekend, Maclean’s journalists fanned out to document this historic shift over a single 24-hour period (Friday to Saturday evening), visiting well-travelled crossing points in Quebec, Manitoba and B.C., as well as a crossing in Ontario that some refugee claimants can legally use. In these places, they encountered time-honoured Canadian openness in the form of shelters and welcome signs for newcomers, and Mounties warmly greeting migrants even as they arrested them. No less evident, though, was a growing sense of wariness and suspicion, from a Manitoban setting up motion-capture cameras by the border, to a Quebec ultranationalist group’s self-appointed mission to make periodic border visits, allegedly just to “observe.” Whether refugees cross into Canada over a ditch, a muddy field or simply across a street; whether they’re abandoning the U.S. asylum system or merely preferring ours in the first place, the trend shows no sign of ebbing. What about Canada’s willingness to welcome them?
FRIDAY, 6 P.M. CT, GRETNA, MAN. Smoke from a Marlboro curls past Abdi Hassan’s grey-flecked goatee as he stands outside a former seniors’ residence he’s called home since Tuesday. “My family lives here. In Toronto. I want to see them,” the Somali national says of a “here” that lies 2,000 km away. Hassan looks to be in his mid-30s. A fellow African migrant who had just crossed the border smokes next to him, but is loath to share his story. Inside, a young girl in a white T-shirt presses her nose to the window, curious about the visitor who’s not allowed inside. A woman in a yellow dress and multicoloured hijab paces in the lounge as she talks into a cellphone. Related reading In Emerson, Man., asylum-seekers find love and fear They’re all spending the night at the “Gretna Reception Centre”—a former retirement home repurposed for newcomers. This southern Manitoba village’s seniors’ facility sat vacant for years until Manitoba Housing decided this spring to make it a transitional shelter for the hundreds of border-hoppers arriving in nearby Emerson (28 km of gravel road east) and hoping to start asylum claims in Winnipeg (110 paved km north). Before this, a Winnipeg social agency’s staff made the journey south whenever border agents called, and hurriedly cobbled together any available housing options, from a Salvation Army shelter to an agency worker’s couch. With the triage centre in this village, authorities have brought system and structure to this chaotic asylum-seeker influx. So have regular nightly RCMP patrols in Emerson, instituted to ensure the bedraggled travellers don’t wander into town before somebody detains them and brings them to the customs office at the Emerson border post, where a trailer now serves as a waiting and processing area. The one-storey brick lodge in Gretna sleeps up to 60, but this weekend it’s only housing a handful of asylum seekers. When the government announced plans for the shelter abruptly in late April, an explanatory community meeting got testy. Jeff Dyck, who runs the village’s lone diner and lives a block away from the migrants’ shelter, initially worried this was being “rammed down our throat.” Weeks later, he says fears have abated. “Other than seeing them walking down the street and waving at us, we wouldn’t know they’re there.” After a few questions from reporters, Hassan wearily snuffs out his unfinished cigarette with his heel and retreats inside his temporary lodgings. He’ll stay the weekend in Gretna. He’ll tell his full story later, in Winnipeg, to a refugee adjudicator.
FRIDAY, 7:45 P.M. ET, STANSTEAD, QUE. The Mae Trio, a young Australian folk group, is playing a room of 20 people and two countries. The Haskell Opera House stage and front rows sit in this Quebec border town, but 40 per cent of the seats are in U.S. territory, in Derby Line, Vt. Hal Newman nicknames his concert space the “Impossible Room.” Where else in the world will somebody find a venue bifurcated by an international boundary? Here, the border consists not of a fence or checkpoint, but a long piece of tape on the floor. But what makes the place truly “impossible” is who might be in the audience. Patrons from both sides of the border are permitted inside without crossing customs. On any given night, it’s conceivable a family separated by the border—perhaps one member living in America, undocumented—can reunite for a show. Contrary to the name, there is no opera. Newman recently brought back live music, using his indie-music connections and online ads to draw crowds. Meanwhile, on the main floor below, the Haskell Free Library would prefer less international buzz. The US-Canada border is marked on the floor of the Haskell Library and Opera house, Stanstead, Que. Roger Lemoyne “At this particular point in time and history, we feel a bit vulnerable about our situation,” library director Nancy Rumery says. “We’re trying to keep our head down and not draw attention to ourselves.” That’s not easy. The lone entrance is on American soil. Canadians don’t need a passport, but they can’t step off the sidewalk on their way in. Refugee claimants have used the library’s unique location as a means to cross illegally because the border road outside has no fence, but rather a row of potted plants. In May, a Montrealer was extradited for smuggling guns through the library. Lately, it feels like all it would take is one tweet from the border-wall-loving Donald Trump for the library to be shuttered—or at least changed. Newman, whose Jewish grandparents immigrated at Halifax’s Pier 21, knows refugee hopefuls have also traversed empty farmland like that behind his home. “My wife and I had this discussion: what do we do if one of us goes out one night and we find a family in our chicken coop in the winter?” he says. “Our thought is we’d bring them inside and give them food.” But the farther into Quebec you travel, the more abstract the border becomes to people—and attitudes toward refugees harden, he says. One doesn’t need to go far. At a nearby campground, Stanstead Mayor Philippe Dutil is calling Friday-night bingo. “What people are telling me is that now with a bigger presence of the RCMP, they feel safer,” he says. “Some people don’t even lock their door anymore.” Dutil isn’t all that bothered by border-jumpers. The issue has taken a grand total of zero minutes of town council’s time. Others, however, have worries beyond security. “Work is hard to find as is and then you have all these refugees come over and take all our work,” says Patricia, a bingo player and gas station manager (she asked that her last name not be used). At the Haskell, the musicians finish playing around 9 p.m. Band member Elsie Rigby remarks on the “immigration crap” going on at home—a reference to Australia’s own crackdown on refugee claimants. Her sister Maggie chimes in: “Looking at that line on the floor there makes you realize how meaningless and arbitrary borders are.”
FRIDAY, 8 P.M. CT, OUTSIDE EMERSON, MAN. Signs at the old border crossing facility in Emerson, Manitoba, as seen from Noyes, Minnesota, where border jumpers frequently cross over from the United States, Friday, June 16, 2017. Trevor Hagan Asylum seekers have walked into this community for years, but 106 new arrivals used to be the rough annual total. This year, that was how many the RCMP intercepted in May, and that was the lowest monthly count since January. “It makes our border look like a joke,” says Ron Opocensky. He and a friend, Jessie Chubaty, started locking their doors recently. They feel bad for people coming into Canada with nothing but a backpack, but they worry those newcomers are abusing the system, or at least putting a strain on it. All Canadians were immigrants at some point, they say, but they came through proper channels. “What would happen to us normal white folk if we tried walking across the border?” Chubaty asks. (Answer: if someone of any race crosses with an asylum claim, they get to test their claim in Canada’s refugee system.) A fundraiser in Ridgeville, Manitoba, close to Emerson, Friday, June 16, 2017. Trevor Hagan It’s not that Emerson residents are unkind; they take care of their own. Opocensky, Chubaty, a convoy of ATV riders and dozens more are crowded on this night into the Ridgeville Co-op Community Club, a nearby bar, for a fundraiser for a local business owner whose granddaughter had heart complications at birth, requiring multiple operations. The family could use some money to cover her medication costs. Greg Janzen, the reeve of Emerson-Franklin, brought $152 worth of shrimp to the steak dinner. He worries migrants with criminal records will evade the RCMP, which might explain his recent purchase of motion-activated night cameras, which he affixed to trees near popular border-crossing points in Emerson. If a sensor is tripped, he gets a picture sent to his phone instantly. After several weeks, he now has plenty of photos of deer and an unmarked RCMP minivan on its nightly patrols—but nary a refugee claimant. Janzen is wary of newcomers, but his solution is the same as that of immigration-reform advocates: end the Safe Third Country Agreement. What good is barring asylum claims at U.S.-Canada border stations when it serves only to force migrants to sneak through farm fields into town? “If we’re going to keep letting them in, let them come in at the port of entry,” Janzen says. Opocensky agrees, albeit with a note of cynicism: “If they’re really coming here to find a home and get safety, yeah.”
FRIDAY, 9:23 P.M. ET, FORT ERIE, ONT. Jenny Vásquez moments after arriving in Canada at the Fort Erie border, Friday, June 16, 2017. Stephanie Foden Jenny Vásquez and her family emerge from the immigration-processing centre near the Canadian feet of the Peace Bridge. They’ve been at the centre since 7:30 a.m.; her sons, eight and 10, entertained themselves on Jenny’s phone by building a Minecraft house with a waterslide. An undocumented migrant in New Jersey, Vásquez realized she needed to flee the U.S. during an information session at her children’s school in February, when she was encouraged to fill out a form stating who should take custody of her two sons if she were deported. Her oldest son, Pablo, known as “Pablito,” soon afterward reported threats from a classmate, who warned, “You better be careful. My mom’s a police officer, and she’s going to come and get your mom.” After escaping violence in El Salvador and Mexico, Jenny and her husband, Pablo, should have by law claimed refugee status in America, which is considered a safe country under the much-maligned agreement. But Jenny has an aunt in |
thing women’s rights. Note, this list is NOT exhaustive, and other organizations are in the process of creating more comprehensive lists (see another example here).
A woman may refuse any and all medical intervention, regardless of the harm such refusal may cause to the infant. In the eyes of the law, the mother’s right to control what happens to her body trumps any right the fetus has.
Hospitals CANNOT force a woman to undergo a procedure or treatment without her consent, even to save the life of the fetus (although depending on the stage of pregnancy, the hospital can refuse to treat a woman who rejects one facet of care).
Women have the right to ask questions about their care and inquire into alternatives.
A woman has the right to a second opinion. She can also request a different nurse or doctor, if one is available.
Consent forms signed during prenatal visits or at hospital admission do NOT count as ongoing consent to every procedure. Women have the right to refuse consent to any procedure at any time.
A woman has the absolute right to leave the hospital against medical advice, though doing so may limit the birth settings and providers available to her and may have insurance coverage implications.
Women have the right to request to speak to supervisors or to consult the hospital’s administration if they feel their rights are being violated.
Women have the right to privacy during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. This means the right to control how many people are in the delivery room, for example.
All women have the right to receive equal medical treatment regardless of their race, disability, HIV status, body mass index, and other factors. Some conditions do increase risks to the mother or infant during labor and delivery. A woman should know if she faces any of these risks and what the evidence-based approach to care is, given her health status.
How women can protect themselves before and during childbirth
Women should work with their medical providers ahead of time, if possible, to understand the likely scenarios that may develop and to construct a birth plan detailing how they would like to be treated.
Women should clearly make their wishes known (if possible) during hospital admission.
If a woman wishes to refuse consent to a procedure, she should make that refusal clear and repeat it as necessary.
A woman should recognize that unforeseen circumstances may make parts or all of her initial goals for birth irrelevant, but that she always retains the final control over her own body.
A woman should know the laws in her state that cover interventions on mothers and babies. Hospital staff may imply that a procedure is a legal requirement, but this may be inaccurate, depending on the intervention.
Hiring a support person such as a doula can help women advocate for themselves during the labor and delivery process. More information on the importance of doulas can be found here.
Other resources to inform and empower
Childbirth Connection – For information on evidence-based care during pregnancy and delivery.
Improving Birth – For information on evidence-based practices and women’s rights during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Also has an emergency contact form for women whose rights are being violated during labor and who need immediate support.
Birth Monopoly – Advocates for evidence-based maternity care, works against obstetric violence and assault, and advocates against government policies that limit women’s care options.
Human Rights in Childbirth – For education and advocacy on women’s rights during pregnancy and childbirth.ALLEN PARK -- The Detroit Lions were ripped for 201 rushing yards against Cleveland. They didn't have many answers for what went wrong, other than they needed to play better. Then they went out there against Chicago and didn't play better.
They allowed another 222 rushing yards. They still don't have many answers for what wrong. And that includes the guy who is supposed to be making the tackles.
"It's tough to really say exactly what it is," rookie middle linebacker Jarrad Davis said. "At the end of the day, defense is about all 11 players making a play on the ball. And we got to do what we can to make sure we get to the ball and get the runners down."
While a lot of players may be to blame, Davis' struggles in the middle have been chief among them. And that's a problem heading into Thursday's game against the Minnesota Vikings, who feature the league's eighth-best rushing offense.
Davis was drafted in the first round to replace the struggling Tahir Whitehead at middle linebacker. But he's been every bit as bad, and in some cases worse. He ranks 86th out of 88 qualifying linebackers, according to ProFootballFocus. And he's been especially bad on the ground, ranking 57th (out of 58) against the run.
He's also missed five tackles and ranks dead last out of 57 linebackers in tackling efficiency.
The Lions were expecting some ups and downs from their first-round pick, but they've gotten far more downs than ups through 10 games.
"I think anytime you're a rookie in this league and you're playing early, it's not going to be pretty the entire time," coach Jim Caldwell said. "You're going to have some good times and really good games. You're going to have some that where you're not as productive as you'd like to be.
"He's been effective for us. He runs around. He makes plays, but he's not perfect. But does a good job in terms of leadership, and he's learning every week. I think that's the valuable thing. So he's getting an opportunity to get out there and do it, and he's done a lot of really, really good things for us."
In Davis' defense, he has had to fight through a lot of adversity this year as well. He missed two games with a concussion, plus watched three defensive linemen go down who were supposed to be starting in front of him.
That includes defensive tackle Haloti Ngata, the Lions' best run stuffer up front. Before the injury, they were allowing 74.6 yards per game on the ground and ranked in the top five overall. Without him, they've allowed a staggering 153.8.
That has been the biggest problem of all against the run. Ngata is just a big, big man, capable of moving the line of scrimmage and clogging the rushing lanes. Without him, Detroit has been forced to shorten its defensive tackle rotation to basically just A'Shawn Robinson and Akeem Spence, and they've struggled.
Throw in the loss of Kerry Hyder in the preseason and the back injury that has sidelined Ezekiel Ansah the last two weeks, and Detroit is playing without three of its projected starting defensive linemen. Davis refused to make excuses, but that sort of thing will hurt a linebacker trying to flow in behind them to make plays.
There is a hope that over time, once Detroit gets better production up front and the game begins to slow down for Davis, he will still deliver on the potential that Bob Quinn saw in him when he took the Florida linebacker 21st overall.
"I mean, like, the game is still so fast," Davis said. "At this point in the season, it has slowed down tremendously from where it was earlier, but at the same time, there's so much going on at one moment in the game. And I know if I take one wrong step, I'm going to be out of position."
More from MLive:French comic Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala speaks to the media during a press conference in a theater in Paris, Saturday, Jan. 11, 2014.
A French comedian was found guilty on Wednesday of condoning terrorism by posting a joke on his Facebook account after Islamist attacks in Paris that killed 17 people in January, but escaped a possible jail sentence.
The Paris court sentenced Dieudonne M'bala M'bala to a suspended sentence of two months in jail. He had risked up to 7 years in prison and a potential 100,000 euro ($106,000) fine.
Dieudonne, who has repeatedly been fined by the courts for hate speech, wrote on Facebook just days after the attacks that he felt "like Charlie Coulibaly."
That was a play on the ubiquitous "I am Charlie" slogan of solidarity following the attack against cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo weekly, using the last name of one of the Paris attackers.
Amedy Coulibaly killed a policewoman a day after the Charlie Hebdo attack and four Jews in a raid on a kosher supermarket two days later. He died in a shootout with police at the shop.
"The feeling of hostility towards the Jewish community that Dieudonne kept up in front of a public attracted by his charisma increases his responsibility," the court wrote.
Dieudonne, who was not in the court on Wednesday, has been found guilty seven times for slander or anti-Semitic statements, while his shows have been banned in some cities as a threat to public order. His lawyer declined comment.
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The comedian, who insists he is not anti-Semitic, is credited with inventing the "quenelle", a gesture critics have likened to an inverted Nazi salute.
Dieudonne posted his Facebook comment on the eve of a huge public march of solidarity in Paris in which more than 3.7 million people, many carrying "I am Charlie" signs, honored the journalists, policemen and shoppers killed by the militant Islamist gunmen.It was once said that the great George Benton knew 48 different ways to counter the jab. If you're keen to split horsehairs and count various permutations of the same techniques, the true number of jab counters in Benton's arsenal is likely even bigger. But despite the depth of Benton's bag of tricks--and it was one of the deepest in the history of boxing--there was one counter that Benton, and just about every out-fighter and counter puncher that either preceded or followed him, preferred.
The jab, of course.
The jab is quick and direct, and it helps set up any number of other strikes and combinations. It makes sense, then, to counter the jab with another punch just like it.
Count Edson Barboza among the fighters following in those legendary footsteps. At UFC 197, Barboza put on a striking clinic against former lightweight champion Anthony Pettis, beating "Showtime" in exactly the kind of fight most fans and analysts thought favored him. Pettis had room to work and time to think, the very things missing in so many of the matchups that had given him trouble in the past. And yet he could do nothing to turn the tide or take the control away from Edson Barboza. And it all started with the jab.
The groundwork was laid in the first few seconds of the bout. Anthony Pettis came forward behind a jab, and Barboza responded with a jab of his own.
1. Pettis moves in from long range...
2.... and flicks a jab at Barboza.
3. Barboza immediately replies with his own jab.
4. The jab halts Pettis' momentum, causing him to whiff on the follow-up right, and allowing Barboza to land an inside leg kick.
5. Barboza slides backward to shore up the distance...
6.... and sends a stiff jab Pettis' way to keep him from following up.
7. Pettis is forced to take a step back as Barboza circles away from the fence.
Simple, direct, and quick. Barboza met nearly every one of Pettis' jabs just like this. Sometimes he slipped and jabbed, sometimes he caught and jabbed, sometimes he got hit and jabbed. Sometimes he connected and sometimes he didn't, but was always ready with the counter jab.
In addition to threatening Pettis, this tactic allowed Barboza to collect valuable data. Simply looking at the opponent, you see, can be an extremely unreliable way to judge the distance between yourself in him. If his arms are a little longer than you realized, or he uses deceptive footwork, or leans back or forward as he comes in, you can find yourself being hit even when you think you're safe, and unable to reply. The counter jab is a straightforward solution to this perplexing issue. It imbued him with a nuanced sense of range. After catching Pettis' jab and returning with his own so frequently, his eyes and body became perfectly synchronized; he knew when Pettis could touch him, and when he could be touched back. Now Barboza could begin finding some more potent counters.
1. Anthony circles while Edson controls the center of the Octagon.
2. Barboza steps forward with a feint...
3.... and Pettis bites, lunging in with a counter right that glances off Barboza's glove.
4. Barboza responds with the trusty jab counter, sticking his left hand in Pettis' chest.
5. Now an uppercut to the body...
6.... followed by a left hook that whips over Pettis' shoulder and smashes into his ear before he can get away.
This sequence took place only two minutes into the first round, but already there is a gulf developing between Barboza and Pettis. Already it is apparent which fighter understands the range--or is at least determined to do so--and which does not. As Barboza feints to draw an opening, he is close enough to hit with a lunging cross. But as soon as Pettis flings himself into the punch, Barboza has already taken a small step back to evade. Because Pettis hasn't been touching and measuring and countering up to this point, his sense of range remains blunted, and he throws himself completely off balance pursuing the counter right hand. Look at the position of Pettis' feet in Frame 4. His feet are squared and his body upright, exposing torso and chin alike. At this point it is downright easy for Barboza, still confined to his balanced, compact stance, to find the openings in Pettis' defense.
By the third round, Barboza had used his counter jab so well that he had acquired an almost perfect sense of distance. Now the jab could become a fearsome offensive weapon, and Barboza landed it almost at will.
Statistics can never tell the whole story of a fight, but Fight Metric's numbers give a good picture of one of this bout's most significant subplots. Of the 48 strikes Pettis landed over the course of the fight 72 percent were to the head, with 16 percent being leg attacks, and a mere 10 percent body shots. Barboza's numbers, on the other hand, are far more evenly spread. 36 percent of Barboza's strikes went to the head, while 42 went to the legs and 20 to the body.
With such variety, Barboza's strikes worked in concert. He attacked up and down and from every angle, threatening Pettis in so many different ways that the former champion didn't know how to react. As a result, Barboza landed much more frequently than Pettis. While "Showtime" landed 36 percent of his 131 attempted strikes, Barboza connected at an impressive 44 percent rate. Throwing 164 strikes, Barboza sent 73 of them home.
The corner of Anthony Pettis' was all urgency before the start of the third round, knowing that he had quite possibly lost both of the first two, but no matter how hard he tried "Showtime" could not put his strikes together. The spearing jab of Edson Barboza, and the myriad strikes which flowed off it, interrupted Pettis constantly. It broke his confidence, and kept him always a step behind in a round that he needed to win.
1. Barboza leans forward trying to draw an opening out of Pettis.
2. Before he can commit, however, Pettis checks, wary of the kick that has been staining his inner thigh purple for the last two rounds.
3. Instead of kicking, Barboza stabs Pettis with his jab.
4. Pettis tries to counter, but he still lacks Barboza's nuanced sense of range. He is too close to land his right hand...
5.... but not too close for Barboza to step back and land a left hook to the temple.
6. Now Barboza steps back, and Pettis advances, determined to make something happen.
7. Now that he's threatened the jab, Barboza goes to the inside leg kick again.
8. And slides back out of range again.
9. Pettis tries to deal with the distance by leading with a long right kick, but Barboza is too comfortable, and throws yet another inside leg kick to Pettis' plant leg, buckling his knee.
If Pettis' backstage warmup with coach Duke Roufus [GIF] is any indication, Anthony came into this fight prepared to counter the kicking game of Edson Barboza. Not at all a bad idea considering what Barboza had done to past opponents with kicks (and what he ended up doing to Pettis).
But he couldn't. Pettis looked for the openings, and he threw the strikes, but, lacking Barboza's cultivated sense of range, he couldn't find the mark often enough. Instead, he ended up reaching to find an opponent who knew all too well how far away he needed to be to avoid being hit. Overextended from these blind attempts, he ate counter after counter. And eventually, those counters took their toll. They chipped away at Pettis' confidence. Instead of drawing the shots he wanted, Pettis ended up fearing the shots he couldn't stop, helpless to do much but wait and watch as Barboza casually picked him over like the cheese plate at an uninteresting party.
And with each shot that Barboza landed his understanding of range improved, and Pettis' ability to defend himself diminished. The second round saw both fighters land 22 strikes, according to Fight Metric. And yet in the third, despite Pettis' sense of urgency, Barboza outlanded "Showtime" with ease, scoring 31 punches to Pettis' 12. In that final frame Barboza landed a full 50% of his attempted strikes.
It wasn't strategy alone that won Barboza the fight, of course. "Junior" also demonstrated that he is technically superior to Pettis. The Brazilian's left hook was one of his most effective weapons, and Barboza threw it beautifully, something he no doubt has the brilliant Mark Henry for which to thank.
1. Pettis slides forward, right hand loaded.
2. Barboza counters with a right, slipping his head off line as Pettis does the same. Both men miss.
3. And both men look to follow up with the left hook.
4. Pettis lands first, but it is a glancing, powerless blow.
5. Barboza connects a split second later and the impact spins Pettis' head around.
6. Pettis silently thanks his parents for passing on the "iron chin" gene.
This one exchange of left hooks reveals so many details about both fighters and the fight. In Frame 2, both fighters are in more or less the same position. Leaning forward, weight committed to the left foot. In Frame 3, both commit the same mistake, failing to cover up with their right hands as they throw the left.
But look at Pettis as he lands his hook in Frame 4. His head is forward, nearer to his left foot than his right. Speaking of the right foot, it is weightless. Pettis has not committed his weight backward, which not only leaves his head hanging in the pocket, but deprives his hook of power. Without weight transfer, Pettis' punch is just an arm punch. Without involving the rest of the body Pettis has ensured that his punch lands first, but he has neither protected himself nor ensured that Barboza will be unable to counter.
Barboza's left hook exemplifies proper punching mechanics. Pettis' punch merely glanced off Barboza's cheek, but Barboza's drives straight through the chin of Pettis. Weight transfer is evident, as Barboza drives off the ball of his left foot and turns his hips through the strike, planting his right foot in the process.
Such was the story of the fight. Edson Barboza came in wonderfully well-prepared. He began with the most basic of fundamentals, and built his game from there. He kept his back away from the fence and refused to hang around too long in the pocket. He led with safe attacks and used the threat of those attacks to create openings through which he could safely send his more powerful punches and kicks. He did all of this with excellent technique and poise, all while fighting at the preferred range of a former champion renowned for his dangerous and dynamic striking.
Edson Barboza and Anthony Pettis entered the cage as "Junior" and "Showtime," respectively, but after the bout their nicknames might as well be reversed. Barboza put on one hell of a show; and Pettis proved that he still has a lot to learn.John Mehr (Photo: Owen Cobb Photo.Jackson,TN, Submitted)
Madison County Sheriff John Mehr confirmed today that he has hired his wife, Michelle, to work part-time at the Sheriff's Office.
Mehr said she works 29 and a half hours a week in the evidence room at metro-narcotics. Madison County records show she makes $20 an hour.
"There's a backlog of evidence that needs to be cleaned out and destroyed," he said. "It's stuff that's been there for 20 years."
The hiring of his wife was done based on her expertise and training in the field, as she is a certified police officer and has worked high-ranks at police departments and has worked with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"She's actually over-qualified," he said.
Because she's a part-time employee, Mehr said she doesn't receive any benefits.
That's also why the job wasn't posted before her hiring, Mehr said.
"I've hired other part-time employees who are specialized in those fields because of their qualifications," he said. "We're setting a higher standard, one that has never been set before."
Michelle Mehr will report directly to Lt. Marc Byrum, who is over the Metro-Narcotics Unit.
"She does not answer to me," Mehr said.
Mehr hopes the hiring of qualified people will help the department get accredited, he said.
Mehr said he doesn't believe his wife working at the Sheriff's Office is a conflict of interest.
Reach Nichole Manna at (731) 425-9657. Follow her on Twitter @NicholeManna
Read or Share this story: http://www.jacksonsun.com/story/news/local/2014/12/11/sheriff-mehr-hires-wife-as-part-time-employee/20255999/Correction appended
The Vermont man who went up against Chik-fil-A to defend his right to use the phrase “Eat More Kale” — which the fast food company argued was too close to its trademarked slogan “Eat Mor Chikin” — has won his legal battle to use the trademark.
Bo Muller-Moore can now silkscreen “Eat More Kale” onto T-shirts to his heart’s content, because the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved his request to trademark the phrase. The application was held up for a while, but a “black-out-period” for Muller-Moore’s request ended on Tuesday, his lawyer said.
The approval comes after a drawn-out battle with Chik-fil-A over the use of the slogan. Muller-Moore started selling T-shirts with the phrase “Eat More Kale” in 2000 after a kale farmer friend asked him to make them.
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But shortly after Muller-Moore attempted to trademark the phrase in 2011, Chik-fil-A sent him a letter requesting he stop using the saying because it was too similar to their “Eat Mor Chikin” catchphrase, and listed 30 other companies who had agreed to stop using the “eat more” language in their marketing.
Muller-Moore is expected to make a formal announcement of the victory Friday with Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin.
The original version of this story misidentified Muller-Moore’s phrase, “Eat More Kale.” It is a trademark.
Write to Charlotte Alter at charlotte.alter@time.com.By FRANCO PANIZO
If there wasn't already enough of a cloud surrounding Mexico and its players' use of clenbuterol, now comes word that more of the players on the Gold Cup-winning team reportedly tested positive for the banned substance.
According to Mexican outlet Medio Tiempo, FIFA Medical Director Jiri Dvorak announced Friday that four more of the 14 Mexicans that took the anti-doping test prior to the tournament have tested positive, bringing the total to nine players. The identities of the additional players who tested positive are unknown, and the Mexican federation does not plan to disclose that information on the basis that the players did not intentionally dope.
FMF President Justino Compean believes that to be the case, because the levels of the positive test from the four additional players were lower than those of the first five and low enough that they do not suggest doping.
The Mexican federation also thinks that the results of the four additional players support the case of the original five who blamed the failed tests on tainted meat and chicken.
The confirmation that more players tested for the substance comes about a week after FIFA president Sepp Blatter had acknowledged that fact in an interview conducted in Spanish.
The five original players to originally test positive were Guillermo Ochoa, Sinha, Christian Bermudez, Edgar Duenas and Francisco Rodríguez. Those players were removed and replaced from Mexico's Gold Cup team.
What do you think of this development? Think the players should be named? Does this taint Mexico's Gold Cup victory?
Share your thoughts below.VIRGINIA BEACH — A mother’s story of love for her 2-month-old daughter went viral after she posted a video of the baby hearing her say “I love you” for the first time.
Born on Aug. 2 with bilateral profound congenital hearing loss, Charlotte Ruth Keane had never been able to hear her mother’s voice until Oct. 12 when she received hearing aids from the Virginia Hearing Aid Loan Bank.
The VHALB is a state program that lends hearing aids to children under the age of 18 who have confirmed hearing loss.
Charlotte’s family didn’t know what to expect when she first received the hearing aids. Although they are still unsure of the root of her hearing loss, the degree of it was significant enough that they weren’t hopeful she’d be responsive to sound even with the hearing aids, her mother, Christy Keane, said.
Still, because they stimulate the brain and nervous system, getting the infant hearing aids was an important first step toward eventually getting her cochlear implants, which are surgically implanted to replace some inner ear function. Keane said that she and her husband plan to get cochlear implants for Charlotte in a year. They are also exploring learning American Sign Language.
But a video posted on Facebook by the 32-year-old mother showed that Charlotte was ready to listen.
The Oct. 12 video captured Charlotte’s response to her first minute of sound after getting hearing aids. In the video, the baby can be seen cooing and wrinkling her bottom lip as her mother says, “Hi… I love you!”
“I felt like our hearts were connected in that moment,” Keane said, adding that she’d always carried pain because Charlotte couldn’t hear her say “I love you.” In those first few moments with the hearing aids, that pain was erased.
Now Charlotte smiles every morning when her mother puts her hearing aids on and says “hello.” She also turns her attention to her 2-year-old sister Cameron when the little girl plays.
And Charlotte’s parents say that they plan to treat their sweet infant no differently than her sister, offering her the same motivation and support as Cameron.
“To us, she’s perfect,” Keane said.
But Charlotte’s first moments of hearing didn’t just touch her parents’ hearts — they also drew attention from viewers across the globe, many of whom have reached out to Keane to offer support and ask questions. Since it was first posted, the video has gotten 17 million views and nearly 300,000 shares.
“It seems like the world has been in such a really dark place,” Christy Keane said. “She brought a little bit of light to it.”You won't want to miss the first ever Fandomonium: A Library Comic Con Event, presented at Headquarters Library, by the Alachua County Library District. This event on Saturday, April 25, is a free, all-ages, all day extravaganza of fan art, cosplay, artist workshops, fandoms, author presentations, a costume contest and more.
Special guests include critically acclaimed science fiction author, John Scalzi, and author/illustrators, Christian Slade and Kurt Wolfgang. The day will be filled with events for all ages: crafts and movies for kids, a Geek Battle, Fandom Bingo, and Daryl Dixon's Zombie Strike for teens and adults. Plus photo ops, cosplay and gaming panels, a workshop presented by SAW (Sequential Artists Workshop), book signings, and giveaways! If you get hungry, go out to the courtyard and visit the food vendors. For more information, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Tumblr.
Follow the link to read more about Fandomonium: A Library Comic Con Event.
Here's a look at the Fan Art Contest finalists:The Weight of Chains is a 2010 Canadian documentary film directed by Boris Malagurski.[1] The film argues that the breakup of Yugoslavia was "orchestrated by Western powers in furtherance of imperial ambitions".[2] According to the filmmaker, it also presents stories of "good people in evil times".[3] It was released on December 17, 2010. Since 2012, the film has been distributed by Journeyman Pictures.[4] The sequel, The Weight of Chains 2, was released on November 20, 2014.[5]
In December 2018, the film was added to the film and video catalog of the Library of United States Congress.[6][7]
Production [ edit ]
Film production began in late 2009, and was completed in October 2010.[6]
The film was sponsored by Serbian diaspora community organizations, the Centre for Research on Globalization, and private individuals amongst others.[1][8][9]
The film uses re-compiled archival footage extensively,[10] which was provided at no cost by Radio Television Serbia.[11]
Synopsis [ edit ]
The film provides a background history of Yugoslavia, from the medieval Battle of Kosovo to the 1912 incorporation of Kosovo into the Kingdom of Serbia and then to the formation of Josip Broz Tito's Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after World War II. It discusses the persecution of Kosovo Serbs after World War II, as well as alleged plans by Nationalists to create an ethnically pure Greater Albania.
The film claims that U.S. interests in Yugoslavia promoted "a market-oriented Yugoslav economic structure" through the National Endowment for Democracy, and the G17 Plus as part of a policy of "privatization through liquidation" that increased ethnic tensions in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Western nations, both openly diplomatically and covertly militarily, supported separatist groups and encouraged conflict so that NATO could be installed as peacekeepers for their own interests. A cigarette factory that was bombed by NATO was later bought by Philip Morris, which the film presents as an example, that the purpose of the war was economic colonization of the country.
The film claims Yugoslavian leaders such as Slobodan Milošević, Franjo Tuđman and Alija Izetbegović were focused only on power, and not on the well being of their people and they, along with the local media, mobilized public opinion in favor of conflict. These tensions led to the 1990s Yugoslav Wars, which culminated in the Kosovo war.
The film presents the fall of Srebrenica "as a stage-managed ploy by the Bosnians and Americans to justify NATO military intervention against Serbia".[2] Interviewee Srđa Trifković asserts that there are "trustworthy witnesses" who claim that Bill Clinton had indicated that "5,000 dead Muslims would be the price of NATO intervention" and that these witnesses believe that "Srebrenica was deliberately sacrificed by Izetbegović in order to provide this burnt offering to the White House". The film also presents the Srebrenica "civilian death toll as no larger than the number of Serbs killed in the surrounding area".[2]
The film includes interviews with the widow of Josip Reihl-Kir (former police chief of Osijek, Croatia) and the widow of Milan Levar along with the story of Srđan Aleksić, who saved a Muslim man from an attack by soldiers of the VRS. There is footage of a village in Bosnia where Serbs and Bosniaks lived together up to the end of the Bosnian war, but were then separated – as the Muslim Bosniaks, left for their own entity.
In the aftermath, the policies of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, the film claims, further demonstrated that Eastern European states were never meant to be equals with the European Union and the West, but rather were only seen as markets for Western goods and sources of cheap labor. The increase in the debt of the former Yugoslav countries is covered to reveal how much tax money each citizen of the former Yugoslavia would have to pay in order for their countries to be debt free.
Malagurski's address at the Belgrade premiere of the film at the BELDOCS Film Festival at the Kinoteka theater in 2011
Interviewees [ edit ]
The interviewees in the film include:[9][12][13]
Release [ edit ]
The Weight of Chains was screened at the 2011 BELDOCS International Documentary Film Festival 2011, Belgrade, Serbia[21] and, as part of the 2011 Beldocs eho Documentary Film Festival, in Novi Sad,[22][23] Zrenjanin, Kragujevac, Niš, Vršac and Aleksinac,[24] in Serbia. It was also screened in London, England as part of the Balkan Cinema Strand at the Raindance Film Festival 2011,[25] at the 2011 Moving Image Film Festival 2011 in Toronto, Canada,[26] at the International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana, Cuba, [27] and at the Balkan New Film Festival in Oslo, Norway.[28][29] The film has also had cinema screenings in Australia, Serbia, Canada, and the United States.[30]
The film was also due to be shown in the 2011 programme of Serbian film director Emir Kusturica at the Küstendorf Film and Music Festival. However two days before the festival began, the film was removed from the schedule without explanation.[31]
The film was broadcast in June 2014 on RT[32] and in early 2015 on Eurochannel[33] TV networks.
RTS protest [ edit ]
In June 2012, a protest in front of the Radio Television Serbia building requested the airing of Malagurski's film The Weight of Chains on Serbia's public broadcaster.[34] In front of 200 protesters, Malagurski said that Aleksandar Tijanić, the director of RTS, had told him that despite positive reviews, The Weight of Chains couldn't be aired on RTS because it had already been aired on Happy TV, Malagurski claimed only clips had been shown, which he said was corroborated by documents from Happy TV.[35] Malagurski also said that "Serbia is the only country in the region and in almost all of Europe, where The Weight of Chains has not been shown by the national public broadcaster".[36]
Critical response [ edit ]
The film has received mixed responses, these include (ordered by publication date):
Toni Ti, writing in Brightest Young Things, a Washington DC and New York based web magazine noted that the film "brings up a lot of issues the public may not be aware of". However she describes the "often-gratingly blatant bias of the film maker". Malagurski, she says "employs a quippy sarcastic tone that sounds incredibly petulant and at times, too amateur for the gravitas subject matter". She goes on, "overall, spending 30 minutes on Kosovo and barely mentioning what really happened in Srebrenica leaves me questioning the director’s choice in taking this approach". Concluding, "what is he trying to show? It can be quite baffling at times".[37]
Vladislav Panov of Pečat, a weekly political magazine in Serbia, wrote that the film is "very convincing" and that "Malagurski covered the facts and scenes in the film just as Michael Moore does in his documentaries. And just like that film maker, obviously Boris' main role model, Malagurski located the source of evil in Washington and big American corporations which had come to buy us out after instructing and preparing 'irrational slaughters of primitive Balkan peoples' ", but added that "Boris bravely detected the main domestic culprits in G17 Plus in skimming the cream on behalf of foreigners".[38]
However, Konstantin Kilibarda, of McMaster University, described the film as a "misguided attempt to give an alternative account of the wars in the former Yugoslavia", and that the film maker "attempts to minimize, deflect and distort the well established role of Serbian leaders in the former Yugoslavia in pursuing a militant nationalist program since the late 1980s, that sought to reclaim Kosovo through the imposition of martial law, as well as create 'ethnically compact' territories that would link Serbs in Serbia with Serbian minorities in Bosnia and Croatia".[39]
Historian Predrag J. Marković, in a discussion at Singidunum University, described the film as "very important" and that "the film talks with a language understandable to young Westerners", also "the author, with a fine irony, distances himself in regards to the local figures and presents a very complex problem, evading self-justification that many domestic directors are prone to."[40]
Tristan Miller, writing in the U.K.'s Socialist Standard, wrote "the film’s flimsier claims and arguments can be explained as the work of a naïve but well-meaning patriot, but others cannot be so innocently excused" … "for all the effort he spends decrying the dishonest propagandising which fuelled the |
Birch, eight years his junior, who lived about a mile away.
For Birch, Lennon was no doubt the more worldly, older-brother figure he never had. For Lennon, Birch was just a little boy, which is why it would probably be a stretch to say the two were the closest of chums—when Lennon founded the Quarrymen in 1957, he was just 15 and his cousin was all of 7. Still, family ties united them. After Lennon’s mother, Julia, was killed in 1958 (she was struck by a car), his younger half-sisters, Julia Baird and Jacqui Dykins, moved in with Birch’s family, giving Lennon and Birch one more point of commonality. Soon after that tragedy, The Beatles began to jell, which meant months-long residencies for Lennon in Hamburg, Germany, widening the distance between the cousins. But perhaps because of his rocky upbringing, Lennon remained close to his extended family, especially Mimi, whom he called weekly, even at the height of Beatlemania in the early 1960s.
Birch watched his cousin’s rise from both up close and afar, visiting Lennon’s home, Kenwood, in Weybridge, just southwest of London, on several occasions. By the time the 19-year-old Birch went to stay with Lennon for a couple of days in November of 1967, he, too, was living with Mimi, as Lennon had done before him. Thus the two men were linked by shared experiences, as well as blood.
On that November visit, while hanging out in Lennon’s music room, where Lennon wrote such compositions as “We Can Work It Out,” “I Am The Walrus,” “A Day In The Life,” and “Across The Universe,” Birch mentioned that he was trying to start a band. “I was just cheeky enough to ask John for one of his spare guitars,” Birch recalls. “I had my eye on a blue Fender Stratocaster that was lying in the studio, but John suggested and gave me the Gretsch while we were talking.” Over the years, the guitar got enough use by Birch that it underwent a few minor repairs, but the handsome instrument, whose laminated-maple body, headstock, and neck retains its original orange-stain finish, is mostly as it was when it changed hands that day in Lennon’s Kenwood music room.
Although it is not certain exactly how many Beatles songs were recorded on that particular Gretsch, one session at EMI Studio 3 on Abbey Road has been verified, the one for “Paperback Writer.” The band had not been in the studio for about four months, their last effort being “Rubber Soul,” which featured both folk and Indian influences, as heard in the sitar played by George Harrison on “Norwegian Wood.” That album had been recorded after the band’s second North American tour in 1965—now, in the spring of 1966, a third tour was facing them, and by many accounts, the boys were not particularly looking forward to it.
So, in April of 1966, it was into the studio once more, this time to record what would become “Revolver,” which is often ranked as not just one of The Beatles’s best albums, but one of the best rock albums by any band ever. The first song recorded for that album was “Tomorrow Never Knows,” as strong a signal as one could imagine that The Beatles no longer wanted to hold their fans hands as much as drop acid or meditate with them, or so the opening lines would indicate—“Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream,” Lennon sang. Today, musicians such as Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead will tell you they can remember exactly where they were when they first heard that song. Rock music would never be the same.
“Paperback Writer,” in contrast, was pure pop, the “son of ‘Day Tripper,’” as Lennon once called the mostly McCartney composition. In his “Beatles Monthly Book” magazine, reporter/publisher Sean O’Mahony witnessed John Lennon playing the Gretsch he would give to Birch during the recording of that song. “John, George and George Martin huddled round Paul,” O’Mahony wrote, “who was seated at the piano trying to work out a bass bit, before asking George Martin to play it. John leaned on the piano while he listened to Paul’s ideas for a while. Then he picked up his orange Gretsch guitar and proceeded to pick away at it.”
“Paperback Writer” would not make it onto “Revolver,” which was released in August of 1966. Instead, “Paperback Writer” was released as a single in June of 1966, jumping almost immediately to No. 1 on the U.S. and U.K. charts. As the band’s latest hit, “Paperback Writer” became a staple of the short, 11-song set played that summer by The Beatles on their last live tour. Tellingly, not a single track from “Revolver” would be performed on that final tour, after which The Beatles concentrated on their studio work, crafting songs that were generally less formulaic. In this light, Lennon’s Gretsch is a relic from an era when The Beatles were still pop stars, before they decided to push their music past the limitations imposed by fame.Was I right not to tell my little girl she was dying? After being told 13-year-old Rachael had months to live her mother hid the truth
Life cut short: Rachael, who died at the age of 17, never knew how ill she was
Jeanette Gilderdale knew it was bad news before the doctor even said a word. It was written all over his face. 'How long has she got?' she asked.
'Christmas if you're lucky,' he replied. It was now July. That meant just six months before her 13-year-old daughter would die.
Jeanette started to cry, but then stopped herself. She couldn't fall apart. Not now.
She wiped her eyes, shook the doctor's hand and left, before walking down the hospital corridor to where her daughter, Rachael, and her own mother, Daphne, were sitting.
'What did he want, Mum?' Rachael asked. 'Oh nothing,' shrugged Jeanette with her best attempt at a smile. 'He was going through all the same stuff he told you already, just about the operation.'
In that split second, Jeanette made a vow: she would not tell her daughter the truth about her condition. 'I couldn't have her waking up every morning wondering if today was the day,' says the 49-year-old nurse from Eastbourne.
'So I made a decision that I've been criticised for, but which I have never once regretted. I was not going to tell my daughter she could die.'
Even though Rachael defied doctors' expectations by living for another four years, her mother never told her about her bleak prognosis.
Jeanette first spotted the mole on the back of her daughter's right knee in May 1998. 'It was the first day she'd had bare legs after a winter in tights and I spotted it straight away,' says Jeanette.
It was the shape and size of a four-leaf clover. It was three different shades of brown and was raised and uneven. I knew it didn't look right. I'm a nurse, but it wasn't a nursey feeling - it was a mother's intuition.'
The GP assured them that it was nothing to worry about, but on Jeanette's insistence agreed to remove it. The minor surgery was booked for a few weeks later, when Jeanette was due to be on holiday in Malaysia with her sister.
Her mother Daphne was looking after the children, who were on their summer holidays, and agreed to take Rachael to the hospital.
'A week later, Mum got a call from the GP's surgery,' says Jeanette. 'The doctor told Mum that the mole was actually cancerous and Rachael needed to be admitted immediately to Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead to have a second biopsy, in which a larger area was removed.
Painful secret: Jeanette Gilderdale decided not to tell her daughter her cancer was terminal
'They wondered whether they should call me back from holiday, but decided against it because I hadn't been away in years and they thought I'd need all the strength I had when I got back.'
So instead, Jeanette faced the bombshell when she came home. 'I noticed the bandage on Rachael's knee immediately,' she says. 'She made me a cup of tea and said: "Mum, I have something to tell you... I have cancer."'
'I can't remember what I said, I was too shocked,' continues Jeanette.
'But then my mum said it was skin cancer and I said: "Oh, that's the best kind of cancer to get, it's easily cured."
And that's what I thought - I just thought they were dangerous moles that could be removed.'
When Jeanette and Rachael went back for the results of the second biopsy, the consultant, Keith Cullen, explained that Rachael had a malignant melanoma - the most dangerous form of skin cancer, which now affects 10,000 Britons a year. He asked if Rachael had spent a lot of time in the sun - the main cause of the disease.
'I told him she had no interest in sunbathing,' says Jeanette. 'And I had always been so cautious with the children, who are pale with blonde hair, covering them in sunscreen.'
Mr Cullen said there was no definite explanation - only that there must be a genetic factor involved - even though there is no family history of the condition.
He said that with malignant melanoma, the first line of treatment involved removing the tissue surrounding the mole in the hope of stopping the cancer from spreading.
Only if it had spread would they consider chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
Tragic: Rachael, who died a month before her 18th birthday with her mother Jeanette
'But it wasn't until he called me back in, when Rachael was getting dressed in a side room, that I realised how serious it was,' says Jeanette.
'He explained that malignant melanomas are measured on a scale of one to five. Level one is the least dangerous and level five is fatal. Rachael was the top of four. He gave her six months before the cancer would spread to other organs and kill her. I didn't ask him any questions. I just walked out.
'I just couldn't believe it. How can you tell a 13-year-old that she's going to die? You can't. I didn't want her living with fear. I wanted her to have a normal life, however much of it she had left. So I put my tears in my pocket and pulled out my smile. And I kept that smile for the next four years.'
The only person Jeanette told about her daughter's death sentence was her mother, who also agreed not to tell Rachael.
'I had no doubts as to my decision. There was no dilemma about telling her father, my ex-husband. He had nothing to do with his children after I left him. And I couldn't tell her brother Christopher, who was just two years older, because they fought like cat and dog and I didn't want him saying it to her in the middle of a row.
'The school knew she was having the operation, but I never told them the prognosis. I knew the more people I told, the greater the chance she would find out. And I didn't want that to happen.'
Four days later Rachael had emergency surgery at St George's Hospital in London, to remove almost half of the flesh and muscle from her calf and all the lymph nodes at the back of her knee. As far as Rachael was concerned, the operation would fix the problem.
'She was in a wheelchair at home for the first couple of weeks while the wound healed, but she didn't complain,' says Jeanette. And two weeks later there was good news.
'When we went back a fortnight later to have the stitches removed, this new consultant believed that they'd managed to remove all the cancerous tissue. It also didn't look like it had spread to the lymph nodes.
'I was elated - his opinion was a far cry from the first consultant's. He told us that if we got to five years we could say she was in remission. We left the hospital that day with hope.'
Indeed, as Rachael's four-monthly and then six-monthly check-ups passed without problems, their hope was rewarded.
'When she first returned to school she was bullied for her unsightly scar, but Rachael was mature and coped with it. She hated going for check-ups, but beyond that we never talked about what had happened to her,' says Jeanette.
Instead, she became exactly what she should have been: a normal teenager. 'We'd have the usual mother-daughter rows about playing music too loud and not coming home on time.
'She got a boyfriend, passed her GCSEs and went to sixth-form college. She was hoping to join the RAF one day,' says Jeanette. 'Throughout this time, I also tried to cram in as much as we could. We went on holiday to Florida and took lots of day trips.'
But the burden of keeping the secret took its toll on Jeanette. 'I would have nightmares about the cancer spreading around Rachael's body,' she says. 'My only release was going to my mother's house, where I'd cry for hours. It was a huge burden for her, too, she was - and still is - my rock.'
Happy memories: Rachael as a little girl celebrating Christmas with her mum and grandmother Daphne Grenall
It wasn't until October 2001 when Rachael was 17 - four years after the first diagnosis - that she started to feel unwell. At first, it was severe period pains and lower-back pain.
The GP said it was probably just hormonal, but referred her for bone scans to be safe. They came back clear. Then came diarrhoea, which was dismissed as a tummy bug.
Throughout this time Rachael continued to go to school, but Jeanette was getting increasingly worried.
'We had been warned to look out for lumps in her armpits, groin or breasts - and, of course, changing moles. And these other symptoms seemed so unrelated. But I felt in the pit of my stomach that something was wrong.'
Then one morning in March 2002, after weeks fighting a chest infection that she couldn't shake off - which again was put down to just a normal infection - Rachael fainted while stepping into the bath.
'I heard a thud and found her unconscious. She had cut her face badly on the plug hole and was bleeding heavily.'
'Rachael was rushed to hospital, where she regained consciousness.
The doctor accused her of drinking the night before and she shouted at him: "I wasn't drunk, I'm sick."
'But when they asked about any significant health problems and we mentioned the melanoma, he was extremely dismissive. I might just as well have told him she liked Toffee Crisps, for all the interest he showed. She was sent home with stitches.
'After that, Rachael never really recovered and was unable to go back to college. A few weeks later she found a lump in her breast. I felt it and told her not to worry, that we all get those from time to time, depending on the time of the month, but I felt sick to my stomach and I could tell she was terrified.'
Just one month later, after a biopsy of her left breast, the worst was confirmed: the cancer was back. 'We were in the hospital and she turned to me and said: "Mum, I'm dying."
It was the first time Rachael had talked to me about her health, the first time she'd said the "D" word.
'But I still couldn't bring myself to tell her the truth, so I held her and said: "No darling, I won't let them." I don't know who I meant by "them".
'She started to shout at me. I don't remember what she said - she just had to vent her frustration at knowing that she was going to die. I tried to hold her and calm her down and then she went in on herself, saying nothing. It broke my heart that I could not make it better.'
At this point, with time running out, Jeanette knew she couldn't keep this a secret from the family any longer.
'I phoned everybody from the hospital. They weren't angry at me, but they couldn't understand how I'd coped with keeping this to myself.
'I didn't expect the reaction we got from Rachael's dad. The last time he'd seen her she was five years old, but he drove through the night, down from Middlesbrough, and turned up at the hospital in the morning. Christopher also came back from university and was utterly distraught.'
Over the next few days - before any treatment had started - the full horror of Rachael's condition emerged as more scans were taken. 'There was a tumour on her ovary the size of a grapefruit. She also had something in her bowel and in her throat; she was literally riddled with it,' says Jeanette.
Her lips started to go blue with poor circulation and a scan showed there was melanoma in her heart.
'As Rachael started getting confused, it emerged she also had a tumour in her brain.
The speed with which it progressed was horrific. She could walk when they found cancer in the breast - 36 hours later, she couldn't even sit up in bed.
'We all stayed by her side for two weeks. She was just six weeks from her 18th birthday, so we'd spend hours talking about what she'd like to do. But every day she became more tired.'
Poll Would you tell your child if they were terminally ill? Yes No Would you tell your child if they were terminally ill? Yes 1485 votes
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She was never told the extent of her cancer. The doctors said that if she asked, they would have to say, but she never did.
After two weeks in hospital and one round of chemotherapy - which doctors hoped would keep Rachael alive long enough to see her 18th birthday - her care became palliative and she was sent home with morphine and anti-sickness pills.
Nurses from Macmillan and the local hospice stayed in the house, along with Rachael's father and Jeanette's parents. 'The first week, Rachael was conscious and chatty.
'I slept in a camp bed next to her in the living room. But then she deteriorated, rapidly.
'I couldn't touch her because it was too painful. She used to say: "Mummy, the sheets hurt." In the second week, she started to go in and out of a coma. At this stage, I wanted it to be over - there is nothing worse than seeing your child in pain.'
Then on May 16 at 2.50pm Rachael took her final breath in her mother's arms - a month before her 18th birthday.
For her funeral the family had a party with hot dogs, which was what she'd planned to have for her birthday party.
'Seven years on, I think of her every minute of every day,' says Jeanette. 'Some days I miss her so much it's hard to stop myself from collapsing in a heap in the corner and never getting up.
'I know she was my daughter and was with me for 17 years, but sometimes I think, did I just dream her?'
On top of her job as a nurse, Jeanette now devotes much of her time to fundraising for Rachael's House, a charity she has started to provide holiday respite care for teenagers with cancer.
She says that she never regrets the decision she made to keep Rachael's condition from her, despite being criticised by friends who believe Rachael had the right to know.
'Nobody knows how they'll react in that situation,' she says. 'One minute she was 13 with her whole life ahead of her, the next everything is turned upside down.
'I still argue that I did the right thing. People shouldn't condemn me for what I did, but I take great comfort knowing that my daughter had almost four years of going to bed every night believing she would wake up the next morning.
'She had four years of being a normal teenager, not four years of fear and dread.
'I doubt she would have lived as long as she did if she'd known - she would have given up.'
• www.rachaelshouse.org.ukDeal watch: Coastal Norway cruises on sale
The 340-passenger Lofoten travels the scenic, fjord-lined coast of Norway. (Photo: Hurtigruten)
It's deal time again at Hurtigruten, the Norway-based specialist in cruises along the country's fjord-lined coast.
The line on Monday kicked off a five-day Northern Lights Sale that brings savings of up to 40% off regular prices on winter coastal voyages. The sailings offer passengers the chance to see the aurora borealis, a natural light display in high latitudes that also is known in northern areas as the northern lights.
The promotion is available through Oct. 2 for trips taking place between Oct. 1 and March 31.
Under the terms of the offer, six-night sailings from Kirkenes to Bergen in November and December are available for $785 per person, based on double occupancy (a $974 savings). A seven-day reverse itinerary is available for $914 per person (a $1,005 savings).
Twelve-day roundtrip voyages are available for $1,489 to $1,889 per person, depending on departure dates (a savings of $716 to $1,301).
Hurtigruten has 11 ships operating along the Norwegian coast that serve a dual role as ferries for the local population and cruise-like vessels for tourists.
The line's winter voyages are marketed as a way to see the aurora borealis. The line is guaranteeing a northern lights sighting on 12-night trips between October 2015 and February 2016 or passengers will get another sailing for free.
For a deck-by-deck tour of one of Hurtigruten's coastal voyage vessels, scroll through the carousel below.
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/1KI1HcgWhen was the last time you paid cash for something? Even though a few vendors still prefer cash, I know I use my credit card for almost everything I buy these days — that is, if I’m not using PayPal or my phone! Virtual money is just so much easier to use. Now bitcoin is the new up-and-coming denomination of value which exists only in virtual form – and, just like gold, but unlike online gaming currency, it’s inherently scarce.
In 2009, bitcoins were invented: a currency with no physical form or issuing authority, just cryptography protecting them from copying or counterfeit. Their nuts and bolts are based on a whitepaper written by someone called Satoshi Nakamoto [PDF]. People started collecting these coins; select online stores started accepting them in lieu of normal money; and the rest is history.
Bitcoins are a “cryptocurrency”. Instead of being backed by physical scarcity, they’re generated mathematically. There can never be more than twenty-one million of them. Until that limit is reached (projected to be in 2140) anyone can make bitcoins at home by running algorithms to discover them. Called “mining”, generating bitcoins involves nothing more than downloading the freeware bitcoin client and selecting a menu option. But you’re not guaranteed to find any in your first hour of hunting or even your first year, and it gets harder as more and more people jump on the bandwagon. Especially when some such jumpers are building dedicated “mining rigs” that turn GPUs over to the task and can sift through the work much faster than your laptop.
If you don’t want to pour electricity and computing power into this lottery, you can also simply buy bitcoins – and once you have them, you can sell them. They’re worth money, in various conventional formats; several different websites provide exchanges. You can also spend bitcoins: a variety of vendors already accept them for goods and services.
Some people are very excited about bitcoins. There’s a few good reasons. One, they’re decentralized: unlike government-generated currencies, no person or organization can exert control over bitcoins in general. They might inflate or deflate depending on what the market is doing, but there is no danger of a Central Bitcoin Treasury deciding to spontaneously triple the number of coins in existence and drop their value that way. Two, bitcoins operate on peer-to-peer software: if you want to give your friend a bitcoin, you lose one bitcoin and your friend gains one bitcoin, with no one helping themselves to a little off the top as a transaction fee. There are fees associated with changing bitcoins into other currencies, and if you want them held in escrow that can also cost you, but just straight-up handing them over is free. And three, they seem to be going up over time: if you were a lucky miner back when bitcoins were new, and found a bundle of fifty to call your own, those fifty bitcoins are now worth hundreds of dollars, compared to the zilch you could have sold them for when they were still completely obscure. For these reasons and others, bitcoins are becoming increasingly popular among early technology adopters (new!), wall street commodity investors (money!), and even survivalists (no government!).
On the other side of the (bit)coin, some people are very dismissive of the new technology. Some concerns (“it’s a bubble”) are more valid than others (“it’s a pyramid scheme”). While bitcoins could persist indefinitely as an alternative currency – even grow in popularity until they’re used everywhere dollars and euros and whatnot are used now – they could also suffer from a sudden collapse of attention, and therefore devalue. It’s not a pyramid scheme, because you don’t have to pay anyone to start participating in the bitcoin economy and your success or failure doesn’t depend on recruiting others. But on the other hand, people who got into bitcoins when they were new got to take advantage of easy initial mining and have amassed large fortunes that you can’t duplicate now that miners are starting to compete so much harder for the remaining bitcoins. And if you start to value bitcoins, that drives their price up and makes those early adopters that much richer.
Other criticisms include the electronic-dependent nature of the currency. You can’t easily stash bitcoins under your mattress. (Well, unless you want to print them out on paper!) And if your area’s Internet goes down, you can still walk to the convenience store and pay for a soda, but you can’t buy anything with your bitcoins. Then again, that’s true of anything you’d buy online with any currency. Finally, because bitcoins run on cryptography, there’s some risk that a combination of advanced cryptanalysis could crack them wide open and leave them vulnerable to copying or theft. Although this is not a weakness bitcoins currently have and most knowledgeable observers believe their open source implementation is mathematically secure, there’s been over 125 cryptographic algorithms which were released, only to later be broken. Then there’s what happened in the recent Mt. Gox debacle, which involved a single user account on the website being breached and the hacker selling off the many coins in said account… enough to temporarily crash the market. Still, banks dealing in standard denominations send warnings about being careful with one’s account information too; this risk is not unique.
Overall, bitcoins have advantages and disadvantages relative to standard currency that make them appealing to a growing niche. Their bubble could burst or they could fall prey to black hats, but they could also deliver on all their promise and come to encompass a substantial fraction of the world’s wealth with their twenty-one million units of cryptocurrency. As my friend who recently purchased $1000 worth of bitcoins put it, “It would be really embarrassing if they went up 1000x again and I was the only one of my friends who wasn’t a bitcoin billionaire”. And even if bitcoins in particular fail, the idea of an online crypto-currency is likely to live on. Decentralized, organic peer-to-peer money is a compelling idea and bitcoins could have any number of successor denominations with the same appeal.
[image credits: joeduncko.com; bitcoin.org]In 1926, Broadway star Alla Nazimova transformed her West Hollywood estate into the Garden of Allah Hotel, which also drew the likes of Greta Garbo, Laurence Olivier and the Marx brothers.
Nearly a century ago, long before The Abbey established itself as the sexually jumbled center of L.A. nightlife, another WeHo hotspot with an "anything goes" attitude was blurring lines amid flowing booze. In 1917, Alla Nazimova was a Broadway star — and an unapologetic lesbian — who successfully made the leap to Hollywood, signing a $14,000-a-week contract with Metro Pictures, a precursor to MGM. She grew confident enough to produce her own vehicles, adaptations of works by such playwrights as Oscar Wilde and Henrik Ibsen.
But those films bombed. Facing bankruptcy in 1926, she decided to transform her 2.5-acre estate at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights into an Ace Hotel-style party destination, featuring 25 villas surrounding an always-hopping swimming pool. The Garden of Allah Hotel opened its doors Jan. 27, 1927. It took its name from the 1904 Robert Smythe Hichens novel about an artisanal-liqueur-making monk who abandons his vows to rescue an heiress in North Africa; Charles Boyer and Marlene Dietrich played the star-crossed lovers in a 1936 movie adaptation, the first shot in Technicolor.
At the last party in August 1959, a man helped a woman, who was wearing an evening gown, out of the pool.
Over the next decade, the Garden became Hollywood's living room: Humphrey Bogart, Laurence Olivier, John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin, Vivien Leigh, Gloria Swanson, the Marx brothers, Errol Flynn, Greta Garbo, Lillian Gish and Dietrich all either lived there or partied there so often, it felt as if they did. On Sundays, Nazimova hosted "girls only" parties that catered to fresh-off-the-bus ingenues. (The boys, meanwhile, were welcome to show off their talents at afternoon mixers held at the nearby home of George Cukor. "George would be very angry if anything untoward occurred," recalls one attendee. "If Cole Porter fancied a guy, he would very gradually take him aside and give him a phone number to call.")
Partygoers at the closing-night bash sat below silent-film posters.
Nazimova sold the place by 1930 and headed back to Broadway, just as the East Coast literati began making their way westward. George S. Kaufman, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker all flocked to the Garden for its permissive (read: alcohol-soaked) atmosphere and smart, starry clientele. When Nazimova returned to Hollywood in 1938, she rented Villa 24 and lived there until her death in 1945.
By 1959, the once-resplendent Garden had grown seedy and neglected. The Lytton Savings and Loan Co. bought the property for $775,000. But before it razed the spot to make room for a bank and parking lot, the seller, nightclub impresario Morris Markowitz, threw one final costume party. His wife dressed up as Nazimova, he came as Cecil B. DeMille, and a thousand revelers showed up as silent-era stars like Rudolph Valentino, Chaplin and Mae West. Nazimova's Salome — "a hothouse orchid of decadent passion!" — was projected on a screen; by midnight, the pool was filled with empty liquor bottles. A McDonald's stands on the spot today.
A couple sat outside in June 1951.
This story first appeared in the June 17 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.Image copyright AP Image caption These ships are helping to transport the chemical weapons away from Syria
Germany is joining international efforts to destroy Syria's stockpile of chemical weapons, the foreign and defence ministries have announced.
The decision is in response to a request for help from the UN and OPCW, co-ordinators of the destruction plan.
Ministers said waste from the destroyed weapons would be burned at a government facility in the town of Munster in line with environmental regulations.
Germany has until now refused to accept chemical weapons onto its soil.
But Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Germany had "decided not to pull back from our responsibility".
"The destruction of Syria's chemical weapons could be the first, decisive step towards defusing the Syria conflict... It is the duty of the international community to ensure their final disposal," he added.
He said Germany had the capacity and technology to undertake this task.
Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen said Germany "has safe technology and a lot of experience with destroying remnants of chemical arms".
"It is sensible for us to use this capability for the sake of the international community and with it, make a worthy contribution to the peace process."
The announcement was welcomed by Russia.
According to the Interfax news agency, a foreign ministry official said it was "a good contribution made by Germany to a task set before the international community".
Image copyright Reuters Image caption The weapons will be destroyed by experts in Munster in full compliance with environmental regulations
The first consignment of toxic chemicals left Syria on a Danish ship early this week.
It is travelling to Italy, where it will be loaded onto a US Navy ship and shipped to international waters for destruction in a specially created titanium tank on board.
Britain has also offered to help get rid of the waste.
Syria agreed to destroy its chemical weapons in a deal brokered by the US and Russia last year.
It followed international outrage when rockets filled with the nerve agent sarin were fired at three towns in the Ghouta agricultural belt around the Syrian capital, Damascus, on 21 August.
Hundreds of people were killed in the attacks.
Western powers said only Syrian government forces could have carried out the assault, but President Bashar al-Assad blamed rebel fighters.
How the plan will unfoldAld. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th) said he is being bombarded by developers interested in building residential buildings north of Lake Street in Fulton Market. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Stephanie Lulay; DNAinfo/Stephanie Lulay
WEST LOOP — A West Loop alderman said he is being bombarded by developers interested in building residential buildings north of Lake Street, despite a ban on residential development in the area.
Ald. Walter Burnett Jr. (27th) said the interest comes after plans for a 19-story apartment tower at Fulton Market and Ogden Avenue on the west end of the West Loop were pitched at a meeting in March. The tower proposal opened up "the floodgates" of interest, and Burnett now said he has received calls from about seven other developers, all who are interested in building 15-18 story towers in the area.
"They're gang-rushing me," Burnett said. "Since we've entertained [the project at Fulton Market and Ogden], they now think that's what we're letting them do."
But Burnett hasn't signed off on the plans for the project at 1367-1377 W. Fulton Market, which would feature 315 apartments, 145 parking spaces and more than 16,000 square feet of street-level retail. The Fulton Market Innovation Plan, a land-use plan approved by the city in July 2014, calls for new residential buildings to only be developed south of Lake Street. That plan, which set out specific guidelines for certain subsets of Fulton Market, was developed to provide general design guidelines for the area and guide future zoning change requests.
Trammell Crow aims to develop a 19-story tower at at Fulton Market and Ogden Avenue that would bring 315 apartments to the west end of the West Loop. [Trammell Crow]
The neighborhood is home to corporations like Google and Glassdoor, and the city and the alderman have identified it as an area ripe for more offices and commercial projects.
Earlier this month, Burnett said he's hesitant to approve projects that don't comply with the Fulton Market Innovation Plan rules.
"We have got to really think about it," the veteran alderman said. "I think to some extent, some developers are getting too greedy and I think we need to slow down."
Burnett said he has to balance interest from developers with the existing Fulton-Randolph Landmark District plan which aims to preserve the neighborhood's character. Some landmarked buildings, which top out at four or five stories, are still garnering "top-dollar rents," Burnett said.
"When we did that, it was to preserve an area in the community. I think that's a great thing," Burnett said. "The Fulton Market District is something we've been preserving for a long time. It's my baby, and I don't know that I'm ready to let that go."
Community groups had a mixed reaction.
Armando Chacon, president of the West Central Association, said the land use plan is a guide, not the rule. A West Loop Design Guideline Task Force made up of the city's Department of Planning and Development and West Loop leaders is revisiting those guidelines now, Chacon said.
"The West Central Association favors a mixed use north of Lake, which should include residential," he said. "We think it should be part of the landscape north of Lake."
Chacon said the 19-story project could build up a stretch of of Ogden and anchor the west end of the Fulton Market district.
"There is not a lot of residential there now, and this is a way to activate the area," he said.
But Hannah Jones, director of economic development at the Industrial Council of Nearwest Chicago, called the Fulton Market Innovation District plan "a well thought-out document" that was developed after numerous discussions with West Loop leaders.
"No housing north of Lake Street is a guideline decision that came out of those conversations, and should therefore be upheld," Jones said in a statement Thursday. "It is clear from the number of new housing developments already being proposed that allowing just one is not a possibility."
Carla Agostinelli, executive director of the West Loop Community Organization, said the group has not yet weighed in on the proposed Fulton project. While the agency respects the guidelines set by the Fulton Market Innovation District plan, she said the group does consider projects on a case-by-case basis.
"If there is a project which does not seem to fit within the guidelines and has reasoning for it, we will not have an issue making a recommendation that is appropriate," she said in a statement.
South of Lake Street, some residential buildings have been proposed or have recently been completed in Fulton Market, including the 29-story luxury high-rise apartment building The Parker on Lake Street and plans for more than 300 apartments at the Bridgford Foods site. A number of other residential projects have been proposed or are under construction |
, the officers were not so lucky.
PCSO Bintcliffe said: ‘They were young birds but pretty big and strong. Luckily they stayed quite calm, although one tried to give me a good pecking and the other left Mike needing a change of trousers.’
Anyone who has seen the 2007 film Hot Fuzz might recall a certain scene…Americans were grateful for Canadian aid in sheltering and rescuing American diplomats during the Iran hostage crisis of 1980.
The "Canadian Caper" was the popular name given to the joint covert rescue by the Canadian government and the CIA of six American diplomats who had evaded capture during the seizure of the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran, on November 4, 1979, after the Iranian Revolution, when Islamist students took most of the American embassy personnel hostage, demanding the return of the US-backed Shah for trial.[1]
After the diplomats had been sheltered by the British mission and Canadian diplomatic personnel, the Canadian and United States governments worked on a strategy to gain their escape through subterfuge and use of Canadian passports. The "caper" involved CIA agents (Tony Mendez and his colleague known as "Julio" for this event) joining the six diplomats in Tehran to form a fake film crew. It was purportedly made up of six Canadians, one Irishman and one Latin American, who were finishing scouting for an appropriate location to shoot a scene for the nominal science-fiction film Argo. On the morning of Sunday, January 27, 1980, the full eight-person party passed through passport control, at the Mehrabad Airport in Tehran, boarded a Swissair flight to Zürich and escaped Iran.[2]
An article written about these events was published in Wired in 2007. It was used loosely as the basis of the film Argo (2012), which dramatized these events. Winning three Academy Awards and three BAFTA awards, including Best Picture, it is a fictionalized account of the operation.[3]
Background [ edit ]
When the Islamic Iranian Revolution occurred, the US-backed Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, fled the country. Amid the turmoil, a mob of young Islamists, known as the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, stormed the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4, 1979, capturing dozens of diplomats and holding them hostage. They demanded the return of the Shah to Iran for trial.[4] The provisional government fell shortly thereafter, when Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan and his cabinet resigned.[5]
Although the new Iranian government stated that the hostage-takers were students acting on their own, it joined in demands for the return of the Shah.[citation needed] Most of the hostages were held until early 1981.
Sanctuary to diplomats [ edit ]
Robert Anders, Cora Amburn-Lijek, Mark Lijek, Joseph Stafford, Kathleen Stafford and Lee Schatz were the six American diplomats who were harboured by Canadian diplomats Ken Taylor and John Sheardown and exfiltrated from Tehran in 1980. They were working in the consulate, a separate building in the embassy compound, when the Iranians came over the wall. Two groups of diplomats fled into Tehran's streets with orders to walk to the British Embassy: The Anders group (excluding Schatz), along with two Americans seeking consular services (including Kim King, who later had a local embassy employee help him obtain an exit visa and fly out of Iran); and the second group, including Consul General Richard Morefield. The latter took an indirect route and were soon captured and returned to the compound. The Anders group neared the British embassy, but saw a huge crowd staging a protest in their path. Robert Anders invited the others to his home, as he lived nearby.[2]
Over a six-day odyssey, the Anders group, aided by Thai cook Somchai "Sam" Sriweawnetr, went from house to house, including one night spent at the British residential compound. After three days, the Bazargan government fell, and the diplomats realized the ordeal would not be over quickly. Looking for options, Anders contacted his old friend John Sheardown, a Canadian immigration officer, and received an enthusiastic invitation for the entire group.[6] On November 10, five from the original Anders group (Anders, the Lijeks and the Staffords) arrived at the Sheardown residence. In addition to seeing John and Zena Sheardown, they were greeted by Canadian Ambassador Ken Taylor. The Staffords were taken by Taylor to his home, where they joined his wife Pat. The other three stayed with the Sheardowns. They were sheltered by the two Canadian households for a total of 79 days.[7] On November 27, Taylor received a call from the Swedish ambassador, asking him to take in American Lee Schatz. Schatz had initially slept on the floor at the Swedish embassy and later stayed at the apartment of Swedish consul Cecilia Lithander. However, the Swedish ambassador felt he could better impersonate a Canadian. Taylor agreed, and placed Schatz in the Sheardown residence.[2]
The Canadians had undertaken great personal risk in sheltering the Americans, as they provided sanctuary in their private residences for the six endangered American diplomats. Two "friendly-country" embassy officials assisted as well, and an unoccupied diplomatic residence was used for several weeks.[2]
Ambassador Taylor contacted Flora MacDonald, Canadian Secretary of State for External Affairs, and Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark for assistance. They expressed support for the sheltering effort.[8] They decided to smuggle the six Americans out of Iran on an international flight by using Canadian passports for them. To do so, an Order in Council was made to issue official multiple copies of Canadian passports, with various fake identities, to the American diplomats in Canadian sanctuary. The passports that were issued contained a set of forged Iranian visas prepared by the US Central Intelligence Agency to be used in an attempt to escape from Iran.[8]
Preparation [ edit ]
The CIA enlisted its disguise and exfiltration expert, Tony Mendez, to provide a cover story, documents, appropriate clothing, and materials to change their appearances. Mendez worked closely with Canadian government staff in Ottawa, who forwarded the passports and other supporting material to the Canadian embassy through a Canadian diplomatic courier. Mendez flew to Tehran with an associate known as "Julio" to assist with the rescue. Julio and Mendez had previously worked together in the CIA's Office of Technical Service (OTS) branch.[9]
Alternative passports and identities had been prepared for a variety of scenarios, but the cover story selected had the six as Canadians working on a Hollywood crew scouting movie locations. The elaborate back-story was based on a film named Argo. The script used was based on the 1967 Roger Zelazny science fiction novel Lord of Light, adapted and set on a planet with a Middle-Eastern feel, to justify their desire to scout filming locations in Iran.[9]
Movie poster created by the CIA as part of the cover story
To make the cover believable, Mendez enlisted the help of John Chambers, a veteran Hollywood make-up artist. They established a functioning office at Sunset Gower Studios on Sunset Boulevard, named "Studio Six Productions" (a nod to the six diplomats). It used office space that actor Michael Douglas had recently used during making the film The China Syndrome (1979). Telephone calls to the "Studio Six" office in Los Angeles would be answered, should anyone call to check on the film's production. Display ads for the upcoming "Studio Six" film were placed in Hollywood publications, and one such newspaper was given to Cora Lijek to carry as part of her cover materials.[7] The team also prepared fake business cards, held a film party at a nightclub in Los Angeles, and took out early advertisements for the film in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter industry magazines. Robert Sidell, a friend of Chambers and also a makeup artist, posed as a film producer at related events, while his wife Joan performed as the receptionist at "Studio Six". Chambers was later awarded CIA's Intelligence Medal of Merit for his help in the operation.[10][11]
A mistake was made in dating the visas, as the Iranian year begins at the spring equinox. One of the Canadian embassy officers spotted the mistake while checking the documents. Fortunately, extra passports had been included, so Mendez was able to insert new visa stamps with dates based on the Iranian calendar.[12] As the weeks passed during this preparation, the American diplomats read and played games, mainly cards and Scrabble. Ambassador Taylor worked to fly out non-essential Canadian embassy personnel. Taylor sent others on fake errands, both to establish erratic patterns and to case airport procedures. Tension rose as suspicious telephone calls and other activity indicated that concealment of the diplomats may have been discovered.[13]
Rescue [ edit ]
Early on the morning of Sunday, January 27, 1980, Mendez, "Julio", and the six American diplomats, traveling with real Canadian passports and forged entry documents, easily made it through security at Tehran's Mehrabad International Airport.[2] After a short delay because of mechanical difficulties with the airplane, the group of seven boarded Swissair flight 363 for Zürich, Switzerland. By coincidence, the aircraft was named Aargau,[14] after the Aargau canton in northern Switzerland.[9] Upon landing in Zürich, the six diplomats were taken by CIA operatives to a mountain lodge safe house for the night. There, they were told that, for diplomatic purposes, they would not be able to talk to the press and that they would be kept hidden in a secret location in Florida until the hostage situation was resolved.[7] Mendez and Julio continued to Frankfurt, Germany, where Mendez wrote his after-action report.
The next day, the story broke in Montreal, in an article written by Jean Pelletier, Washington correspondent for La Presse; it was quickly picked up by the international press.[13] The CIA drove the six diplomats from Switzerland to the US Ramstein Air Base in West Germany to be flown across the Atlantic to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.[15]
After the eight Americans in the "caper" left Iran on Monday, January 28, the Canadians closed their embassy that same day. Ambassador Taylor and the remaining staff returned to Canada. The six American diplomats arrived in the United States on January 30, 1980.
Agent Antonio J. Mendez is congratulated by President Jimmy Carter on the success of Operation Argo
The six rescued American diplomats:
Robert Anders, 54 – consular officer
Mark J. Lijek, 29 – consular officer
Cora A. Lijek, 25 – consular assistant
Henry L. Schatz, 31 – agricultural attaché
Joseph D. Stafford, 29 – consular officer
Kathleen F. Stafford, 28 – consular assistant
The Canadians involved in the rescue were appointed to the Order of Canada, Canada's second-highest civilian award. They included:
Ambassador Taylor and his wife Patricia Taylor
Immigration officer Sheardown and his wife Zena Sheardown
Mary Catherine O'Flaherty – communications officer
Roger Lucy – political officer and first secretary for the Canadian Embassy.
Laverna Katie Dollimore – personal secretary for Ambassador Taylor
Zena Sheardown, a British subject born in Guyana, would normally have been ineligible for the Order. Flora MacDonald intervened to ensure that she was awarded the membership on an honorary basis. Ambassador Taylor was subsequently awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by the United States Congress for his critical assistance to the United States.
Pelletier had uncovered some of the facts concerning the escaped diplomats before January 28, 1980, but he did not publish the story. He knew the safety of those involved had to be preserved, although there was great news value to the paper and writer. Several other news organizations also possessed some elements of the story. Pelletier's article ran on January 29 as soon as he knew the hostages had left Iran. But his exposure of the operation, resulted in the US having to end their plans to house the six Americans secretly while the hostage drama continued.[13] The Argo story was blown, but the CIA's role was kept secret by both the US and Canadian governments at the time. They wanted to ensure the safety of the remaining hostages. The CIA's full involvement was not revealed until 1997, when records were declassified.[7]
President Jimmy Carter had officially maintained for negotiation purposes that all of the missing American diplomats were held hostage, so the news about six being rescued came as a complete surprise to the public. American gratitude for the Canadians' actions was displayed widely and by numerous American television figures and ordinary citizens alike, who particularly recognized Taylor for gratitude. The Canadian flag was flown in many locations across the United States, and ads were taken out on "Thank You" billboards.[8]
In popular culture [ edit ]
In 1981, a television movie about the Canadian Caper was made, Escape from Iran: The Canadian Caper, directed by Lamont Johnson, with Kenneth D. Taylor played by Gordon Pinsent.[16] The movie was filmed in and around Toronto, and was an American-Canadian co-production.[16] A children's illustrated book about the event was written by 2013 Eric Hoffer Award-winner Laura Scandiffio and Stephen MacEachern, entitled Escapes![17]
The critically and commercially successful film Argo, based on this event, was released in North American cinemas on October 12, 2012. In the film, the role of John Sheardown and his wife Zena were omitted for reasons of length and cost.[6][18] The film includes elements of both fact and fiction.[3] In particular, the film focuses largely on the role the CIA played in the operation and minimizes the extended involvement of the Canadians, and their share of strategy and preparation. Former President Jimmy Carter acknowledged this in an interview in 2013, while also praising the film.[19] In addition, the film incorrectly states that the six American diplomats had been turned away by the British and New Zealand embassies. The American diplomats spent one night in a British diplomatic compound before it became obvious that the militants were searching for the diplomats and had confronted the British embassy. All of the diplomats involved agreed that the residence of the Canadian Ambassador would be better suited to sheltering them.[20] Argo won three Oscars, including Best Picture, at the 85th Academy Awards on February 24, 2013.[21]
Historian Robert Wright also covered these events in his book Our Man in Tehran (2010). A companion documentary film of the same title was released in 2013.[22]
References [ edit ]Hi everyone, its been a while since I've posted anything to this amino so instead of reintroducing myself I am going to be talking abit about a certain consistent theme across the splatoon 2 single player campaign.
*WARNING THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR THE FINAL BOSS OF SPLATOON 2 READ AT YOUR OWN RISK*
Octolings.
One of the main NPCs you fight against in the single player missions, as one of the main bulks of the octarian forces (and my personal favorite designs for an enemy in a videogame), they teach the player about predicting the movements of players in the main multiplayer matches. As such these NPCs are equipped with gear similar to an inkling, however there is one change when it comes to these bipedal octopodes; and that is their eyewear.
In the first Splatoon, the Octolings wore these goggles, which are impractical when you look at them objectively, however when we fast forward to Splatoon 2 we see these glasses being used.
Now these do look very similar to something, and no I'm not talking about the blatent Terminator eye syndrome in the left lense, I am talking about the similarities to the glasses worn by Callie of the Squid Sisters during the final boss.
These glasses are dubbed as the "Hypno-shades" by Dj Octavio during the final boss after Marie sniped them off of Callie during Phase 2 of the fight as he utters this line of text.
Besides these glasses having different lights illuminating the glasses, they look shockingly similar, this gives food for thought to the theory that DJ Octavio used these goggles as mind control devices for his octarian forces, using Callie as a potential test subject.
But why Callie? And why would he use these on the Octolings?
One simple answer.
Marina.
We have seen fanmade characters of octolings coming to the surface for one reason or another however Marina shows this concept off proudly, but did you ever think on why she came up there in the first place? The Sunken Scroll's page #2 may have the answer, as we see Marina with two octarians enjoying the initial confrontation with Octavio during Splatoon 1.
What if this event lead Marina and other Octolings to the surface to co-exist with Inklings from a newly acquired passion for music and inkling culture? If so, Octavio would then worry that the bulk of his army leaving Octo Valley and Octo Canyon and rendering his army useless, thus to combat this, he kidnaps Callie and develops an eyewear that he can use to manipulate the minds of the wearer and potentially control his army better.
I am not the first to point this out as the user Green Octoling came up with the same kind of theory a few days earlier, however this version of the theory added a better reason to why these glasses are used.
As this is all up for interpretation at this point, I need to list the major hole in this theory, Why haven't we seen other Octolings in Inkopolis besides Marina? Maybe they are either in hiding, or they are just not yet present in Inkopolis square or the Inkopolis plaza, unless you count in hackers of course.
As this is a theory, I would like to know your thoughts, are these shades mind controlling these soldiers of the Octarian army? Or are they merely meant for looks? Let me know in the comments!
Thanks for reading everyone, I'll catch you next tide!
#CuratorReviewA week ago Omar Kinnarath was preparing for rally at the Winnipeg City Hall, now he is being relentlessly harassed online.
"I'm concerned for sure. I'm concerned about how my life is completely changed now," he said.
Kinnarath is the founder of FF1 — Fascist Free Treaty 1, which planned a rally in response to a different rally organized by the Canadian Coalition of Concerned Citizens (CCCC) against Motion 103, which calls on the government to "recognize the need to quell the increasing public climate of hate and fear."
On Saturday, the handful of people who joined the CCCC protest at Winnipeg City Hall Saturday — one of a series of protests nationwide — were drowned out by hundreds who attended FF1's counter-rally.
The large turnout to counter the CCCC rally was amazing, Kinnarath said.
A photo of Kinnarath dressed in traditional clothing for Ramadan was made into a meme and started spreading online. The meme said his employer's name and called Kinnarath a danger to society, also calling for a boycott of the company he works for.
"It's definitely the fact that I'm a Muslim. It's definitely the fact that I'm a refugee," he said.
"They think I'm a terrorist. They see pictures of me in traditional garb during Ramadan and they are flipping out and sharing my picture," he added.
The image was reported to Twitter and Facebook and Kinnarath said it has been taken down. He also spoke with his employer and apologized for what was happening but Kinnarath said his employer was empathetic about the situation.
However, the online harassment hasn't stopped since the rally with a barrage of Facebook messages, sometimes threatening, and other posts about him online.
"I had no idea there would be a need for this in 2017. It seems ridiculous to have an anti-fascist resistance," he said.
"I'm just staying vigilant and hopefully this is just trolls being trolls, like keyboard warriors, that's what I'm just hoping it is."Hong Kong’s unpopular chief executive has infuriated pro-democracy campaigners by using a Chinese New Year message to urge the former colony's citizens to act more "like sheep".
In a brief video address commemorating the start of Year of the Sheep, CY Leung said sheep-like behavior was required in the wake of the turbulence caused by last year’s street protests.
“Last year was no easy ride for Hong Kong. Our society was rife with differences and conflicts,” the chief executive of the former British colony said.
“In the coming year, I hope that all people in Hong Kong will take inspiration from the sheep's character and pull together in an accommodating manner to work for Hong Kong's future.”
In case his message had been missed, Mr Leung noted that the 12 animals in the Chinese zodiac had 12 individual "character types". "Sheep are widely seen to be mild and gentle animals living peacefully in groups," he said.
• Seven of the dumbest things CY Leung has said
The reaction from the pro-democracy campaigners and student groups behind the recent Umbrella Movement protests was anything but mild.
“He has every intention of gobbling up Hong Kong for his Beijing master,” said Claudia Mo, a pro-democracy legislator, noting how Mr Leung’s detractors knew him as “the wolf”.
Mr Leung had a track record of tactlessness, Ms Mo added. “Once he told his supporters that if others have different opinions [they should] go and shout at them.”
Asked for his opinion on the reference to sheep, Alan Leong, from the pro-democracy Civic Party, told CNN: "I think it's crazy, and he is sick.”
Hong Kong pro-democracy activists occupied the city's streets for 11 weeks last year in what became known as the Umbrella Movement.
Ma Ngok, a political scientist, told the South China Morning Post, the comment was “not smart”.
“He seems like he wants the people to blindly follow what he says like sheep following the shepherd. And CY Leung preaching more peace is kind of ironic because many people see him as the guy causing a lot of conflicts in Hong Kong."
• Who is CY Leung and why do Hong Kong protesters want him to resign?
A 2012 profile of Mr Leung by China’s state-run media suggests Hong Kong’s leader once placed greater value on characteristics usually associated with the outgoing Year of the Horse.
The pro-Beijing leader’s impoverished childhood instilled in him “the importance of determination and perseverance,” the profile said.The Islanders, who went 24-12-4 after Weight replaced Jack Capuano on Jan. 17, had the NHL's second-best record from Jan. 19 until the end of the season. They ended the season with a six-game winning streak but finished one point behind the Toronto Maple Leafs for the second wild card into the Stanley Cup Playoffs from the Eastern Conference.
Weight, who admitted Wednesday that when he got the job he wasn't sure if being a coach was something he wanted to do long-term, will continue to serve as assistant general manager.
"I wasn't lying to everybody when I [said] I was kind of taking it a day at a time and just really focused on once we got close to that playoff race to trying to get in the playoffs and compete," said Weight, the Islanders' 19th coach since entering the NHL in 1972. "It was probably the two days after the season, to be honest. I felt like a good feeling coming out of the year after the last game against [the Ottawa Senators, a 4-2 win Sunday] and talked about it a lot with friends and obviously my family and people within the organization.
"We just worked hard at it for two days. It was important to me to meet with all of my bosses face to face and talk about things I believe in, that communication, that clarity, as do they. By the time we went to our wrapup dinner [Tuesday] night, I was feeling really good about it, as were they, and that was exciting to me. I would say in the last 48 hours, nothing really changed in my mind."
Video: Doug calls into the studio discuss his new job title
Having Weight, 46, as coach is a relief to general manager Garth Snow.
"I was just hoping and my fingers crossed on a personal level, because it's a big commitment," Snow said. "Doug has obviously a family, a lot of moving parts going on in his life away from hockey. I know that the stars had to align for him personally to accept this responsibility, so I was happy that Doug and his family had that comfort level."
The Islanders were last in the Eastern Conference when Weight took over, but he managed to get them back in the playoff mix despite a schedule that included a nine-game road trip, the longest in their history, from Feb. 21 through March 11. The Islanders went 5-3-1 and remained in the race to the final weekend.
"It was real seamless; everybody picked up the rope and pulled on it and helped me," Weight said. "The players responded. I think once I felt like the players were responding and the more meetings I had and we changed a couple of things as a staff, I felt like the players responded. Our team got better from a few things. I did feel very confident that way.
"I had a couple of games admittedly in [media] scrums after that I felt like maybe you didn't get outcoached or whatnot, but I didn't react to certain things as well as I'd like. You learn from those things. It's experience. It's different … you move six feet on a bench [from being an assistant] and you think it'll be relatively the same, and it's not. There's a lot more pressure as far as making those decisions and getting the vibe of your team and going with your gut as times. But I really did gain momentum as I felt our team did. I felt confident that I felt if it was the right thing to do that I could do it.
"I'm proud that I prepared for four years. I did a lot of things in the offseason that kind of prepared me if I did go that direction and learned from a lot of good people, so I definitely did gain momentum as the season went on from the first game I coached to the last."
Weight said he'll probably make changes to the coaching staff. Assistant Bob Corkum joined Weight after Capuano was fired; Greg Cronin has been an assistant since the 2014-15 season.
"That's what I've got to get to work on now," Weight said. "I'm excited that I can be entrusted. We've got to work diligently. I want good people that want to work and that have a passion to win and have respect and knowledge. You want everything that's good around your team."
With his coach in place, Snow can turn his attention to potential roster upgrades and the NHL Expansion Draft and 2017 NHL Draft in June. He also has the ability to re-sign captain and center John Tavares beginning on July 1. Tavares, the No. 1 pick in the 2009 NHL Draft, has next season remaining on his contract.
"Obviously, John's been here since [he was] an 18-year-old kid," Snow said. "Obviously, [he's] the face of our team, our franchise. He knows how we feel about him and how much respect we have for him as a player and as a person. We can't say enough good things about what John brings to the organization.
"We're going to give it our best shot in getting him signed. He's got one more year on his six-year contract. That should happen towards the end of June, July and we'll start that process."It was minus 35 degrees Celsius in February of 2013, when Máirtín Ó Dubhghaill visited Hortolova, a children’s orphanage in Bryansk in South-West Russia.
The heating in the building was broken, due to a faulty pump system, and the residents, mostly in their mid-teens, were perishing in the cold.
Máirtín immediately headed to the nearest town, and with money fundraised in Galway and Connemara, bought warm blankets, woolly socks, and electric heaters for the children.
No wonder in this part of Russia, halfway on a map between Kiev and Moscow, he is sometimes referred to as Santa Claus.
Since he first got involved with From Russia With Love, the charity founded in Dublin in 1998, the Indreabhán resident has visited Russia at least 40 times to bring much needed cash to buy practical items for orphaned children.
He has been there three times already this year (October, May and January), and is planning another trip early in the New Year to dispense the money fundraised in Galway and Connemara during this festive season.
Now, his dedication to the charity, and volunteerism generally, has resulted in him being named as a recipient of a prestigious award, which he received at an awards ceremony at City Hall in Dublin on December 7.
It was during his teaching days at St Pat’s primary school Lombard Street in the city, when Máirtín first became involved with From Russia With Love, a subsidiary of the newer version, From Children With Love.
Máirtín used to bring children from St Pat’s to sing carols on Shop Street during Christmas, something he is still doing with choirs including at Na Forbacha.
One Saturday night 18 years ago, Máirtín saw founder of the charity, Dublin’s Debbie Deegan on Pat Kenny’s RTÉ television show Kenny Live, where she was speaking about the abandoned children she had met in Russia.
Máirtín rang her the following morning to pledge his support and that year’s St Pat’s carol songs collection was donated to the charity. And he has had an association with the charity ever since.
See full story in this week’s Connacht Tribune.Late last February, 1,546 players assembled in the Baltimore Convention Center to play Magic: The Gathering, a competitive collectible card game. To outsiders, the Hasbro-owned fantasy game is a diversion. To these tournament participants, however, it’s a cut-throat mental battle for a $3,500 prize.
Among the players present was Jackie Lee, a 27-year-old illustrator who had traveled from Boston to compete. Lee was no ordinary participant: In order to prepare for the Baltimore Grand Prix, she play-tested her deck and studied strategy for 30 hours every week.
After 15 grueling one-on-one matches, Lee’s hard work paid off and she found herself playing in the semifinals. This match would be livestreamed around the globe and commented on by a pair of sportscasters, like a high-stakes poker game.
It was here that Lee’s luck began to change.
Cloaked in the anonymity of the stream’s live chat, hundreds of viewers began to berate Lee for what they considered her largest offense: playing cards while female.
“From ‘get back to the kitchen’ to comments about how fat or bangable I am, to openly stating one’s intention to masturbate, it was pretty much as bad as you could imagine,” Lee told the Daily Dot. “They grew more and more desperate for me to lose, and when I finally lost my semifinal match, they exploded in delight.”
Online sexism is nothing new. What makes Lee’s case special is that she’s facing it by herself.
Regardless of the support she garners from other female—and more commonly, male—players, Lee is in an unprecedented position. She holds a ranking among the top 100 players worldwide. Hers is the only name among the top 100 that’s female.
Players estimate that women make up ten percent of the community. But according to another professional Magic player, writer Patrick Chapin, this handful of female players is beginning to outperform its male counterparts. As he wrote on Star City Games, one of the web’s premier Magic strategy blogs, women are a more noticeable part of the community than ever:
“Percentage-wise, women are performing not only better than ever at Grand Prix, but better than men by a clear margin,” he wrote. “Seventy-five percent of all women to [make it to the] Top 8 [of] a Grand Prix in Magic’s 15-year history did so in the past four months.”
Chapin, an internationally ranked player himself, told the Daily Dot that no woman before Lee has ever been so widely considered a top player by her peers.
“This isn’t a first or anything, but from watching her play, I can tell you, she isn’t just good for ‘a girl.’ She truly is top 20 or top 15 in the US, and if she keeps performing at this level, she will continue to climb. She has skill, mental toughness, endurance, perspective, is cool under pressure, and a great attitude. Plus it looks like she is having fun.”
While the sexism often present in the Magic community has kept many women from competing, Chapin said he thinks Lee is helping to change that.
“Racism and sexism were nothing new, but being a champion did not spare Jackie Robinson or Billie Jean King. Jackie Lee is scaring people, as she is breaking down world views of a lot of people. She is the best female player of all time already, and on the way up. She is also making it a lot better for everyone who is to come after her and she is doing a lot for Magic culture.”
Lee is seen as an inspiration—and to some, as the embodiment of the threat to the male-dominant status quo. In order to feel they’ve put her back in her place, some threaten her with rape, one of the oldest power assertions in history:
“I don’t personally care what this pack of children says about me, but I find it very sad, given that other women have told me I’m a source of inspiration. When your champion is getting publicly threatened with rape during a serious competition, I think that says terrible things about your community.”
Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that produces Magic: The Gathering cards (as well as other fantasy games like Dungeons and Dragons) has already made its position on sexual harassment clear. Last year, the company banned a player for life after he wrote an online post in which he threatened to rape a female Wizards employee.
That employee was Helene Bergeot, the Director of Organized Play. Bergeot, who oversees Magic tournament regulations worldwide, told the Daily Dot that sexism and harassment are “definitely not welcome,” online or off.
“It is considered as unsporting conduct,” she said. “Fortunately, we’ve encountered only a few isolated cases of this nature and even fewer reported by female players or judges.”
Perhaps Bergeot has encountered few cases because of her reputation as somebody who takes harassment very seriously. In late March, she had another player suspended for taking photos of other tournament attendees and making fun of their appearances on Twitter. That same weekend, she blogged a warning for other players who would do the same.
“Disrespectful, harassing or bullying behavior, whether onsite or online, is not welcome at Magic events and violates Magic tournament floor rules,” she wrote.
Supporters know that if anyone is going to put a halt to the sexist remarks Lee is facing, it’ll be Bergeot. For example, when Dan Barrett saw another player tweeting sexist remarks about Lee and fellow female player Melissa DeTora, he immediately brought them to Bergeot’s attention.
For her part, however, Lee has done—and cared—little about her trolls. Apart from a short lecture at the end of a strategy article, Lee’s public statements are strictly about the game.
She hopes that her stoicism will pave the way for more women to start playing Magic.
“It’s been shown that in very heavily male-dominated professions, such as certain fields of science, when the number of women begins to approach 50 percent, the chilly climate evaporates,” she said. “I’m hoping that as more women enter the tournament scene, women who play will finally be regarded as the norm, and we can all stop fussing about it.”
Photo via Wizards of the CoastOn Saturday’s broadcast of “Melissa Harris-Perry” on MSNBC, author Allison Hobbs reacted to the report that head of Spokane’s NAACP Rachel Dolezal has been identifying herself as a black woman, while, according to her birth certificate, she was born to white parents.
Hobbs stated that she has heard some question if Dolezal is mentally ill and then that there is something “psychologically wrong with someone who would choose to give up white privilege in order to live as a black woman.”
“She’s also not necessarily — I think there’s some confusion in that many people would wonder, well, ‘What is she trying to gain? What is she after?’ That’s where I’ve been really interested in some of the responses. Some people have gone as far as to say that she must be mentally ill; she must be disturbed. There’s something actually psychologically wrong with someone who would choose to give up white privilege in order to live as a black woman.”
Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrentMost of the reactions to the President’s statement that Romney’s plan is similar to his plan to change Social Security have been to say that it is not true. I believed what Obama said, so I went to the news article about Diamond-Orszag plan which Obama linked to on his election website. A link to the Diamond-Orszag paper here.
The plan involves benefit cuts and revenue increases. Social Security as a self-funding system, which never pays out more than it takes in. The D-O plan claims that Social Security has an actuarial deficit which will kick in way out in the future where accounting identities can be mathematically configured to paint a frightening picture. Despite recent use of the Social Security payroll tax as a piggybank for stimulus purposes, the myth of the conservation of Social Security revenues continues.
Our children and their children will get their Social Security benefits cut under this plan. The D-O plan rationalizes that those generations will live longer, so they divide total revenues over more years of retirement, and like “Good Americans” inflict the pain of cuts without any empathy, priding themselves on the ability to make ‘difficult’ decisions.
Current workers will be asked to pay increased payroll taxes under the D-O plan. This would be reasonable if expected benefit levels were maintained for future recipients. Instead, The D-O plan won’t pay out benefits under the same formulas. They change the structure of future benefits. D-O reduces the benefits for younger persons and their progeny (<55 year olds):
“Workers who are 55 or older will experience no change in their benefits from those scheduled under current law. For younger workers with average earnings, our proposal involves a gradual reduction in benefits from those scheduled under current law. For example, the reduction in benefits for a 45-yearold average earner is less than 1 percent; for a 35-year-old, less than 5 percent; and for a 25-year-old, less than 9 percent. Reductions are smaller for lower earners, and larger for higher |
one of the few right decisions the board has done, or this person is one of the few board members who knew what they were doing (from what I heard, this person may have left the board a while ago when SEGA decided to start the project again). This game should have been cancelled permanently, and the final product is undeniable proof of it.
"Despite that, I believe SEGA wanted to try to get some of the money back, at the fans' expense. So another blame for SEGA there. SEGA should have also watched the project and development a lot better, because there was a lot of warning signs that said this was a disaster in the making. So whoever was assigned to watch Gearbox and the game has some responsibility too, unless the board was forcing him to do it. SEGA and their lawyers also have some blame on the wording of the contract too, but more on that later."
The blog then moves onto the main event, addressing the involvement of Gearbox Software and its CEO, Randy Pitchford. In no uncertain terms, the studio is accused of robbing its publisher and lying to its face.
"Now here is the company that should get most of the blame: Gearbox Software and Randy Pitchford. Gearbox stole from SEGA, they robbed us, lied to us about the game, and tried to get another company to make the game instead. Let's see where the funding went shall we? Everyone said the game went to both Borderlands games, but Duke Nukem Forever gets a mention as well, but it's pushed out of the spotlight, because people want to forget about that game, and I don't blame them! Duke Nukem Forever had a big impact on Aliens: Colonial Marines as well."
A Gamasutra article was used to back up the claim. The article in question is an interview with Pitchford, in which he explains how his studio got the rights to Duke Nukem Forever.
"It clearly shows that Pitchford and Gearbox wanted to focus heavily on Duke Nukem Forever, but how would they get the money to hire some of the 3D Realms team and even buy the intellectual property? Sure, they made a lot from Borderlands, but guess where they got the money to fund Borderlands in the first place? Yup, SEGA.
"So Gearbox essentially lied to SEGA, mishandled funds, broke agreements and contractual obligations to work on other projects, didn't want to work on a game they were contractually obligated to work on and gave it to another team, poor organization and direction on ACM, took on too many projects from different companies at once, and other things that we may not even know about. Hell, part of me believes that Gearbox wanted this thing delayed as much as possible so they can get more funding money to embezzle from SEGA."
Danielson concludes by saying he's heard rumors of possible legal action being taken by SEGA, but admits the contract may preclude such a step from being taken. All Gearbox apparently had to do was ship the game to fulfill the agreement, which it's now done. He added that SEGA should have canceled A:CM and taken the studio to court, rather than try to make the fans pay for the investment. The writer even goes so far as to suggest SEGA ought to have published Borderlands, given it paid so dearly for it.
"In this case, what happened clearly was SEGA had a decent eye on the project, rightfully cancelled it, when they saw the problems, then someone decided to restart the project, leading to this massive mess," he concludes. "Where is our money Randy? We should get sales from Borderlands 1 and 2, since it was our money that funded it."
That eventual Aliens: Colonial Marines post [SEGA Awakens]
You are logged out. Login | Sign upStephen Colbert is preparing for his big CBS close-up. The new host of The Late Show has been filming test episodes of his new show, inviting guests and audience members into the recently revamped Ed Sullivan theater in an attempt to figure how his show will work. In a piece on CNN Money, attendees said what they saw over the past week or so “resembled an actual broadcast in many ways,” with Colbert chatting up guests including former Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher, cartoonist Garry Trudeau, and former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins and running through both monologue jokes and pre-taped pieces. Susan Pane, a New York-based dog groomer who attended a test run last Thursday, told CNN Money that Colbert seemed “genuine,” noting that he wasn’t using the “goofy persona that he had on The Colbert Report.”
Other interesting tidbits from the CNN Money piece include hints as to what The Late Show’s new set looks like, with attendee Scott Interante telling the site that the set is “two-level,” “beautiful,” and has a bit of a “mechanic shop aesthetic,” with Colbert entering through a garage door each night. The sign above the stage reads, “The Late Show With,” with CNN Money noting “the absence of the host’s name is deliberate, as the sign is positioned above where Colbert will stand each night.”
For those who can’t wait until the new Late Show premieres September 8, there’s always Waze. GPS app users can now opt for Colbert’s voice when choosing who reads them directions, though the comedian and host’s golden pipes will only be an option on the service through September 22. In a statement reported on by The Verge, Colbert touted the virtues of his “own dulcet tones,” with Waze noting it also recently added Neil Patrick Harris and New England Patriots’ star Rob Gronkowski to its voiceover roster.New England Patriots running back Jonas Gray is a man of many talents.
The day after Gray’s breakout performance against the Indianapolis Colts in which he rushed for 199 yards and four touchdowns in New England’s 42-20 win on Sunday night, a video began getting passed around showcasing another of his skills.
Apparently, Gray’s as funny as he is a powerful runner, and he once was the opening comedy act for Screech from “Saved By the Bell.”
Back when he suited up for Notre Dame, a friend of Gray’s, who was a stand-up comedian, encouraged him to start jotting down his jokes. Soon enough, Gray had collected enough material and his friend told him to just go for it, according to an interview with Boston.com recently.
“He said, ‘You know what we need to do? We need to have something at Notre Dame where you just do open mic or something. We’ll get a headliner, and you just do your thing. Get all your teammates to come out, and it’ll be fun,'” Gray said. “We ended up doing it.”
It just so happened he ended up opening for Dustin Diamond at a South Bend, Ind., bar back in 2011.
“My friend knew him,” Gray said. “He just hooked up with his agent, he knew him, and made it happen.”
Check out Gray trying his hand at comedy in the video below.
Photo via Brian Spurlock/USA TODAY Sports ImagesA spokesman for Prime Minister Tony Abbott declined to comment on the ambassador's recall. Anger mounts: Indonesia reacts after allegations that Australia spied on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Credit:Reuters The furore erupted after whistleblower Edward Snowden released documents revealing that in 2009 Australia's Defence Signals Directorate targeted the personal mobile numbers of Dr Yudhoyono and his wife, Kristiani Herawati, as well as eight others in the President's inner circle. His spokesman, Teuku Faizasyah, called on Australia to urgently ''clarify this news to avoid further damage. The damage has been done and now trust must be rebuilt." Dr Yudhoyono's special adviser for political affairs, Daniel Sparringa, said the spying revelations had ''devastated'' the President.
''Until today, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has always paid special attention toward the deepening of the two countries' relations. Therefore the news has devastated us,'' he said. Ambassador recalled: Nadjib Riphat Kesoema. Mr Sparringa said if immediate action was not taken by Australia, ''it will continue to impede'' ties. Indonesia's Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said: "It is nothing less than an unfriendly act which is having already a very serious impact on our bilateral relations. "This is not a clever thing. It's not a smart thing to do. It violates every single decent and legal instrument that I can think of.'' He was not satisfied with Australia's response, which he characterised as ''dismissive''. He repeated an earlier threat to withdraw intelligence cooperation - which could include information on people-smuggling and terrorism.
Prime Minister Tony Abbott declined to comment on the revelations but defended information-gathering in principle while reiterating that the relationship with Indonesia was "all in all our most important". ''All governments gather information … and all governments know that every other government gathers information,'' he said. However, Australia used information to ''help our friends and our allies, not to harm them'', Mr Abbott said. ''My first duty is to protect Australia and to advance our national interest and I will never, ever depart from that. Consistent with that duty, I will never say or do anything that might damage the strong relationship and the close co-operation that we have with Indonesia." The revelations will stoke tensions between the two nations, already simmering over boat turn-backs and Indonesia's dissatisfaction with Australia's explanation on earlier spying revelations.
It is believed that Dr Yudhoyono has called together his closest advisers to discuss the allegations and an appropriate response as furious senior members of Indonesia's parliament pressed him to take a firm line. The President has ordered the State Intelligence Agency to find out which Indonesian officials are currently the subject of phone-tapping. A deputy chairman of the parliament's foreign affairs committee, Tubagus Hasanuddin, said Australia had "crossed the line". The revelations were contained in documents leaked by Snowden and revealed by the ABC and the Guardian Australia website on Monday. The phones of the President, his wife - who is known universally as Ibu Ani - Vice-President Boediono, former vice-president Yusuf Kalla and Dr Yudhoyono's foreign affairs spokesman, Dino Patti Djalal, were all targeted, as were a number of senior ministers. Mr Dino, until recently Indonesia's ambassador to Washington, Yusuf Kalla and another spying victim, Hatta Rajasa, all have presidential ambitions in elections next year.
The documents reportedly reveal that Australia attempted to listen to Dr Yudhoyono's personal phone calls at least once in 2009. The material comes in the form of a slide presentation. One slide entitled ''IA Leadership Targets + Handsets'' bears the names of the top political figures and the types of phones they own. The slide's footer bears an Australian Defence Department slogan: ''Reveal their secrets - Protect our own.'' Another slide is titled ''Indonesian President Voice Events'' and has a graphic of calls from Dr Yudhoyono's Nokia phone over 15 days in November 2009. Mr Dino told ABC's 7.30 that he felt "very violated" by the tapping. Mr Hatta, who was the state secretary at the time, said he was concerned because, at the time, he was discussing "state secrets which were certainly not for public consumption, let alone for another country's".
The deputy speaker of Indonesia's parliament, Budi Priyo Santoso, said there was great anger among MPs. "I'm deeply disappointed and upset … why would they use this kind of thing if they try to conduct their diplomacy to a high moral standard? We need clarification, otherwise it will affect our bilateral relationship.'' Another senior MP, Mr Tubagus, said Dr Yudhoyono must react strongly. "Give Australia a timeframe to provide an explanation. If not, return the Australian ambassador to his country until Indonesia gets an explanation." The bugging of Ibu Ani would not appear simply to be an attempt to extract personal information about the President, but to have an ear to one of the most important policy relationships in Indonesia. In a 2007 WikiLeaks cable, Ibu Ani was named by US diplomats as the country's ''cabinet of one'', and sources in Jakarta's political elite have described her as having a ''gatekeeper role'' to the President. Tensions are already high between Australia and Indonesia over surveillance after Fairfax Media reported recently that Australia's embassy in Jakarta housed electronic spying equipment.
Loading Greens senator Scott Ludlam has called for an immediate inquiry, saying that Australian intelligence-gathering along with the US surveillance program was out of control. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer said the revelations were damaging to Australia. ''It's a shocking situation,'' he said.The Australian Broadcasting Corporation thought that they could get away with running a hit piece on #GamerGate on their nightly news program called 7:30, hosted by Monique Schafter. The piece caused enough controversy to get Australians writing and calling in about it, but the response from the ABC was to explain that they chose to go with the harassment angle over detailing corruption in the media industry.
Many Australians became proactive in seeking help from the Australian Communications and Media Authority after it became known that the broadcasting corporation actively chose to present the story in a one-sided fashion. The ACMA is the equivalent of the CRTC in Canada or the FCC in America.
After a few months of silence, an investigation and compliance officer from the broadcasting investigations section of the ACMA responded to a consumer about launching a full investigation into the ABC.
Over on Kotaku in Action, a post from user not_just_amwac contains the contents of the letter from the ACMA for all to see.
I was forwarded the letter, where compliance officer D. Benson mentions that…
“The Australian Communications and Media Authority (the ACMA) has commenced an investigation into your complaint concerning the broadcaster’s compliance with the ABC Code of Practice 2011. “Investigations of this nature may take several months and you will be notified of the outcome in due course.”
The letter goes on to explain that the results of the investigation will be posted up online for all to see.
This doesn’t guarantee that the ACMA will find the Australian Broadcasting Company in fault, or that any sort of reprimand will be handed down, but it does mean that they are looking into the situation. It’s similar to the acknowledgment that the FTC is also investigating Gawker as well, as documented in a post on KiA [backup].
For those of you fighting for ethics, this is great news. At least the governing bodies are listening and willing to look into the situation.
As for the American Broadcasting Corporation’s hit-piece on #GamerGate… it helped wake up a lot of people and get them reacting and looking for ways to rectify the lopsided portrayal of #GamerGate in mainstream media. The coverage was so biased, it even managed to get YouTubers like AlphaOmegaSin involved. However, at the moment, there have been no reports of any formal governing bodies investigating ABC, Stateside.
I’ll keep you posted on the outcome of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and what sort of verdict the ACMA will hand down regarding their coverage of #GamerGate.The 23-year-old black man whose killing Saturday by a Milwaukee police officer sparked protests and violence was charged just last year with pressuring a victim not to testify against him in a retaliation shooting, criminal complaints show.
The complaints obtained by FoxNews.com describe how Sylville K. Smith, while jailed in the July 2014 shooting, enlisted his girlfriend to tell the victim to sign a letter recanting his story, commanding her by phone to “stay on dude” and to “call [expletive] and tell him to fill out that form!”
The victim eventually did recant his story, and both the shooting case and the witness intimidation case were dismissed later in 2015.
Smith was killed Saturday afternoon after police said he was seen with a handgun while fleeing officers during a traffic stop. Milwaukee police initially identified the officer who shot and killed Smith as a 24-year-old man with six years with the department, three as an officer, and it was later revealed that the officer also is black.
The weekend shooting set off days of unrest in a city where racial tensions already were running high, particularly in the wake of the 2014 killing by police of Dontre Hamilton, a mentally ill black man. The officer in that shooting was fired by the Milwaukee police chief for not following department procedures, but later was cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
The two years that led up to Smith’s killing Saturday by police were marked by his own propensity for violence, retaliation and intimidation, court records show.
Milwaukee police noted Smith had a “lengthy arrest record,” and the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Office released a detailed list of alleged crimes dating back to 2011, from a marijuana citation to allegations of robbery, cocaine possession and heroin dealing. But the case that stands out was a shooting on Aug. 24, 2014, that started as a fight between girls at a party.
The criminal complaint in that case quotes the victim as telling police that the party and the fight was a month or two earlier, and Smith was looking to retaliate. It wasn’t clear how Smith or the shooting victim were connected to the girls.
The victim told police that on the evening of the shooting he was smoking marijuana while driving a friend’s Taurus through the Sherman Park neighborhood -- the same neighborhood that over the weekend became the focal point for unrest in the city. Suddenly, an Infiniti pulled up next to him, and he recognized Smith as the driver.
Fearing that Smith was going to shoot him, the man sped off and was chased by Smith from street to street, at one point stopping the Taurus to get out and run, the complaint says. When the Infiniti pulled up next to the Taurus, Smith got out and started running after the other driver, the court records say, while a passenger in Smith’s car got out and shot up the unoccupied Taurus. Smith then started shooting at the other driver, who later told police he suffered a minor injury in the incident, though it was later determined to be an abrasion instead of a gunshot wound.
Smith and his passenger took off in the Infiniti, and their victim was able to drive his bullet-riddled car to a police station to report the incident, the complaint says. Officers later recovered 20 bullet casings from the scene of the shooting.
Smith was arrested in January 2015 and charged in Milwaukee County court with first-degree reckless endangerment, a felony with a maximum potential sentence of 12 years and six months.
But that charge never stuck because of what prosecutors later alleged was a witness intimidation plot, as detailed in a second complaint against Smith. In that case, Smith was accused of calling his girlfriend from jail numerous times in June and July 2015 and coaching her on how to get his victim to sign an affidavit saying that Smith wasn’t tied to the shooting.
“These calls are representative, and not exhaustive, of the calls made by Smith to (his girlfriend) in efforts to dissuade (the victim) from cooperating with the prosecution,” prosecutors said in the complaint. “This is clearly evident by the recantation … that reached the State and has been filed with the Court.”
Online court records indicate that the reckless endangerment charge was dismissed in November because of the recantation.
“State is not prepared to proceed to trial as essential witnesses are not present. The state informs the Court that the victim contacted the state and indicated that he would not be present,” the records state.
The witness intimidation charge could have landed Smith in prison for up to 10 years, but that case, too, was dismissed, in September.
Chief Deputy District Attorney Kent Lovern told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in an email that the witness intimidation case was dismissed because, although the victim reversed himself, he was not intimidated into changing his story. The victim had told the court he was unsure who shot at him, the Journal Sentinel reported.
Despite Smith’s good fortune in court, it apparently didn’t end his ties to crime. Milwaukee police say when he was shot and killed Saturday while fleeing officers he was armed with a gun that had been taken in a burglary in March in Waukesha. The victim in that crime reported 500 rounds of ammunition also were stolen.A skyscraper more than 1,000 feet tall might be heading to Brooklyn. Towers that tall are hard to come by even in Manhattan, and there aren’t any plans to build anything that large in any other borough yet.
But there’s plenty of demand for a super-tall residential tower in Brooklyn—and now, one of the developers who has nurtured Manhattan’s Billionaire’s Row has the air rights to build something as tall as the Empire State Building in downtown Brooklyn.
Crain’s New York Business reports that Michael Stern bought the former Dime Savings Bank at 9 Dekalb Avenue, a landmarked classical building dating back to the early 1900s. In addition to the architectural gem—which might be repurposed as an event space or high-end retail outlet—Stern picked up 300,000 square feet in air rights. That’s all he needs to build a super skyscraper on the site he owns next door at 340 Flatbush Avenue Extension.
Stern, who is building the super-skinny tower at 111 W. 57th Street in Midtown, could even wind up building a second 111 W. 57th in Brooklyn, more or less. That project, which was designed by SHoP Architects and is currently underway, incorporates an existing landmark at its base, the former Steinway & Sons piano showroom and hall. No, the downtown Brooklyn tower won’t absorb a classical bank structure the same way—but it is bound to be designed by SHoP.Advertisement
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You don't have to be a journalist, a political analyst or a sociologist to notice the huge shift that has happened in the media of the United States. Dozens of television channels, newspapers, magazines, and websites have morphed into PR vehicles. Unbiased journalism is long gone. Who do we have to thank for that? The Russians? Trump? The media themselves? The answer is: Barrack Obama.
Thanks, Obama
In a statement released on December 23, 2016, President Barrack Obama said: "Today, I have signed into law S. 2943, the 'National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2017.'"
The funding of the US military was hardly a surprise, but the Defense Authorization Act had something much more significant buried deep inside it, under layers of legislation -- the Countering Foreign propaganda and Disinformation Act.
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Signed by President Barrack Obama and introduced by two congressmen, Adam Kinziger (Republican) and Ted Lieu (Democrat), this act is meant to combat “foreign disinformation and manipulation."
And as ZeroHedge reports, Senator Rob Portman said: "These countries spend vast sums of money on advanced broadcast and digital media capabilities, targeted campaigns, funding of foreign political movements, and other efforts." This is exactly what it sounds like. Why does this sound like a politician complaining about the media not being able to spread government propaganda? Because that is exactly what it is.
Portman then added that "there is currently no single U.S. governmental agency or department charged with the national level development, integration and synchronization of strategies to counter foreign propaganda.” Obviously, Portman implied that the American government indeed needs to find a way to counter what he calls "foreign propaganda" and what better way is there to do that than to take control of the media? Clearly, they have succeeded.
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Fake news
One doesn't have to read between the lines to realize that what Portman is saying is a spine-chilling, Orwellian statement, glorifying government-funded propaganda. Long before the term "fake news" hit the mainstream, the United States government made sure to legally infiltrate the country's most influential media outlets. In layman's terms, they legalized propaganda. Yes, they have made it 100% legal. Isn't that beyond ridiculous? It may be, but it is the reality.
It's interesting how Democrats and Republicans don't have a problem working together when it comes to controlling the media and making sure to feed nothing but misinformation and propaganda to the public. The Obama Administration laid the foundation for "fake news," destroying journalism in the United States.
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When will America recover from this atrocity and will that ever happen? Who knows, but until that actually happens, we are much better off seeking information ourselves, reading conflicting reports, and trying to come up with our own conclusions.
Fast forward to September 2017 -- it is almost impossible to tell if a news story is real or fake. Can the American people trust anyone? No, not really.Breaking News Emails Get breaking news alerts and special reports. The news and stories that matter, delivered weekday mornings.
Dec. 30, 2017, 6:43 PM GMT / Updated Dec. 30, 2017, 6:43 PM GMT / Source: Associated Press
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — Mickey Mouse. Nick Saban. Any Other Republican.
Those were some of the names that got write-in votes in the Alabama Senate election as voters suggested their own alternatives to Sen.-elect Doug Jones and Republican Roy Moore.
An unusually high number of voters — 22,852 people, or 1.6 percent of the 1.3 million people who went to the polls — opted for a write-in candidates, sometimes showing their humor and frustration along the way. "Anyone Else," ''Neither," and "Any Other Republican" were among the written submissions.
Many of the submission were more serious as some voters followed the lead of Sen. Richard Shelby, who said he could not vote for Moore and was instead writing in the name of another Republican.
Outgoing Sen. Luther Strange, who was appointed to the post, but lost the GOP primary to Moore, was the top write-in candidate in a majority of counties. State election officials did not tally statewide numbers on write-in candidates, but numbers submitted by counties showed that Strange received more than 7,500 votes — roughly a third of the write-in ballots.
Related: Alabama makes Jones win official as Moore’s last-ditch challenge fails
He was followed by retired Marine Col. Lee Busby, former aide to White House chief of staff John Kelly. He was the top vote-getter in at least 10 counties.
Other names frequently listed as write-ins were Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Saban, the University of Alabama football coach.
Alabama election officials stressed ahead of the election that voters had to write-in the name of a living person in order for the vote to be tallied. That did not stop votes for Bugs Bunny, Mickey Mouse, Snoopy, SpongeBob Square Pants, Ronald Reagan, Jesus and UR Mom.
Moore was dogged throughout the election by accusations of sexual misconduct with teens several decades ago when he was a prosecutor in his 30s. At least one person voted by write-in for Leigh Corfman, one of the women who first raised an allegation against Moore.
Someone else voted for Sassy, the name of the horse that Moore rides to the polls on Election Day.
Roy Moore rides his horse, Sassy, to cast his vote at the polling location on Dec. 12, 2017 in Gallant, Alabama. Joe Raedle / Getty Images
Other voters gave nods to another woman they perceived as being wronged in the world of state politics: Dianne Bentley, who divorced former Gov. Robert Bentley amid accusations that he was having an affair with an aide, got at least three write-in votes.Under the guise of a “literature” course:
WHITEHOUSE, TX (KLTV) – The school year is almost here, and if literature of the Bible is not already offered in your child’s school, it will be this fall.
Books are a common sight in classrooms around the nation, but the Bible is one book that is not. Come this fall, a Texas law says all public schools must offer information relating to the Bible in their curriculum.
“By the end of the year, what they begin to realize is that it is pervasive. You can’t get away from it. The kids came back and were like ‘It’s everywhere,'” said John Keeling, the social studies chair at Whitehouse High School. Whitehouse already offers a Bible elective. “The purpose of a course like this isn’t even really to get kids to believe it, per se, it is just to appreciate the profound impact that it has had on our history and on our government.”
The law actually passed in 2007, but this will be the first school year it is enforced because the bill says, “The provisions of this act pertaining to a school district do not take effect until the 2009-2010 school year.”In November George Soros, John Paulson and Leon Cooperman, three of the most successful hedge fund managers ever, quietly participated in a rights offering and became major shareholders in Caesars Acquisition Co., a spinoff from casino company Caesars Entertainment that has ownership in Caesars' online gambling assets.
Their stakes--previously unreported--are all part of an unprecedented bet on the future of the $60 billion casino business in America, as states from New Jersey to Delaware and Nevada legalize a practice that the Department of Justice said was illegal just two years ago. They were joined by billionaire private equity managers Leon Black, David Bonderman, Marc Rowan and Joshua Harris, whose two respective buyout firms are the biggest shareholders in Caesars Entertainment and doubled down by investing a combined $484 million in Caesars' online gambling vehicle.
Already a roster of billionaires, from brothers Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, who control the Ultimate Fighting Championship, to MGM Resorts' biggest shareholder, billionaire Kirk Kerkorian, are betting big on online gambling's comeback.
There's just one problem with all of this: Sheldon Adelson. The very week that Caesars' online gambling play started trading on the Nasdaq, Adelson, the nation's fifth-richest man--and one of the country's biggest political donors--thanks to his vast casino holdings, unleashed an army of lawyers and lobbyists on Washington and state capitals, telling FORBES he will "spend whatever it takes" to stop online gambling in America.
More on Forbes: Sheldon Adelson Says He Is 'Willing To Spend Whatever It Takes' To Stop Online Gambling
His advocacy group--the Coalition to Stop Internet Gambling--is already up and running, and is working to get state attorneys general to sign a petition against online gambling. He's hired former New York governor George Pataki, together with former Arkansas senator Blanche Lincoln and former Denver mayor Wellington Webb to lead the lobbying effort. "There is no reason to put a casino on everybody's kitchen table, in the bed of every young person, whether they are underage or of age, or on mobile phones," says Adelson. "I don't want people to get addicted."
So far the markets are betting he'll lose. Shares of Caesars' online gambling spinoff are up more than 30% from their rights offering price. But while Adelson's moralistic stance may be laughable to opponents, given the potential long-term threat a shift to online gambling poses to his industry, they still take it seriously. His Las Vegas Sands, with a recent stock market valuation of $60 billion, is worth more than all the other U.S. casino companies combined. Adelson spent some $100 million unsuccessfully trying to get a Republican into the White House in 2012.
"What I have heard Adelson say is, 'I am very rich, and I don't like Internet gaming,' and those things are true," says Mitch Garber, CEO of Caesars Acquisition Co. But "Sheldon's eyes are closed to the fact that all goods and services are ultimately going to be purchased on the Internet."
More on Forbes: New Jersey Suspends Review Of PokerStars' Online Gambling License
For years online gambling in America belonged to offshore companies willing to take on the federal government, which declared all online gambling to be illegal. In 2003 online poker took off when Christopher Moneymaker, an unknown accountant from Tennessee, qualified in an online tournament for the main event at the World Series of Poker and won poker's top prize, together with $2.5 million. Online poker companies became big sponsors of poker programming on cable outlets like the Travel Channel and ESPN. By 2005 the company that ruled the U.S. online poker market, Gibraltar-based PartyGaming, conducted an IPO on the London Stock Exchange that made its American founder, Ruth Parasol, the nation's richest self-made woman. A year later then billionaire Calvin Ayre, who ran a sports-betting website from Costa Rica, was featured on FORBES magazine's cover with the headline "Catch Me If You Can."
But in the fall of 2006 Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA), strengthening the Justice Department's tools to go after online gambling firms operating in the U.S. Some companies, like PartyGaming, quickly ceased their U.S. operations, leaving the then $1.4 billion U.S. online poker market dominated by two offshore companies, PokerStars and Full Tilt Poker, which profited immensely because of the high-margin nature of the business. But federal prosecutors and agents kept investigating the companies, seizing their funds and eventually in 2011 shutting down the websites of the major online poker companies that cater to the U.S. and indicting their founders. In the weeks that followed Full Tilt collapsed amid accusations made by the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan that it was operating a Ponzi scheme. PokerStars settled the civil charges the government filed against it by paying $731 million, but its founder, Isai Scheinberg, who is not a U.S. citizen (he's Israeli-Canadian), has not come to the U.S. to face the criminal charges filed against him. The government also indicted Ayre, a Canadian who has also not returned to the U.S.
Not long after shutting down the offshore operators, the Department of Justice reversed its long-held opinion that all forms of online gambling are illegal, unleashing states that wanted to regulate and tax online gambling except sports betting. Sensing profits, the billionaires followed.
Why the turnaround? Expensive lobbyists and lawyers are a big part of the answer. Since 2007, for instance, former New York senator Alfonse D'Amato has been paid to be chairman of the Poker Players Alliance. That Washington lobby group received funding from the Interactive Gaming Council, a Vancouver group backed by firms including Full Tilt Poker. The American Gaming Association, the casino industry's powerful lobby, is now backing online gambling with everything it's got.
More on Forbes: 30 Under 30 Finance: The Top Young Traders, Bankers And Dealmakers
The stakes are huge: Private equity firms Apollo Global Management and TPG are still trying to salvage their 2008 LBO of the company that left it saddled with $28 billion in debt. They see online gambling as a way to make up for Caesars' missing out on Macau, the biggest casino revolution in decades.
So while Adelson's limitless money--and his willingness to spend it--may slow the momentum for online gambling by blocking its spread into big states like California and Florida, the odds of him stopping it or bullying his rivals out of the game are slim. He's got lots of chips, but all the other players at the table do, too.
Correction: A previous version of this article said Apollo and TPG conducted their LBO of Caesars in 2006. The buyout occurred in 2008.
More on Forbes:
13 Money Mistakes Retirees Should Avoid
10 Winning Stocks Set For A Slide In 2014
Forbes 30 Under 30: The Brightest Stars In 15 Different FieldsCHENNAI: The Centre’s Pink Revolution to promote meat production and export has led to a 44% increase in meat consumption and export in four years, but it has failed to regulate the industry.According to data compiled by the animal husbandry departments of all states, meat from registered slaughterhouses increased from 5.57 lakh tonnes in 2008 to 8.05 lakh tonnes in 2011. Export earnings from bovine (beef and cattle) meat expected to touch Rs 18,000 crore in 2012-2013. India became the world’s top exporter of beef in 2012.Uttar Pradesh is the top buffalo meat-producing state with 3 lakh tonnes in 2011. At least 70% of the buffalo meat is exported. “Our meat is lean and cheaper. We supply halal meat, which is preferred in Gulf countries,” said Surendra Kumar Ranjan, director of Uttar Pradesh-based Hind Agro Industries Though meat meeting international standards reaches markets in the Europe, the Gulf and South-East Asia, most of the meat sold in India is substandard. The best quality meat is sent abroad while B-grade meat reaches the domestic market.Further, activists say the way animals are transported and slaughtered is cruel and far from international standards. “There is rampant abuse of animals in transport and slaughter of meat whether for domestic consumption or export,” said Arpan Sharma, CEO of Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations.The amount of beef consumed and exported from the country has gone up 44% in the last four years, according to data from the Union animal husbandry department. However, animal abuse while transporting and slaughtering is rampant, say activists.According to data compiled by the animal husbandry departments of all states, the meat produced in registered slaughterhouses has increased from 5.57 lakh tonnes in 2008 to 8.05 lakh tonnes in 2011. At least 70% of the buffalo meat is exported. Uttar Pradesh is the top buffalo meat-producing state with 3 lakh tonnes in 2011. According to the US Department of Agriculture, India became the largest exporter of beef edging out Australia and New Zealand in May 2012.Bovine (buffalo and cow) meat from India is popular in South-East Asian and Gulf countries, said Surendra Kumar Ranjan, director of Uttar Pradeshbased Hind Agro Industries. “Our meat is lean and cheaper. We supply halal meat, which is preferred in Gulf countries,” he said.Animal activists, however, kill this rosy picture. “There is rampant abuse of animals during transport and slaughter whether the meat is for domestic consumption or export,” said Arpan Sharma, CEO of Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations.Processed meat exports are expected to earn close to 18,000 crore in 2012-13. The increase is attributed to the Centre’s Pink Revolution to promote meat production and export with modernized abattoirs and storage facilities. The food processing ministry had announced subsidies of 15 crore to modernize abattoirs. The buffaloes killed went up from 49.46 lakh in 2008 to 69.6 lakh in 2011.There are 38 integrated abattoirs in the country which slaughter for export. Agricultural and Processed Food Exports Development Authority ( |
this question, REmap 2030 makes a clear case for renewables. It shows the transition is affordable based on existing technologies, and that the benefits go well beyond the positive climate impact.
"Countries today face a clear choice for a sustainable energy future.”
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——–I spent many hours researching which speaker set would best suit my needs and pleased ("pleased" would be an understatement) with my choice in the Mirage Nanosat 5.0. I paired these sleek speakers with a un46d7000 Samsung LED TV and a spare entry level Denon 1609 AV receiver for my bedroom set. I have invested nearly 3k in speakers alone in my living room, and would like to think I hold high standards for home audio whether it be for casual viewing, movies or sports. This Mirage Nano set hold their own in my relatively small bedroom! I purchased this set for a mere $243.00 including overnight shipping. I have since watched four movies and use this set for all audio output during viewing. I must admit, I am truly happy with my purchase and they continue to amaze me! I opted to go small (and aesthetically clean in appearance), ditching a pair of considerably larger Klipsch bookshelf's and matching center speaker and haven't looked back. These speakers produce excellent/clean highs, decent midrange, and lows one would expect with a speaker of this size... that is what subwoofers are for, no? At times I can see where dialogue can be somewhat lost by not having a proper center channel speaker (Mirage Nanosat Cc Small High-Performance Center Speaker) but I am content with my current setup nor would I consider upgrading anytime soon. That being said, I have my TV wall mounted, below is a TV stand containing all of my components, atop are the center and two "bookshelf" speakers with the surrounds on both sides of the stand (all of which are aligned against the same wall). I intend on properly wall mounting the two rear speakers to extract as much potential from this set with my given equipment. I'm eager to start installation of mounting the rear channels and expect improvements in all around sound. I would not hesitate in purchasing this set again and I would recommend them to a friend without hesitation.EL SEGUNDO, Calif., Sept. 6, 2017 -- Today, on International Colorblind Awareness Day, UNO announced the launch of its newest deck, UNO® ColorADD, the world's first card game for the colorblind.
Designed in partnership with ColorADD, the global organization for colorblind accessibility and education, the deck features its proprietary code, an inclusive and non-discriminative language that enables people with any type of color blindness to identify color. The code is based on three graphic symbols representing three primary colors. These symbols can be found on the top-left and bottom-right corners of each card to define UNO's iconic red, yellow, green and blue suits.
"Our partnership with ColorADD allows us to extend the game play to the 350 million people globally and 13 million Americans who are colorblind," said Ray Adler, Senior Director, Global Games at Mattel. "UNO is a truly universal game and we are continuing to look for ways to make one of the world's most popular card games all inclusive."
Of the 350 million people worldwide who are affected by some form of color blindness, the most commonly confused colors are between red and green—two of UNO's four colors.
"Our color coding system has been incorporated in various ways, including in grammar schools, public transportation, hospitals, and consumer goods such as colored pencils and clothing," said Miguel Neiva, Creator of ColorADD. "By partnering with UNO, we can bring our mission to an even broader audience, promoting inclusivity and raising awareness for an often-overlooked, and under-discussed, condition."
Visit Shop.Mattel.com/UNO for more information on UNO ColorADD or to purchase for $5.99.
About Mattel
Mattel (NASDAQ: MAT) is a global learning, development and play company that inspires the next generation of kids to shape a brighter tomorrow. Through our portfolio of iconic consumer brands, including American Girl®, Barbie®, Fisher-Price®, Hot Wheels® and Thomas & Friends™, we create systems of play, content and experiences that help kids unlock their full potential. Mattel also creates inspiring and innovative products in collaboration with leading entertainment and technology companies as well as other partners. With a global workforce of approximately 32,000 people, Mattel operates in 40 countries and territories and sells products in more than 150 nations. Visit us online at www.mattel.com.
About ColorADD
ColorADD is a global organization leading the industry for colorblind accessibility and education. ColorADD has pioneered a color identification system for colorblind people as a universal and inclusive code in support of the estimated 350 million people around the world who are affected by color blindness. For more information, please visit www.coloradd.net.
Media Contacts:
Candice Jacobson
Mattel Global Communications
Candice.Jacobson@Mattel.com
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212-445-8283US Attorney General Eric Holder is calling on Congress to enact a national standard for notifying consumers when their personal or financial data have been compromised.
Late last year, a cyberattack compromised the payment information of some 40 million customers and the personal information of as many as 70 million shoppers at the discount retailer Target. Since then, high-end retailer Nieman Marcus and arts and crafts store Michaels have both raised the alarm that their systems may have been breached, as well.
“As we have seen, especially in recent years, these crimes are becoming all too common,” Mr. Holder said during his weekly video address Monday. “Although the Justice Department officials are working closely with the FBI and prosecutors across the country to bring cybercriminals to justice, it is time for leaders in Washington to provide the tools that we need to do even more by requiring businesses to notify consumers and law enforcement in the wake of significant data breaches.”
While federal laws require banks and hospitals to inform their customers and patients immediately in the wake of a cyberattack, there is no federal standard requiring retailers to immediately notify customers that an unauthorized party may have accessed their information.
Consumer advocates have criticized Target for not alerting customers of the breach soon enough. A Target executive told Reuters that the company disclosed the incident four days after internally confirming the break-in, but did not say when it first learned of the problem.
“It’s a judgment call,” Joseph DeMarco, former head of cyber crime at the US Attorney’s Manhattan office, told Reuters. “A breach investigation could take weeks or months before you know enough to have a legal obligation to disclose.”
In the absence of a federal mandate, 46 states and the District of Columbia have enacted their own legislation outlining how and when companies need to send out an alert to customers. Some state attorneys general have expressed concerns that federal legislation could impede their ability to crack down on violators.
However, Holder may find some surprising allies among retailers.
The National Retail Federation has long supported implementation of federal guidelines for notification in the event of a cyberattack.
“A preemptive federal breach notification law would allow retailers to focus their resources on complying with one single law and enable consumers to know their rights regardless of where they live,” the retailer association said, in a January letter to Congress.
Consumer advocates worry that the retail industry's drive for federal regulation will help to usher in weaker laws that trump those that states have already implemented.
“None of the federal proposals [as of Feb. 11] are as strong as the strongest state laws, and that’s wrong,” said Edmund Mierzwinski, consumer program director of the US Public Interest Research Group. “I don’t think we need [a federal law] that’s weaker than California’s.”
In the eyes of the Obama administration, all cyberattacks are nationally significant. The president has called the cyberattacks “one of the gravest national security dangers that the United States faces.”
During a White House event earlier this month, the Department of Homeland Security launched a voluntary program to help a wide range of businesses assess their vulnerability to cyberattacks.
“It boils down to this – in cyber security, the more systems we secure, the more secure we all are,” said DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson. “We are all connected online and a vulnerability in one place can cause a problem in many other places.”
The threat of cyberattacks has loomed large ever since the online marketplace became a reality in the 1990s. Since then, much of the nation’s infrastructure, including water supply controls and the electrical grid, have moved online. Security experts have long warned that concerted cyberattacks could transcend the level of time-consuming nuisance into a major security threat that could compromise the nation’s infrastructure.
So far, at least, it seems that cyberattacks have been isolated schemes, according to a National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force report, released earlier this month.
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“Bringing all of the government’s knowledge together today, the report demonstrates there is no evidence of a coordinated effort – whether by criminal groups or nation states – to harm the US economy,” said Steve Chabinsky, a cyber security expert and former cyber attorney for the FBI. “Plain and simple, whoever did this just wants to make a whole lot of money.”
Material from Reuters and the Associated Press was used in this report.Batsman Haris Sohail has twisted his left ankle at Pakistan's ongoing training camp in Lahore, ahead of the India tour, but is not expected to be out of action for too long. Sohail, who is yet to make his international debut, is part of Pakistan's squad for the one-day leg of the tour.
Sohail was taken for an MRI scan that revealed the injury was not serious. He was advised six days rest, which would mean he should be ready to play in time for the India ODI series, which begins on December 30 in Chennai.
In June, Sohail had been picked in Pakistan's squad for the T20s against Sri Lanka, but didn't make the playing XI. He had been in fine form on the domestic circuit, scoring three hundreds and a half-century in his last four first-class appearances for Zarai Taraqiati Bank Limited. He had also scored a rapid, unbeaten fifty in Sialkot Stallions victory over Abbottabad Falcons in the just-concluded Faysal Bank T-20 Cup.
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.Samsung’s powerful Galaxy Note 4 is the only phone compatible with the company’s recently launched Gear VR headset. After a Thanksgiving sale saw the price on the three major U.S. carriers come down to $199 before returning to $299, Verizon and Sprint have dropped their Note 4 prices down to $149 just in time for the holidays, while AT&T’s Note 4 comes down to $269.
The Galaxy Note 4 snaps into Gear VR, utilizing the phone’s high-resolution display and powerful processor to provide a best-in-class mobile VR experience. If you’re planning to pick up a Note 4 for use with Gear VR, the time has never been better.
Upgrade and New Contract Prices
Amazon has the Galaxy Note 4 available for the three major US carriers; the prices listed below are available with an upgrade or new contract (select the ‘Individual Plan or ‘Family Plan’ option to see the price).
No Upgrade and Off-Contract Prices
If you aren’t eligible for an upgrade but are still craving the Note 4 for Gear VR, here are your choices (select the ‘Without a Service Plan’ option to see price):
Samsung’s Gear VR headset launched earlier this month in the U.S. for $199. The company says it will make its international debut in “early 2015.”
See Also:A Minnesota man convicted a couple years ago of charges related to terrorism has been just released by a judge from a halfway house.
Justice, anyone?
The man, Abdullahi Yusuf, pleaded guilty in February 2015 of conspiring to provide material support to an overseas terror group.
And now he’s pretty much free.
KSTP has more:
In ordering his release in a Thursday hearing at the federal courthouse in downtown Minneapolis, Judge Michael Davis asked Yusuf if he was prepared to be ostracized by a portion of his community, to which Yusuf responded, “Yes.” Yusuf will return to his parents’ home in Burnsville. … Yusuf pleaded guilty in February 2015 to conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization. The prosecution at the time recommended 42 months in prison. He was sentenced to time served, 20 years supervised probation and placed in a halfway house. Yusuf was found in violation of his supervised release in May when he admitted to probation officers he had watched a CNN documentary on the Islamic State at the halfway house, despite the terms of his probation requiring him to “not possess, view, access, or otherwise use material that reflects extremist or terroristic views.” The conditions of his probation were unchanged following the violation, and he was ordered to return to the halfway house. His probation officer said at Thursday’s hearing Yusuf had been a role model in the halfway house, that he is opening up more and becoming comfortable in his own skin. His father, Sadiik, said his son had changed “100 percent …. We’re just glad to see our son again and we’ll be ready to help him.”
The Truth Must be Told Your contribution supports independent journalism Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more. Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible. Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too. Please contribute to our ground-breaking work here.
Make a monthly commitment to support The Geller Report – choose the option that suits you best. Contribute Monthly - Choose One Subscriber : $18.00 USD - monthly Contributor : $36.00 USD - monthly Patron : $50.00 USD - monthly Silver member : $100.00 USD - monthly Gold member : $250.00 USD - monthly Platinum member : $500.00 USD - monthlyAs a Wisconsin alumnus who was not particularly disappointed when football coach Bret Bielema bolted for Arkansas this past Fall -- a notion seconded by Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez -- it's been fascinating to watch the dynamic between the Razorback fanbase and their new phenomenal-recruiter-but-horrific-clock-manager. Which is to say, unlike his haters, they've embraced him wholeheartedly.
In fact, Hogs fans are so enthusiastic about Bielema that they've begun sharing an array of personal photos to illustrate their fanhood, including those of their vacations, babies, wedding cakes, and landscaping.
It began in May with a couple baby pictures:
Then came a "relaxing" vacation photo in June:
Then a crazy office photo:
Later, the floodgates would open up - this is a small sample of what has now been SO MANY vacation photos.
“@taylorgammill: @BretBielema our beach crew, we take over Destin for a week each year. #WPS pic.twitter.com/q31D3NU5cy” Best vacation pic yet! — Bret Bielema (@BretBielema) July 3, 2013
They sent t-shirts:
And beach art:
And cute Vines:
And deck furniture:
“@imthatfeerogirl: @BretBielema Check out this housewarming gift I got my husband, @RyanFeero. Go Hogs!! pic.twitter.com/gg0v14I6c9” A must get — Bret Bielema (@BretBielema) July 10, 2013
And fortune cookies:
And yardwork:
And desserts:Santa gifted me 'The Essential James Joyce in one sitting' with a note inside to say they hoped this would give me a taste of his work.
The Hugo Award winning Foundation by Isaac Asimov, which looks amazing. The only work of Asimov's I can say I'm familiar with is The Last Question so if Foundation is by the same author I'm excited!
A copy of Metro 2033 which as the note in the cover confirms, is a video game as well as a book.(Santa felt bad about writing in a new book in pen, at my request I should say, however now every time I open these books I'll be reminded of Santa and this moment we shared).
Finally the letter that Santa sent me, which I consider as much a gift as the books, a hand written letter at that. Someone told me that an unfinished book is like an unfinished love affair, so I will endevour not to leave any pages unturned!
Thank you Santa.This article is from the archive of our partner.
Representative Greg Walden, a Republican from Oregon, thinks the idea of the trillion-dollar platinum coin — which has gone from conspiracy theory to mint-worthy meme already this year — is "absurd and dangerous," and that anyone stupid enough to think it might save our economy is just that: stupid. Which is why on Monday afternoon he introduced an actual bill to ban the Treasury Department from making these expensive coins. "Some people are in denial about the need to reduce spending and balance the budget. This scheme to mint trillion dollar platinum coins is absurd and dangerous, and would be laughable if the proponents weren't so serious about it as a solution. I'm introducing a bill to stop it in its tracks," Walden says in release from his office.
Wait, huh? People were actually serious about this thing? We knew Congressman Jerrold Nadler liked the concept, but we thought the point of a trillion-dollar coin wasn't about the coin itself so much as what an idea that crazy said about Republicans' idea of compromise these days. "Given the realities of our political situation, and in particular the mixture of ruthlessness and craziness that now characterizes House Republicans, it’s just ridiculous — far more ridiculous than the notion of the coin," Paul Krugman wrote on his blog today.
All of this was somehow lost on Walden, who all too willingly bit the troll bait, and drives home the concept of the GOP holding Congress hostage even more now that he's outlawing trillion dollar coins and whatnot. "My bill will take the coin scheme off the table by disallowing the Treasury to mint platinum coins as a way to pay down the debt. We must reduce spending and get our fiscal house in order," Walden said.
This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.Mumbai: The Reserve Bank of India’s (RBI) monetary policy committee (MPC) kept the key interest rate unchanged on Wednesday, noting risks to inflation, but expressed optimism that the slowdown in economic growth had bottomed out.
The decision was in line with market expectations. The repurchase rate—the rate at which the central bank infuses liquidity in the banking system— was left unchanged at 6%.
RBI also maintained its neutral policy stance, which essentially means future calls on rate direction would be data-driven and in either direction.
The policy supports the expectation that interest rates will remain unchanged for a prolonged period but the mention of the output gap, the difference between the actual output of an economy and its potential, shows that the MPC is concerned about growth as well, said Gaurav Kapur, chief economist at IndusInd Bank.
“Going purely by the upside risks to inflation would have warranted a change in monetary policy stance to more hawkish. But they stuck to neutral because of the negative output gap. Going ahead, with expectation of CPI remaining above 4%, I think they will hold on to rates, unless the Union budget turns out to be populist and there is indication of significant fiscal slippage." said Kapur.
The rate-setting panel raised its fiscal second-half inflation estimate range marginally to 4.3-4.7%. The central bank has a medium-term consumer price index-based (CPI-based) inflation target of 4%.
The panel noted that there were several factors that threatened to push up inflation in the near term such as rising food and fuel prices, increase in input costs and farm loan waivers in some states. It also highlighted the partial rollback of excise duty on petroleum products and the decrease in revenue on account of the cut in goods and services tax (GST) rates posing dangers to the fiscal deficit target, which could push up inflation.
At the end of October, the centre’s fiscal deficit had hit 96.1% of the budget estimate for this financial year. RBI had maintained status quo on rates in the previous meeting in October as well. Since then, CPI inflation accelerated to 3.58% in October, the fastest pace in seven months, on rising food and fuel prices.
The rate decision was not unanimous. Ravindra Dholakia, one of the three external members of the MPC, suggested a rate cut of 25 basis points (bps). One basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point.
RBI retained its fiscal 2018 forecast for growth in gross value added (GVA), a measure of economic output, at 6.7%.
The panel noted several factors that could push growth in the coming quarters such as the amount of funds raised from capital markets, improvement in the ease of doing business rankings, large distressed borrowers being referred for bankruptcy proceedings and the government’s Rs2.11 trillion bank recapitalization programme. It noted that these could get a further shot in the arm if banks passed on earlier rate changes by the central bank to lending rates on outstanding loans.
RBI reiterated that it was committed to keep headline inflation close to 4% on a durable basis.
“We have a neutral stance, which means that depending on the data flow in coming months and quarters we’’l determine what we do regarding the policy. So the neutral stance is there for a reason that all possibilities are on the table, and we would look carefully at both the inflation data and the growth data that comes in the coming months," said RBI governor Urjit Patel.In recent months, there has been no shortage of potentially alarming headlines detailing how mainstream financial and tech giants such as eBay, IBM and JPMorgan may be looking to enter or impact the bitcoin space with strategic patent filings.
The most recent company to enter these ranks was Colorado-based remittance giant Western Union, which received a patent on 1st April that reports have suggested would give the company a claim to a key aspect of the bitcoin industry – the exchange of alternative currencies.
Despite the sensational headlines, however, it has remained unclear as to what potential effect, if any, such a patent would have on the ability of bitcoin businesses to provide similar services or offerings.
The question remained, how worried should bitcoiners be about these high-profile patent filings?
Community concern
One patent analyst and bitcoin enthusiast believes the threat of such actions is not only real, but that it’s one that the bitcoin industry needs to actively defend against.
To this end, Reed Jessen, founder of the Cryptocurrency Defense Foundation (CDF), is seeking to protect the bitcoin space from such intrusion through the strategic filing of patents.
“Our goal will be to protect the fledgling cryptocurrencies of the world from the repressive pressures of the patent system and allow them to compete based on the merits of their use, not on government-granted monopolies,” said Jessen in the CDF’s launch statement.
The service would be offered royalty-free to companies that agree not to assert their patents against others in the industry.
More broadly, the CDF would seek to build a patent portfolio to promote and defend the community’s interests and business ambitions, especially given that its research suggests 65 patents related to cryptography have been filed by companies such as QUALCOMM and Visa.
With this in mind, CoinDesk asked Jessen to analyze three recent digital currency related patents – filed by eBay, Gemalto and Western Union – to illustrate their potential impact on the bitcoin space.
Though he notes his assessments represent his opinion and not any legal judgement or advice, Jessen provides a look at how the claims – both those pending and those approved – could impact digital currency businesses.
Western Union
In Jessen’s view, the Western Union patent does give the company exclusive rights to an exchange that allows users to trade digital currency for fiat currency, though the actual system to which Western Union is entitled these rights is far more narrow.
For example, the system protected by Western Union’s patent would provide users with a list of people looking to sell fiat for digital currency and allow these individuals to select the person with whom they would like to trade.
Western Union’s patent also notably calls for an “assessor” that would analyze the offer and score them based on their value. The assessor would then award both individuals proposed trade scores, and both parties would decide whether to execute the trade based on such information.
Jessen concluded that due to these specifications, any effect on the bitcoin space as a result of the patent is likely to be limited, explaining:
“This patent only grants Western Union the right to stop someone from using the ‘assessor’ functionality for 20 years, not the right to exclude people from using exchanges to trade money. If your exchange does not have an ‘assessor’, it does not apply to you.”
Western Union provided comment on its filing to CoinDesk, though the statement did not provide clarity as to its goal for the patent:
“Western Union generally does not comment on specific intellectual property assets. That said, we have, and will continue to explore opportunities that build on our experience and expertise in the various facets of the money transfer market.”
eBay
Unlike Western Union’s filing, which was recently granted, eBay’s patent for a “System and method for managing transactions in a digital marketplace” is currently pending approval. However, it has grabbed headlines due to eBay’s past statements about its active interest in the digital currency space.
This patent, filed in December 2011, describes a system that determines whether a customer is buying unique digital goods and makes adjustments to avoid this overlap.
According to Jessen, the process would work like this:
“If you are attempting to buy the album ‘Abbey Road’ by the Beatles on iTunes (or some other music service), but have previously purchased ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’, this program will identify that you already own the song and instead sell you ‘Abbey Road’ minus ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’ at a reduced costs.”
Bitcoin, however, could still be affected by the system, he said:
“This patent relates to cryptocurrencies only tangentially in that [it describes] doing this process with a privately issued currency like airline miles or bitcoin.”
Gemalto
Of the three patents, the implications of software developer Gemalto‘s pending patent application for a “Transaction method between two entities providing anonymity revocation for tree-based schemes without trusted party” may be perhaps the most related to digital currency.
Filed in April 2008, Jessen described the patent application as “very closely related to the concept of the block chain”. He noted it uses public key encryption, but adds additional anonymity features.
Overall, Jessen suggests the patent could have implications for alternate uses of the block chain, saying:
“They are proposing a cryptocurrency scheme without the need for access to the Internet.”
As with eBay’s filing, however, the patent has not been approve and may never be granted.
Business idea illustration via ShutterstockOver the course of the weekend there may have been a chance that you, your family and/or friends may have enjoyed one or two (or six) of those brown pops. Possibly a different alcoholic beverage may have been enjoyed! Either way, the worst part about partying is the worry of how you are getting home. For some it can be awkward, but ever so important, to approach your friends and family to stop them from drinking and driving. While there is no easy way to approach the subject matter, BACtrack has made your life slightly easier.
This bluetooth breathalyzer can help you, your friends and family easily identify one’s approximate blood alcohol content, which can aid in one’s judgement prior to driving. It is important to note that no device is available to accurately tell you whether or not you should drive after drinking. BACtrack is geared towards helping you track your drinking patterns and how your body handles the alcohol you consume, so please keep that in mind as you read through our review and our testing of the BACtrack Mobile Breathalyzer.
DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS
The BACtrack Mobile smartphone bluetooth breathalyzer is a very simple device, which isn’t hidden by its packaging. The front of the packaging features a clear plastic window that let’s you see pretty much exactly what you are buying.
The backside of the packaging, goes a step further, it tells you how you can test, track and learn about your drinking habits.
According to the side of the box, when we open up the packaging we will find the BACtrack mobile smartphone breathalyzer, three mouthpieces, a carrying pouch, a Micro-USB charger and the user guide.
The BACtrack device is approximately the width of a credit card, but just a little shorter and a depth of about a centimetre. The top of the breathalyzer has the mouthpiece at the front, and an air ‘exit way’ on the backside. In the image below you can see some of the internal components of this bluetooth breathalyzer, this includes a Xtend Fuel Cell Sensor Technology, which was originally designed for military use to determine the alcohol mixture required for particular hybrid fuel assault vehicles. The device also features an internal air pump that ensures the air is equally passed across the sensor. Additionally, this feature allows the sensor to focus on air from deep within the lungs, closer to where the air in your lungs meets the blood stream.The BMW M4 (and M3, pictured below) will transition from a CFRP driveshaft to a steel version.
BMW has announced a “technical measure” for its M3 sedan, M4 coupé and M4 convertible that will see the carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic (CFRP) driveshaft on these models replaced by a steel version.
The reason for the switch from what the automaker earlier described as a “fundamentally new approach” to the manufacturing of this component? To “create the necessary technical basis for meeting future statutory emissions requirements”.
In short, this means that the CFRP driveshaft, which by design features a larger diameter than the steel version, will apparently prevent the fitment of new emissions control devices that the Munich-based brand will soon have to install in its vehicles.
Interestingly, the switch will not apply to the M4 CS and M4 GTS special-edition variants.
The change to an “M-specific high-performance driveshaft made of steel” will take place from November 2017, BMW said in a statement, adding that “at a later point in time, a petrol particulate filter will be incorporated into the existing installation space in these models in major markets”.
“The newly developed steel driveshaft has been designed to ensure the superlative performance and handling qualities of the BMW M3/M4 high-performance sports cars remain unaffected,” the statement added.
But will drivers notice a difference? Well, while that seems unlikely, there probably will be a minimal weight addition, considering that at the launch of these models, BMW said the use of the CFRP component resulted in “a weight saving of 40 percent” (as well as “a reduction in rotating masses”)…How to add GIF Images to your Whatsapp conversation on iOS & Android
http:/www.marcforrest.com
The team at Whatsapp released an update this week for iOS & Android which now includes the ability to send GIF images in your messages. This has probably been one of the most requested features for the Whatsapp app for a while now!
If you don’t know what a GIF is, I’m pretty sure you’ve seen one of those silly looking silent video’s of cats somewhere on the internet, much like the image below…
To insert GIF’s into your Whatsapp messages follow the steps below:
1. Download a GIF enabled keyboard for iOS or Android. My favorite is Tenor GIF keyboard (iOS or Android) or GBoard Keyboard for iOS
2. Once installed, open the keyboard and select your GIF.
3. You then need to “paste” the GIF into your conversation, which will then show up on the other person’s phone.
The process is pretty much like typing out any message or sending a photo or video, so very simple. The one thing to consider is GIF’s are a bit larger in size, so I would recommend turning off your “Save Incoming Media” on Whatsapp. I also suppose Group chats may become annoying with people sending unnecessary GIFs, but hopefully Whatsapp give an option in later editions to turn this option off :)
Have fun with some cool GIFS :)Dan Bull Raps About How Megaupload Takedown Screws Indie Artists Like Him
from the helping-the-artists? dept
Independent musician Dan Bull, who we've written about a number of times, is one of many independent artists whoon purpose, to distribute his own album. All of the links out there to download his album -- which he-- point to Megaupload. And, unfortunately, they now all point to nowhere, because the US government used questionable reasoning to completely shutter the site. So Dan did what Dan does best... he wrote and recorded a song and video about it. Check it out below:My favorite line? "Make money giving away things for free? Ah! Why can't the majors do similarly?" It's a key point. As we explained on Friday, tons of artists have figured out that Megaupload and similar sites are a fantastic new business model, but they're a business model that the major labels hate... so they work double-time to make it look like some evil conspiracy. If anyone in the US government actually bothered to understand how music is distributed, marketed and monetized today, they would have realized that Megaupload isn't-- it's one way to make things better for artists. But, as we know, the folks in the US government only get their information from the RIAA. So they end up making life much more difficult for indie artists by shutting down useful services for those artists. And, in the end,is exactly what the RIAA wants.
Filed Under: cyberlockers, dan bull, independent artists, megaupload
Companies: megauploadGETTY UKIP leader Farage says the new poll shows that the British public want out
Many of those who were prepared to give Mr Cameron the benefit of the doubt are increasingly rallying to the ‘leave’ side. It is now clear that the Prime Minister has asked for very little in his EU renegotiation – and is not even likely to get that. The most important issues for the British people – such as taking back control of our borders, the cost of membership and the supremacy of our Parliament – aren’t even on the table. They are simply not up for debate as long as we are anchored inside the European Union. Mr Cameron’s original promise was a fundamental renegotiation of EU membership which clearly we can see will now not happen. There has been absolutely nothing fundamental in the nature of his negotiations.
We now see countries right across the continent re-imposing border checks
He has fiddled away on the periphery rather than addressing the major concerns of the British people. Many who had hoped optimistically for serious reform are beginning to realise that serious change inside the EU is frankly impossible. They will now vote for Britain to leave. It is clear that the choice is between deeper EU integration or a more prosperous future as a proud, independent country free to negotiate our own global trade deals. Continuing levels of mass uncontrolled EU immigration have added to a growing belief that only by controlling our borders outside the EU can we be safe and free to decide who can and cannot enter our country. EU open borders have been exposed as a major security risk. We now see countries right across the continent re-imposing border checks.
GETTY People are increasingly rallying to the ‘leave’ side despite Cameron's promises
Outside of the EU of course we could have our own Australian-style ‘points system’ for those who want to enter our country. That is the type of migration system the vast majority of British people want, yet it is incompatible with EU membership. These polls could grow wider over the next few months as people begin to realise that Mrs Merkel wants to fast-track Turkey, with a population of 75 million, into the EU. It would be an act of sheer lunacy and another clear example of why we must seize this golden opportunity to leave the European Union.
GETTY Mrs Merkel wants to fast-track Turkey, with a population of 75 million, into the EUGlobal warming hysteria, as we wrote yesterday, is not science. The models on which it rests are known to be wrong, since they are refuted by observation. So why, then, does climate change hype persist?
Because a great deal of money depends on it. The purpose of global warming hysteria is to bamboozle voters into transferring vast amounts of wealth and power from the private sector to the government. This will be done via a carbon tax and regulations on, or prohibitions of, fossil fuels; but the scheme goes much deeper than that. Since virtually every human activity (including breathing) generates some quantity of carbon dioxide, global warming is an excuse to regulate pretty much everything, conferring unprecedented power on the federal government. Further, global warming justifies vast federal subsidies of “green” energy scams. The Democrats, in turn, are rewarded for those subsidies by enormous political contributions by the likes of Tom Steyer.
The Science and Environmental Policy Project reveals the tip of the iceberg, at least:
In August 2013, the White House reported in FY 2013, US expenditures on Clean Energy Technologies were $5.783 billion, Energy Tax Provisions That May Reduce Greenhouse Gases were $4.999 billion, and Energy Payments in Lieu of Tax Provisions were $8.080 for a total $18.862 billion. Such expenditures created a sustained green lobby for climate change.
That is $19 billion per year. But again, that is only the beginning of the story: it doesn’t count the vast sums that would be involved in a carbon tax, or the selective suppression of the economy through regulation that climate hysteria enables.
Still, the $19 billion figure is striking. How does it compare with what the federal government spends on actual human health issues: SEPP provides the numbers:
For FY 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NI |
reason to have a hearing,” her attorney, Lee Thompson, said. “The attorneys were able to resolve that by agreement for the time being, preserving everyone’s rights if down the line it becomes an issue again.”
Abortion services haven’t been offered in Wichita since Dr. George Tiller, one of the nation’s few late-term abortion providers, was killed by anti-abortion activist Scott Roeder in May 2009. A spokesman for Means’ practice has said she never intended to perform late-term procedures.
Thompson, who also represented Tiller before his death, said Means is not considering locating her abortion practice at Tiller’s vacant clinic.
Operation Rescue president Troy Newman, who had been subpoenaed by the landlord to testify at the injunction hearing before it was canceled, had organized demonstrations at Means’ medical practice after it became public that she was planning to offer abortion services in Wichita.
“Abortion is bad for business, it is bad for property values,” Newman said. “You are going to have me and my truck and signs and people chanting and graphic pictures of aborted babies out front. You will have lease holders canceling their leases and moving and ultimately your property will be devalued for the foreseeable future because there is an abortion clinic there.”
Newman called the agreement between Means and her landlord “a victory for the movement” and said his group did not plan any further demonstrations at the Foliage Development complex as long as she was not performing abortions there.
Kari Ann Rinker, state coordinator for the Kansas National Organization for Women, said Means has been looking for a better facility not just for the nuisance aspect of the situation, but for safety reasons.
“She has every legal right to practice abortion at that facility — that is within her legal right — but is it convenient or safe for her? No, it is not.”Adeline Gray poses for a portrait at the 2016 Team USA Media Summit on March 9, 2016 in Los Angeles.
The United States has never had an Olympic gold medalist in women’s wrestling.
This summer, Adeline Gray wants to change that.
Gray is a three-time world champion (2012, ’14 and ’15) and has been undefeated in international competition for the past two years. She knows no one can beat her when she’s performing at her best, and she gets a rush of confident energy – not nerves – when it’s time to compete.
“I’m a lights-and camera-person,” Gray said. “The second that the stakes start to get high, I seem to get more focused and more driven. I know what my job is, and I know what it takes for me to accomplish that.”
The 25-year-old Denver native began wrestling at age 6 at the encouragement of her father, George. While most girls her age were taking dance or gymnastics, Gray was on the mat, dreaming of one day becoming an Olympian.
She competed – and won – against the boys in high school. And the more she improved, the more opportunities she had to meet other talented female wrestlers from across the country with the same goals as hers.
Life At The Olympic Training Center
When Gray was invited to join the resident women’s wrestling program at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, she jumped at the chance.
“I made my first world team in 2009, my senior year of high school, and then I was able to move into the Training Center,” Gray said. “I was so excited. I moved into one of the resident dorms with now two-time Olympian Kelsey Campbell.”
That was seven years ago, and she’s been moving forward ever since.
At the OTC, Gray trains with other members of the U.S. Women’s National Team under the leadership of world-class coaches Terry Steiner, Erin Tomeo and Emma Randall. She has access to a sports psychologist and nutrition specialist, both of whom she consults on a regular basis to stay mentally and physically strong.
In addition to on-mat training, Gray lifts weights at the newly renovated Ted Stevens Sports Services Center, a 37,000–square-foot strength and conditioning facility.
Also located in Ted Stevens is a recovery and sports medicine center, where Gray admits she spends a lot of her time. After overcoming a dislocated kneecap in 2010 and a serious collarbone injury in 2013, the world champion is prioritizing staying healthy in the lead-up to Rio.
“It hasn’t all been sunshine and rainbows – there have been some injuries along the way,” Gray said. “But one of the great things about the staff at the Training Center is they helped me stay on track and overcome those, and really come into my own as an athlete.”
A Fresh Perspective
The community at the OTC has been equally important to Gray, as she lives and trains alongside Olympic and Paralympic hopefuls in a wide variety of sports.
“Everyone’s world championships are at different times – ours are in September, whereas swimming’s, for example, are in the summer,” Gray says. “But we all kind of hang out in the cafeteria and talk about it, and all ride off of each others’ highs and lows with those events. You get that energy from other athletes.”
Gray credits Athlete Services Coordinator Sherry von Riesen – also known as “Team Mom” – for helping her through a tough period of time after her 2010 knee surgery.
“The OTC can be a hard place to be when you’re hurt, because the best thing you can do there is train,” Gray said. “But Sherry puts together a lot of volunteer opportunities, and that’s really what helped me stay connected, have some perspective and find a more positive realm. It’s not just about the sport all the time, but it’s also about inspiring all the people who are along for the journey.”
Gray has spent hundreds of hours volunteering in the Colorado Springs community, from reading to kids at the children’s hospital to helping build homes through Habitat for Humanity.
With just months to go before Rio, though, it’s time to put full focus on her Olympic dream.
An Olympian – At Last
Four years ago at the 2012 U.S. Olympic Trials, Gray narrowly missed making Team USA. She reached the finals in the 63kg weight class, but was defeated by heavy favorite Elena Pirozhkova. Gray traveled to London as an alternate for the team, an experience that only fueled her ambition.
After the London Games, Gray moved up a weight class. After winning the world championship at 67kg that year, her coaches encouraged her to keep adding. She ultimately transitioned to 75kg – a move that certainly paid off, as she went on to win both the 2014 and 2015 world titles.
Entering the 2016 Olympic Trials in April, Gray’s perspective was vastly different than it was in 2012.
This time around, it was she who was the heavy favorite. In a final match that lasted only 65 seconds against runner-up Victoria Francis, Gray punched her ticket to Rio in commanding fashion.
She and Pirozhkova will be traveling to the Games as teammates, competing in two different weight classes.
As for her goals later this summer, Gray has some ideas.
For now, though, she’s just enjoying being able to – at last – call herself an Olympian.
“I want to celebrate the fact that I just became an Olympian a little bit longer. I’ve been trying to make an Olympic Team for a long time now, so I’m going to fully allow myself to be excited about that,” Gray said. “When we do take those steps closer to Rio, it’s kind of glaring what the goal is. We don’t have an Olympic gold medalist for women’s freestyle wrestling for Team USA, and I’m ready to be that person.”Foto: Facebook
DANAS HDZ slavi 28. rođendan.
"U subotu 17. lipnja 1989. u Zagrebu je održana osnivačka skupština HDZ - Hrvatska demokratska zajednica. Sljedećih 28 godina članovi HDZ-a predvodili su borbu za neovisnost, teritorijalnu cjelovitost, međunarodno priznanje i afirmaciju Hrvatske, a i danas HDZ ostaje središnja politička snaga daljnjeg razvoja zemlje", objavljeno je na Facebook stranici hrvatskog premijera i šefa HDZ-a, Andreja Plenkovića.
Kako ne bi ostali na samo jednom bitnom datumu iz povijesti HDZ-a, prisjetimo se još nekih važnih događaja u 28-godišnjoj povijesti "središnje političke snage daljnjeg razvoja zemlje".
Afera Fimi Media
Najveća korupcijska afera hrvatske politike i krunski dragulj kriminalne povijesti HDZ-a. Afera u kojoj je HDZ preko marketinške tvrtke Fimi media u vlasništvu Nevenke Jurak iz državnih i javnih tvrtki, a po direktnom nalogu Ive Sanadera, izvukao na milijune kuna za potrebe HDZ-a. Afera još uvijek nema svoj sudski epilog. Lani je, naime, Vrhovni sud ukinuo presude Sanaderu, HDZ-u i svim ostalim okrivljenicima za Fimi mediju, a slučaj je vraćen na ponovno suđenje.
Prema nekim procjenama, iz javnih tvrtki je u aferi Fimi Media po nalogu Ive Sanadera izvučeno čak 180 milijuna kuna.
Afera HAC
Uz Hrvatske autoceste vežu se mnoge afere. U tolikoj mjeri, da su praktički postali sinonim za izvlačenje novca.
Prisjetimo se najpoznatije afere HAC-a i bojanja tunela Mala kapela i Sveti Rok koji je preplaćen 11 puta. Umjesto 34 kune, bojanje po kvadratu je naplaćeno 220 kuna.
Zadarski gradonačelnik i bivši HDZ-ov ministar prometa i infrastrukture Božidar Kalmeta, sumnjiči se da je sa svojim suradnicima podijelio preko 15 milijuna kuna i 850.000 eura iz javnih tvrtki za održavanje i izgradnju cesta.
HAC se sumnjiči i za nezakonite natječaje za signalne stupiće. Točnije, da ih je umjesto 30 kuna plaćao i do 580 kuna, ali i da su kupili više opreme nego što su naručili i to za 4,5 milijuna kuna.
S braćom Žužul optuženi su i da su ukrali brdo, točnije pogodovali Skladgradnji iz Imotskog kako bi se iskopao kamen za Luku Ploče. HAC je time oštećen za više od 58 milijuna kuna.
Velika afera bila je i na odmorištu Mosor, gdje su izgrađeni tri milijuna kuna vrijedni WC-i. Radove na dionici Dugopolje – Ravča, sumnja se, preplaćeni su za 740 milijuna kuna, a optuživani su bili i za primanje mita za zapošljavanje.
Na sve optužbe, poput one da je u njegovih šest ministarskih godina kilometar autoceste poskupio sa 4,25 na 17 milijuna eura, Kalmeta je odgovarao da ne misli dati ostavku jer se ne smatra odgovornim.
Afera HEP
Ivu Sanadera tereti se da je 2008. s bivšim vlasnikom Dioki grupe Robertom Ježićem poticao tadašnjeg predsjednika uprave HEP-a Ivana Mravka da Ježićevim tvrtkama isplati pozajmicu od 15 milijuna kuna i da im prodaje struju ispod tržišne cijene.
DORH smatra da je HEP oštećen za 3,8 milijuna kuna, a optužnica je postala pravomoćna tek u rujnu 2013. godine.
Afera Hypo
Još jedna u nizu optužnica prema bivšem HDZ-ovom premijeru. Optužuje ga se da je u aferi Hypo državu oštetio za 7,2 milijuna kuna. Sve je počelo još 1995. godine, kada je Ivo Sanader bio na mjestu zamjenika ministra vanjskih poslova. Tada je, prema optužnici, zloupotrijebio položaj i pregovarajući s Hypo bankom oko kredita visokog 140 milijuna austrijskih šilinga kojim je Vlada namjeravala opremiti veleposlanstva, dogovorio sebi proviziju od sedam milijuna šilinga odnosno oko milijun njemačkih maraka.
Afera INA - MOL
Afera INA - MOL teži 75,5 milijuna kuna. Sanadera se tereti da je 2008. godine od mađarske naftne kompanije i tadašnjeg odgovornog za nju, Zsolta Hernadija, primio deset milijuna eura mita kako bi Mađarima omogućio preuzimanje upravljačkih prava u INA-i, iako joj nisu većinski vlasnici.
Afera Planinska
U ovoj aferi, teškoj 26,4 milijnuna kuna, uz Sanadera se još tereti i i bivšeg HDZ-ovog ministra regionalnog razvoja, Petra Čobankovića, bivšeg HDZ-ovog saborskog zastupnika Stjepana Fiolića te glavnog direktnora Inženjerskog biroa Mladena Mlinarevića.
Afera HPB
2009. je bila godina HPB afere. Uz ovu aferu vezana je Hrvatkova Hrvatska poštanska banka, jedina banka u državnom vlasništvu. Odobravali su se krediti koji su oštetili banku za 210 milijuna kuna.
Afera Kamioni
Bivši ministar obrane Berislav Rončević i njegov zamjenik Ivo Bačić glavni su akteri ove afere. Riječ je o dvojici djelatnika MORH-a koji su 2004. godine bili u prvom Povjerenstvu, zaduženom za tehničke detalje kamiona koji će se nabavljati i popis tvrtki za pozivni natječaj. Optuženi su da su kupnjom skupljih i lošijih Ivecovih kamiona za HV umjesto povoljnijih MAN-ovih, navodno oštetili državu za 10,2 milijuna kuna.
Afera Spice
Bivši HDZ-ov potpredsjednik Vlade Damir Polančec sa sskupinom suokrivljenika optužen je da je novcem Podravke pokušao preuzeti vlasništvo nad tvrtkom Spice te da su je pritom oštetili za gotovo 400 milijuna kuna.
Polančec i sedmorica njegovih suokrivljenika u ponedjeljak su nepravomoćno oslobođeni optužbe, a četvorica optuženih proglašeni su krivima da su Podravku oštetili dajući 65 milijuna kuna zajma splitskoj tvrtki SMS.
Afera Verona
3. rujna 2006. godine Index je objavio kako su se tajno u Veroni 24. i 25. lipnja sastali Ivo Sanader, predsjednik Uprave Plive Željko Čović te Miomir Žužul, a tema razgovora bila je prodaja Plive.
>> Tajni sastanak u Veroni: Žužul uvjerio Sanadera da Barr treba kupiti Plivu?
Prema informacijama koje smo tada imali, na sastanku je donesena ključna odluka o prodaji Plive. Međutim, tek 2011. USKOK je počeo istraživati kako je prodana Pliva te još neke njihove transakcije.
>> Index otkrio Aferu Verona još 2006: Prodaja Plive na meti Uskokovih istražitelja!
Nismo naveli sve važne prekretnice u turbulentnoj povijesti HDZ-a iz jednostavnog razloga što ih je previše.There wasn’t much action over the last week, with most teams in the conference only playing one game. This means there wasn’t a lot of movement in the rankings either. Notre Dame and Miami both fell two spots in to #5 and #10 respectively while no team climbed more than one spot. With only nine days until conference play begins each school is trying to put themselves in the best position they can heading into ACC play. Some of the most notable matchups include Georgia @ Georgia Tech, #6 Kentucky @ #10 Louisville, Clemson @ #16 South Carolina, and #12 Virginia @ California.
Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4
1.(1) Duke (10-1)- Duke hasn’t played a game since December 10th and could be getting their top-ranked freshman back any day now. The Blue Devils play host to a Tennessee State team that took N.C. State to overtime just last week and whose only other loss is to Vanderbilt. Duke then has one more non-conference game against Elon on Wednesday before starting ACC play on New Year’s Eve on the road at Virginia Tech.
2. (2) North Carolina (10-2)- The Tar Heels suffered their second loss of the season on Saturday when they fell to #6 Kentucky, 103-100. Justin Jackson scored a career high 34 points, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the all freshman backcourt of De’Aaron Fox and Malik Monk. The pair combined for a staggering 71 points with Monk setting the freshman record with 47. UNC finishes out non-conference play with a pair of tough mid-majors in Northern Iowa and Monmouth before opening conference play on the road against Georgia Tech.
3. (4) Virginia (9-1)- The Cavaliers held Robert Morris to a season low scoring total when they beat them 79-39 on Saturday. Virginia has bounced back nicely with back-to-back wins after losing their first game of the season to West Virginia two weeks ago. Next up for Tony Bennett’s crew is a cross-country trip to take on the California Golden Bears in their final non-conference game. The Cavs open ACC play with games against #11 Louisville and #23 Florida State.
4. (5) Louisville (10-1)- The Cardinals rolled Eastern Kentucky by 31 points in their final game before squaring off against hated rival, #6 Kentucky. Louisville has lost three in a row and six of the last seven to the Wildcats. It doesn’t get any easier for the Cardinals after Kentucky with games against #12 Virginia, #16 Indiana, and #25 Notre Dame. To make it through that stretch with two or fewer losses the Cardinals will need to figure out a way to slow down three of the nation’s top 15 offenses.
5. (3) Notre Dame (9-2)- The Irish faced their second ranked opponent in a row on Saturday when they took on Purdue in the Crossroads Classic. In the first half, everything was going Notre Dame’s way as they built a 14-point halftime lead over the Boilermakers. However, Purdue played lights out in the second half and came back to defeat the Irish 81-86. Notre Dame will look to get back on track with games against Colgate and St. Peter’s before traveling to Pittsburgh to open ACC play.
6. (6) Florida State (10-1)- In the Seminoles’ only game of the week, they were tested early by Manhattan. The Jaspers came out with more energy and even took the lead with 6:50 remaining in the first half. However, Florida State had too much talent for Manhattan and took control in the second half and won comfortably, 83-67. Florida State has just one more non-conference game against Samford this afternoon, after which they have nine days off before opening up ACC play with Wake Forest.
7. (7) Virginia Tech (9-1)- The Hokies had seven different players reach double figures in a 113-71 victory over The Citadel with Ahmed Hill leading the way with 22. Sophomore, Chris Clarke made Virginia Tech history on Saturday when he became the first player in school history to ever record a triple-double with 13 points, 12 rebounds, and 10 assists. The Hokies will host Charleston Southern and UMBC to close out their non-conference schedule before facing off with #5 Duke to open ACC play.
8. (9) Clemson(8-2)- The Tigers picked up their sixth straight win last night when they traveled to Birmingham to take on the Alabama Crimson Tide. Vanderbilt transfer, Shelton Mitchell, had a career night and led the Tigers in scoring with 18 points. Next up for Clemson is a showdown with in-state rival, #16 South Carolina, on Wednesday before finishing off their non-conference schedule against UNC Wilmington. Clemson has a brutal schedule to start conference play with four of their first six ACC games against ranked opponents. The other two games come against Wake Forest and Georgia Tech, but both come on the road.
9. (10) North Carolina State (9-2)- N.C. State finally has their whole team intact for the first time all season and beat Appalachian State and Fairfield by an average of 27 points. Freshman Omer Yurtseven looked solid in his Wolfpak debut, scoring 12 points and pulling down 4 rebounds. The Wolfpack will finish non-conference play with a couple of cupcakes at home in McNeese State and Rider before traveling south to take on Miami in their conference opener.
10. (8) Miami (8-2)- Miami hosted local rival FAU last Friday, and beat them comfortably, 76-56. Senior, Davon Reed, led the Hurricanes with 21 points, while freshman Bruce Brown had 14 of his own. Miami dominated the glass all game long, out rebounding the Owls by 19, and five different players for the ‘Canes grabbed at least six rebounds. Miami only has game against George Washington and Columbia left in the non-conference part of the schedule before facing N.C. State in an important game for both teams.
11. (10) Pittsburgh (8-2)- Pittsburgh won their only game of the week against Rice, 82-72, but were pushed by the Owls all game long. Jamel Artis had a season-high 31 points to lead the way, however the Panthers’ sloppiness kept Rice in the game as they turned the ball over 18 times. Pitt will look for a cleaner performances against Omaha and Marshall before opening conference play against #21 Notre Dame on New Year’s Eve.
12. (12) Wake Forest (8-3)- The Demon Deacons fought admirably, but came up just short of knocking off #17 Xavier, 65-69. Bryant Crawford matched a season high with 20 points while dishing out 6 assists to lead the Deacs in the loss. Wake has one last non-conference game, against LSU, before opening conference play on the road against #23 Florida State. While Wake has no bad losses this season, they also don’t have any signature wins and will need to surprise some teams if they want to make it to the Big Dance.
13. (14) Georgia Tech (6-3)- The Yellow Jackets dominated Alcorn State in their only game of the week, 74-50. Four Georgia Tech players reached double figures with Josh Okogie and Tadric Jackson leading the way with 14 apiece. Georgia Tech will face off against in-state rival Georgia on Tuesday before taking on Wofford two days later. The Yellow Jackets have an extremely difficult three-game stretch against #7 North Carolina, #5 Duke, and #11 Louisville to open ACC play and will start conference play in an 0-3 hole if they can not find an upset in there.
14. (13) Syracuse (6-4)- We’ve all heard the saying “when it rains it pours” right? Well right now Syracuse is in a category-5 hurricane. Last Saturday’s loss to Georgetown was the Orange’s fourth loss in six games and put their hopes of making the NCAA Tournament in serious jeopardy. Luckily for Syracuse their next four opponents are less than good and should give this team a chance to gel before getting into the meat of conference play.
15. (15) Boston College (6-5)- Boston College won their second game in a row on Sunday night with an 82-75 victory over Sacred Heart. Jerome Robinson poured in a career-high 32 points in the victory with Ky Bowman and A.J. Turner joining him in double figures with 12 and 10 points respectively. The Eagles conclude non-conference play this week with games against Fairfield and Providence before opening ACC play with Syracuse.
Player of the Week
Chris Clarke, Virginia Tech. – The sophomore guard from Virginia Beach, Virginia made Hokie history when he posted a stat line of 13 points, 12 rebounds, and 10 assists for the first triple-double in school history. Clarke has seen an increase in his production across the board from last season to this one and does a little of everything for VA Tech averaging 9.1 ppg, 7.4 rpg, and 4.2 apg. With ACC play right around the corner, the Hokies will need consistent performances out of players like Clarke if they want to make it to the NCAA Tournament for the first time under Buzz Williams.
Game of the Week
#10 Louisville vs. #6 Kentucky– These long time rivals collide in a midweek top 10 showdown for bragging rights as the top team in Kentucky. If Louisville wants to win, they will have to find a way to slow down Malik Monk, who just scored 47 on UNC and is averaging 20.8 ppg as a freshman. Luckily the Cardinals boast the #10 scoring defense in the nation, at 59.4 ppg, and should have the pieces in place to slow the Wildcat’s offense down.The History of Rancho Seco 1966-1969 SMUD purchases 2,100 acres in southeast Sacramento County for a nuclear power plant. Construction begins on the cooling towers. 1971 SMUD raises rates...even though Rancho Seco hasn't produced a single kilowatt-hour of electricity.
The day Rancho Seco is dedicated there is a forced shutdown of the reactor (unknown to those attending the dedication ceremony)... a portent of things to come. [10/19/74]
The turbine breaks down. The plant is shut down for 13 of the first 18 months of operation. 1976 Loose parts are found in Rancho Seco's generator. SMUD says the find "will not cause any additional lost time." The plant is down for six months. [4/9/76, SB ] 1978 Rancho Seco shuts down four times. Problems are due to a dangerously fast cooldown. 1979 Radioactive iodine is found in milk from cows grazing near Rancho Seco. [Quarterly Radiation Report on Rancho Seco ] 1980 Rancho Seco shuts down six times. Problems occurred with pipe supports, reactor coolant leaks, malfunctions, turbine bearings and feedwater flow. [9/26/83, SU ]
SMUD is fined $25,000 by the NRC for violating federal safety standards. 1981 A state report on emergency planning estimates that a serious nuclear accident at Rancho Seco could result in as many as 76,000 deaths and 110,000 injuries. [11/2/80, SB ]
Rancho Seco shuts down 12 times. Problems are due to steam generator tube leaks, feedwater, reactor coolant pump and turbine vibrations. [9/26/83, SU ] 1982 Rancho Seco shuts down 11 times, due to problems with the turbine, steam leaks, oil pressure and reactor trips. [9/26/83, SU ]
SMUD is fined $120,000 for violating federal safety regulations.
The steam generator leaks again...more radioactive steam escapes. Another shut-down. 1983 Rancho Seco shuts down five times, due to maintenance, re-fueling, modifications, oil pressure in turbine generator, heat imbalance in reactor and leak in steam generator tube. [9/26/83, SU ]
The steam generator tubes leak again and more radioactive steam escapes into the atmosphere. The plant is shut down again.
SMUD faces a lack of skilled workers for Rancho Seco. [3/6/83, SB] 1984 Rancho Seco is on the NRC's list of the ten worst nuclear plants in the U.S. in overall assessment of management performance. [3/28/89, Public Citizens Mishaps Report, NRC ]
More than two billion gallons of water containing radiation levels above federal guidelines have been dumped from Rancho Seco into a creek that feeds the Cosumnes and Mokelumne Rivers, SMUD officials confirmed. [4/14/84, SB ]
Two workers are killed by high-pressure steam bursting from a boiler at Rancho Seco.
An explosion and fire shut down Rancho Seco for 38 days. 1985 SMUD raises rates twice...by nearly 30 percent. SMUD has the first budget deficit in its history. From January 1, 1985 to March 31, 1988, Rancho Seco operates only three months (out of three and one-quarter years).
On December 26, Rancho Seco suffers thethird-fastest shut-down in U.S. reactor history when a control circuit malfunctions. The sudden temperature change could have cracked the reactor vessel and led to a meltdown.
SMUD customers are now paying 40 percent more than a year ago. Rancho Seco work is $27 million over budget and another rate increase is being considered. 1986 Sacramentans for SAFE Energy (SAFE) calls for the SMUD board of directors to commission an independent, comprehensive study of the safety and economic risks associated with Rancho Seco as well as a comparison of alternative means of meeting our energy needs.
Rancho Seco assistant manager for nuclear operations Dan Whitney said plant managers sometimes deliberately withheld information about system shortcomings when questioned by the NRC. [5/22/86, SB ]
SMUD admits that Rancho Seco was "mismanaged, mismaintained and misoperated" its entire lifetime. [5/20/86, SB ]
Two Rancho Seco workers are fired for drug abuse. They claim there is drug abuse throughout the plant. 1987 wo water leaks lead to the release of approximately 10,000 gallons of radioactive water, some of it flowing into the nearby creek, outside of the plant's boundaries...[3/28/89, Public Citation of Mishaps, NRC ]
In 1987, SMUD pays more than $350,000 in cash bonuses to fill positions at Rancho Seco. [7/10/88, SB ]
"Rates have increased 84 percent since March 1985, leading to ratepayer dismay and a situation in which half of SMUD households pay more than if served by surrounding Pacific Gas and Electric Company. " [10/23/87, SB ]
Chief of nuclear operations, John Ward, is fired despite reputation as a fixer of hopeless cases."It was like being in charge of the Keystone Kops," says Ward. [9/23/86] 1988 "Closing Rancho Seco is the option for the future of SMUD that makes the most sense." [3/2/88, Sacramento Bee Editorial Staff ]
"The never-ending series of mishaps are beginning to look like a very high-budget Marx Brothers film, with Harpo in charge of warning the city should there be an emergency." [2/19/88, TV 40 Editorial Comment ]
A SMUD-commissioned, $824,000 QUEST study team recommends closure of Rancho Seco, saying that unstable operation of Rancho Seco could bankrupt SMUD.
Rancho Seco operates at less than 37%--even less than its lifetime capacity average of 39%. Rates have increased almost 92% since March 1985 due to Rancho Seco problems. [INPO ]
The October 1988 SMUD bond prospectus states, "The District has concluded that terminating Rancho Seco in June 1989 would not have a materially adverse impact on the District's operations through December, 1999." [SMUD ]
Measure B (to close Rancho Seco) loses on the June ballot by the narrowest of margins--only two votes per precinct. Measure C (to give Rancho Seco a trial run) barely passes.
Rancho Seco supporters promise stability and low electric rates for SMUD. However, immediately following the June 1988 election, SMUD General Manager Richard Byrne is fired, Rancho Seco chief of nuclear operations resigns and SMUD discloses the need for additional rate increases. Two SMUD chiefs get $520,000 in severance pay and bonuses.
Former SMUD general manager Richard Byrne said he was "stifled, pressured and threatened by pro-Rancho Seco board members who wanted to keep potentially damaging information from reaching the public before the June 7, 1988 election. [6/18/88, SB ]
SMUD gives out $248,500 in bonuses to middle- and upper-level employees in May for ''extraordinary service.'' About 80 percent ($197,000 was awarded to Rancho Seco managers and the balance to employees at SMUD headquarters. [9/1/88,SB]
SMUD secretly paid out more than 970,000 in cash and benefits to eight managers who were forced to leave the utility during the past two years. [11/17/88, SB ]
Operating Rancho Seco in 1988 cost nearly twice the amount it would have cost SMUD to have purchased the same amount of electricity from other utilities. [12/26/88, SU ]
December 12--Operators try to restart Rancho Seco with malfunctioning valves. They rig the system in a manner for which there are no written procedures. One of two steam generators runs dry. NRC officials say operators took the plant through "uncharted waters" and showed poor judgment in handling the restart. 1989 On January 31 Rancho Seco shuts down. Two days later, radioactive gas is released into the environment. The plant is down for 45 days. Bill Chapin, Rancho Seco plant mechanical maintenance supervisor and co-chairman of the Rancho Seco Political Action Committee says, "I think there's no doubt, the Ranch cannot have another breakdown between now and June, politically speaking." A day after his quote, Rancho Seco goes down yet another time. [3/28/89, SB ]
SMUD and PG&E contract ensures cheap, reliable power for Sacramento through l999. [2/27/89, SU ]
The nuclear industry's own Institute of Nuclear Power Operations prepares a report on the recent shutdowns at Rancho Seco, saying that Rancho Seco's prior operating history as well as recent shutdowns "cause us to have a renewed concern over the quality of Rancho Seco operations." [INPO]
SMUD pays $1,230 for one Rancho Seco employee's clothing as part of the "distinctive attire'' program. Jackets, pants, shirts and ties have already cost $72,000; laundry bills, $2,500 a month--all ultimately paid by the ratepayers.
The plant comes to an abrupt halt (is scrammed) on the 10th anniversary of the Three Mile Island meltdown. High-level radioactive gasses are vented to the atmosphere. On April 8 the reactor is started, even though the cause of the March 28 accident has not been found and malfunctioning equipment (from the March 15 accident) has not been repaired. [3/29/89, SB, SU ]
June 6th, 1989 Sacramento Citizens go to the polls and vote to permanently close Rancho Seco. Sources: SB: Sacramento Bee, SU Sacramento Union xxx The above was a poster created for Measure K on June 6, 1989To commemorate the nearing end of my exams and Mr.Grumpy (i.e my dad) for taking me to see Frozen yesterday in the cinema. I really like the plot twists and the somewhat realistic falling in love, I personally fell in love with the architecture though!
AHEM. Now I have serious feels about this.1)2) I HAVE A HUGE LOVE FOR FINNISH, especially for Samuli Edelmann. He and Jippu do this wonderful duet called "Jos Sä Tahdot Niin" (If you want it so) and I think I have found the perfect pairing for it since it is all about sacrifice |
reports of renewed violence.
Wednesday's clashes erupted in the early hours when security forces tried to storm the mosque.
The authorities said in a statement they were targeting armed gangs that "stocked weapons and ammunition in the mosque and kidnapped children and used them as human shields".
Hundreds of people had gathered at the mosque to try to prevent security forces from getting in.
Reports say several people were killed in subsequent clashes, including a medical worker who was treating an injured protester.
Activists say more people were killed when security forces opened fire on crowds of mourners at the funeral of some of those killed at the mosque.
'Bullet holes'
The worst violence was said to have happened in the early evening, when crowds of protesters from surrounding villages tried to get into the city to demonstrate.
Witnesses and activists told reporters that security forces opened fire indiscriminately.
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption The BBC's Lina Sinjab is one of the few journalists to reach Deraa
It was not immediately clear how many people had died.
On Thursday, a hospital official in Deraa told Reuters they had received 25 bodies, adding: "They all had bullet holes."
Rights activists supplied the BBC with a list of 45 people they said had been killed in the unrest.
The BBC's Lina Sinjab in Damascus says the number of dead is difficult to verify because some of the protesters could have been taken to hospitals in other towns and cities.
Unrest broke out last Friday in Deraa when locals campaigned against the detention of 15 children, held apparently for daubing anti-government slogans on walls.
The authorities opened fire on the demonstrators, sparking more radical protests calling for political reform on the following days.
If confirmed, Wednesday's violence would be the worst since the unrest began.
The government has consistently denied the numbers of casualties claimed by witnesses and activists.
The authorities have claimed to be targeting "infiltrators" and "troublemakers" trying to spread fear among the population.Today Google had a huge announcement for Indonesia, in which it detailed six new products for the nation that are arriving now or coming soon, as well as milestones and new initiatives for residents of the country. Among the more exciting announcements are support for the Google Assistant in Bahasa Indonesia, the rollout of Google Stations for expanded WiFi internet access, YouTube Go for the country, Waze support for the capital's odd-even license plate policy, and expansion and milestones for Google's programs in the area.
There are a lot of new product features coming to the country, and while some might be more exciting than others, they're all good things. First and foremost, Google Station will further spread internet access to hundreds of locations over the next year, increasing connectivity in the region. Expanded internet access is an intrinsic good, and will help with things from education to empowerment. But even those just wanting to watch videos on YouTube will benefit.
On that note, the expansion of YouTube Go to the country will provide improved access to visual media even if data is spotty, by allowing users to preview and select videos based on size, increasing their awareness of data consumption. If you aren't already familiar with it, we've written about the subject a few times, and it's already available in India.
When it comes to Google Assistant, the blog post is unclear whether it will work outside Allo, as it is quite explicit in mentioning it. But as of today, it supports the Bahasa Indonesia language. The shortcuts in Search that other areas have had since March will also be rolling out soon, benefiting both locals and tourists as they hunt for food and directions.
One of the features Google has announced, the new region-tailored health answers for Google Search, is brand new and not even available in the US. Google is partnering with area hospitals for it, and the feature should raise awareness for Indonesia's 700 most common health conditions.
Waze has also been updated to help drivers with the recently-implemented odd/even license plate system, which restricts the days a car can be driven in some areas based on those digits. It's just a temporary solution to ease congestion in Jakarta until a granular system based on road use is introduced later this year. In the meantime, having Waze work with the restriction should save drivers a bit of a headache.
Product features are great, but it's the programs that will make the biggest long-term difference for residents of the country, and Google has a lot of reasons to celebrate on that front, too. The company recently hit a milestone of 25,000 developers trained through online courses and workshops in Indonesia, putting them on-track to hit the 100,000 developer goal the company set last year. It also saw more than 4,500 people sign up for the Gapura Digital classes for small businesses.
The Womenwill program for women entrepreneurs has helped more than 7,000 women across five cities, and will soon be expanding to a sixth. Google.org, the philanthropic branch of the company, is also working with ICT Watch, an Indonesian non-profit, to train 35,000 students, teachers, and parents on internet literacy and safety.
Google is also making some of its Primer app-based classes available in Bahasa Indonesia, which should help entrepreneurs in the area with business formation and growth. The lessons focus on topics like how to create a business, sell products and services online, and digital marketing, though more lessons will be added in the future.
These new products, services, and programs should help residents of Indonesia tremendously. And not just when it comes to simple things like content consumption or navigation for locals and tourists, but they should also help residents when it comes to more complex goals like starting a small business, or staying safe online.BERLIN (Reuters) - German police on Wednesday raided the apartments of four imams suspected of conducting espionage on behalf of the Turkish government against followers of U.S.-based cleric Fetullah Gulen, accused by Ankara of organising a failed coup last July.
The new Central Mosque is photographed in Cologne, Germany, February 15, 2017. REUTERS/Thilo Schmuelgen
The raids, in the states of North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate, could further strain relations between the two NATO allies, which need each other to resolve issues ranging from militant Islamist attacks to Europe’s migrant crisis.
The Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office (GBA) said in a statement that the imams had acted on an order issued on Sept. 20 last year by the Turkey-based Diyanet religious authority, which said the Gulen movement was behind the putsch attempt.
German Justice Minister Heiko Maas said the four imams were members of Ditib, Germany’s largest association of mosques, which brings imams from Turkey to serve the community of some three million people with a Turkish background who live here.
“It is very clear that the influence of the Turkish state on Ditib is big. The association must plausibly disengage itself from Ankara,” Maas said in a statement.
A Ditib spokesman rejected the allegations and underlined that the investigations were not being carried out against the association or its mosques.
“The investigations are looking into individual imams who are accused of collecting and passing on information illegally,” spokesman Bekir Alboga said, adding that Ditib was not the official employer of the imams.
“We represent almost 50 percent of the mosques and a majority of the Muslims in Germany who pose no kind of danger,” he added.
Last month, the GBA opened an investigation into Turkish intelligence operations on German soil after a lawmaker filed a criminal complaint. Austria is also investigating whether Turkey has been operating an informer network targeting Gulen followers on its soil, via its embassy in Vienna.
Turkey has accused Germany of harbouring militants from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and far-leftists of the DHKP-C, which has carried out attacks in Turkey. German officials reject the accusation.
The GBA said Wednesday’s searches were aimed at finding more evidence to link the suspects to espionage activities.
“The suspects are suspected of having collected information about members of the so-called Gulen movement and passed it on to the general consulate in Cologne,” the GBA said.
Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan accuses Gulen of masterminding the abortive coup, in which at least 240 people were killed, and wants the United States to extradite him. Gulen denies any involvement in the coup attempt.
Since July Turkey has arrested tens of thousands of people over suspected ties to Gulen in a wide-ranging crackdown criticised by Germany and other European Union nations.HILO » Avocado growers in Hawaii are looking forward to the benefits of more lax federal export regulations that are allowing them to ship their products to the mainland.
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HILO » Avocado growers in Hawaii are looking forward to the benefits of more lax federal export regulations that are allowing them to ship their products to the mainland.
The export of all Hawaii avocados to the mainland was banned in 1992 after a fruit fly species was discovered in an outbound shipment. Avocados could still be sent if they went through a fumigation process, but that can have an impact on taste, The Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture decided to approve the shipment of Sharwil avocados in 2013, allowing only that one type of avocado to be sent to 32 states. The states are in northern regions where fruit flies are less likely to thrive.
The first shipment of 1,000 Sharwil avocados to the mainland arrived in Minnesota in March.
“It just took a little bit to get the things moving along,” Glenn Sako said of the time that passed between the regulation’s approval and the first shipment. Sako is an agricultural specialist with the Hawaii County Research and Development Department.
Kona avocado grower Brooks Wakefield said she and her husband, Bill, have been transitioning from cultivating Malama to Sharwil avocados to take advantage of the new regulations. Many other farmers have been doing the same, she said.
“This is very, very exciting for the whole state,” said Wakefield.
Sako said the goal is to have the first shipments to the mainland encourage more growers to start growing Sharwil. The shipping season for Sharwil is Nov. 1 to March 31.
“We want to be able to hit the ground running,” Sako said.
Two additional sample boxes of avocados have been sent to distributors in Philadelphia and New York.More bad news for the orthodox Soto position that Dogen was opposed to koan introspection in zazen.
Modern scientific historical research supports what some of us who have experienced koan introspection and Dogen Zen have been saying for some time – Dogen offers wonderful teaching by example of how to engage the wild and rich world of koan.
Why does it matter? If you care about enlightenment, it matters. If you care about truth, it matters. If you care that Dogen’s words can inspire opening and actualizing the radiant field of awakening, it matters.
It’s high time that we reclaim Dogen’s work for koan introspection.
Enter a wonderful new book edited by Steven Heine, Dogen and Soto Zen, a collection of essays by leading Buddhist scholars about a wide range of issues regarding Dogen and, of course, Soto Zen.
Heine summarizes the purpose of the volume by suggesting it “…moves forward with ways of associating and connecting some of the dots, so to speak, in order to explore and determine to what extent Sōtō Zen represents faithfully or may misrepresent, and complements or may depart from, Dōgen’s thought in terms of such issues as meditation and monasticism, literature and philosophy, or gender and cultural memory.”
Yeah, in many ways the Soto school, reformed in the late 19th Century so as to compete with the Pure Land school and various Christian denominations, dumbed down the dharma in order to be popular with lay people and keep them coming to visit the grave sites of relatives. And give money. No need for long hours of zazen – practice and enlightenment are one! No need for those bothersome koans – the founder was purely into just sitting.
See Jiryu’s excellent recent series of blog posts for more and less on this in “Lay People: Leap Clear of Mushrooms!” and other recent posts.
Granted, our Soto forebearers probably had a bunch of noble aspirations too, including survival. I’m heartened to learn that there was a lively debate about direction for the school regarding monk and lay practice, uniformity and diversity of styles, precepts as training rules vs. ceremonial blessings, etc.
The winners in the debate, winners largely due to the positions they held rather than the merits of their arguments, stressed “just sitting” zazen as a koan-free zone and employed a doctrine of the oneness of practice and enlightenment that diminishes the importance of enlightenment (no need for bothersome striving). Strangely, this view was then transplanted here to West where lay people are not that interested in visiting grave sites on memorial days but are interested in wholehearted zazen and enlightenment.
But, come to think on it a bit, maybe it’s not so strange when zazen is regarded as a reenactment ritual, kinda like a funeral, with Zen students revisiting the cold and dead.
All the while, the Soto school has used the words of Dogen to support the 19th Century reformation by cutting and pasting (quite literally, especially in regards to what has become the most essential expression of the Soto faith, “Shushogi”). We’re inheriting a tradition that might well stand accused of dumbing down the dharma by delimiting Dogen – that’s even before we Americans got our hot little commodifying hands on the dharma.
Or as Foulk puts it (summarizing the perspective of Soto by Rinzai Zen), it is an approach “…that allows practitioners to remain smugly ensconced in delusion while believing that they are already awakened.”
Yes, to see Dogen’s teaching used to credential a cold-and-dead ideological and faith-based (rather than realization verified) “just sitting” is just sad.
The lead chapter in Dogen and Soto Zen is T. Griffith Foulk’s “Dogen’s Use of Rujing’s ‘Just Sit’ (shikan taza) and Other Koans” (underlining added) and I think I’m in love. Maybe just the Valentine’s Day spirit generalizing in a wonderful way.
Here’s Heine’s summary of Foulk’s chapter:
“A central thesis of this chapter is that Dōgen does not actually teach (or even conceive of) the mode of zazen practice—now generally referred to as shikan taza—that is attributed to him by modern Sōtō school scholars as well as Zen teachers. The instructions Dōgen does give for the practice of zazen, which Foulk analyzes in considerable detail, do not employ this term, nor do they recommend an approach that is consistent with what contemporary researchers say about just sitting.”
Foulk shows that Dogen viewed “just sitting” as a koan. As I’ve noted here before, when explaining zazen, for example, Dogen repeatedly presents the thinking/not-thinking/non-thinking koan. What does it mean that “just sitting” zazen is koan? It enlivens the practice as something to actualize in this vividly hopping along moment, the truth happening point.
The Soto orthodoxy, however, tells us that Dogen didn’t like koan, an assertion akin to the emperor claiming he was fully clothed in a splendid gown while walking around buck naked.
Foulk writes, “It is clear nevertheless that Dōgen regarded kōan literature as a repository of wisdom left by the ‘buddhas and ancestors’ in Bodhidharma’s lineage, that he embraced and recommended the study of kōans as an essential part of Buddhist practice, and that kōan commentary was the principal device he used to instruct his own disciples.”
Now, some contemporary apologists of the Soto orthodoxy begrudgingly argue that Dogen used koans but NOT for zazen. No, never. No way. Dogen was a pure zazen guy after all who would never contaminate his zazen with … what? “…A repository of wisdom.” Hmm.
However, as Foulk points out, one of the ways Dogen was creative was in his use of the koan to vivify the details of Vinaya (monastic discipline) and the reading of the sutras – two really essential aspects of the Zen life that covered what was happening in the monastery twenty-four hours a day. I’d say he koanized both the rules for everyday behavior and for reading and understanding the sutras.
For example, in “Instructions for the Cook,” Dogen writes, “Wash the [dishes] so that they are completely pure and clean, placing up high those that belong in high places and putting down low those that belong in low places. High places high and level; low places low and level.”
That last sentence quotes an important koan, thus koanizing the practice of even putting away the dishes. Dogen also does this with sutra reading. This from “Seeing Buddha” (underlined portions represent references to koan):
“The ‘becoming close to the Dharma Master’ that is spoken of [in the Lotus Sutra] is like the Second Ancestor’s eight years of serving his teacher, after which he got the marrow of a whole arm; it is like Nanyue’s fifteen years of pursuing the way. Getting the master’s marrow is called [in the Lotus Sutra] ‘becoming close to.’ When it [the Lotus Sutra] speaks of the ‘bodhisattva path,’ this is ‘I am also like this, you are also like this.’”
So this guy who is knocking down all barriers and koanizing everything in sight, low and high, from putting away the dishes to the reading and understanding the Lotus Sutra, brackets zazen as the “no koan” zone. Hmm. Does this sound right?
The orthodox position also claims that practice and enlightenment are one and so there is no “experience” of enlightenment. This dismisses the truth of immediate experience and the reports of many practitioners ancient and modern, including the likes of not only Shakyamuni Buddha but also Dogen, Ejo, Gikai, Keizan, and Meiho (the first five Soto ancestors in Japan). Even the lesser known Meiho realized enlightenment, by the way, while grappling with the koan, “What is it that makes all things wax and wane?”
Some proponents of the “no koan” zazen zone, argue that there is no evidence that Dogen used Dahui’s “punchline” (aka, key word, watto) method in zazen. Dogen also doesn’t say not too, of course, and his zazen instructions seem to provide a basic trellis without micro managing the actual contents. Certainly, Dogen does not say ever to keep zazen free of koan.
Further, there are places in Dogen’s writing where he advocates the use of a punchline, sometimes punchline after punchline. The guy seems to have been into the serial punchline method. For example, in the finale of “Instructions for the Cook,” Dogen exhorts us to study and realize the one word Great:
“As for what is called great mind, this mind is like the great mountains or like the great ocean. It is not biased or contentious mind…. On this single occasion you must write the word Great. You must know the word Great. You must learn the word Great.”
But if you find yourself writing, knowing or learning Great in zazen, you’ve strayed from the one true path of pure zazen?
Nah.
So what was the meaning of “Just sit” for Dogen? Foulk writes,
“Given that Dōgen undeniably treated Rujing’s ‘Just sit’ as a kōan in these and other contexts, a question that remains is this: How did he interpret the meaning of the saying? As I show in my previously published analysis of Dōgen’s commentary on the kōan that appears in the chapter of Shōbōgenzō entitled ‘King of Samadhis Samadhi,’ he allowed that the verb ‘to sit’ had a number of different meanings. In the first place there is the ‘sitting of the body,’ which presumably refers to the physical posture of zazen. What he called ‘mental sitting,’ then, would be a kind of concentrated state of mind that could be cultivated in any posture, whatever the practitioner is doing. When the practitioner is no longer attached to any physical or mental phenomena, however, that liberated or awakened state is referred to by Dōgen as the ‘sitting of the body and mind sloughed off.’ In light of this I conclude that Dōgen interpreted Rujing’s admonition to ‘just sit’ as an injunction to ‘just gain awakening.’
If so, Dogen himself did not practice or teach what is now labeled as “shikantaza” and the great founder himself had a gaining idea, too.
Like I said, it’s high time that we reclaim Dogen’s work for koan introspection.When it comes to high-flying, show-stopping dunks, DJ Stephens has been the benchmark in professional basketball. The 6’5” wing that went undrafted out of Memphis has spent time both overseas and in the D-League, most recently with the Iowa Energy, and has radically improved his game in that time.
After signing with the Memphis Grizzlies in July, Stephens is ready to show the world he is more than just a dunker, but a legitimate player that can contribute on a winning team. His play in both Summer League and preseason has been impressive to say the least thanks to his newfound shooting stroke, versatility, and incredible athleticism.
The most impressive addition to Stephens’ game is how good he has been as a perimeter shooter. While in college Stephens rarely shot the ball from deep, averaging 0.4 shots per game. He did shoot a decent 37 percent, but it was clear he wasn't comfortable incorporating that into his game. His shot from deep started to click while with the Energy, he attempted almost three shots per game and hit on about 33 percent of them.
His shooting averages, both from deep and overall, have been very impressive in Summer League and preseason games. In three games played during Las Vegas Summer League, Stephens averaged 10.3 points while shooting 36.4 percent from deep and 59.1 percent overall in 21 minutes of action. So far this preseason Stephens is averaging similar numbers, 10.5 points on 40 percent from deep and 50 percent from the field in 19.6 minutes.
While it is only Summer League and the preseason, showing that kind of consistency is always a good thing to see and something coaches look for. In both cases, Stephens averaged just around three attempts from deep which shows he knows when he should pull the trigger from deep. So while he is expanding his range and changing his game, you won't have to worry about him attempting wild or crazy shots on offense, he knows his role and how to play it.
With this newfound shot, Stephens’ game opens up in an entirely new way. He has always been a good defender, he was named C-USA Defensive Player of the Year and All-Conference USA Defensive third-team as a senior, but now that he is a viable option on offense and more than just a dunker, he can become a legitimate 3-and-D wing.
Standing at 6’5” with a 7” wingspan, Stephens is versatile enough to guard three positions with ease. His long arms are great for keeping players in front of him and disrupting passing lanes. Stephens’ supreme athleticism and high motor make him a formidable defender. With coaching and possible mentorship from one of the best wing defenders in the league, Tony Allen, Stephens could become an even more ferocious defender.
As of right now, only Allen and Jordan Adams are ahead of him on the depth chart at shooting guard. While both of them are good players and will take more minutes than Stephens, he can still carve out a role with this team. He has always risen to the occasion when given the opportunity. Tony Allen is in his 12th year and Jordan Adams is still unproven; don't be shocked if Stephens plays himself into a larger role on this team.
Stephens should make this roster and should be in the NBA from here on out. Few players are more electric than he is, and more importantly he has worked hard to get to where he is today. He didn't let going undrafted get him down, he didn't let getting cut stop him. Instead, he persevered and developed into a more well rounded, complete player. This could be the beginning of something special for Stephens, you should tune in to find out.Apple is demanding that any potential patent-litigation settlement with Samsung include an anti-cloning provision, according to a recent court filing.
The smartphone giants are in settlement negotiations in an attempt to head off another trial. The trial is set for March.
Apple's "discussions with Samsung have consistently included limits to both the scope of any license and a prohibition against cloning Apple products," B.J. Watrous, Apple's chief intellectual property counsel, said in a filing late last week with the US District Court for Northern California. Such a provision would prohibit future Samsung products from copying the design of Apple's handsets.
In its filing, which was first spotted by Foss Patents' Florian Mueller, Apple also disputes a Samsung assertion that the iPhone maker offered a settlement that lacked such a provision.
"Every offer Apple made to Samsung has included limits to both the scope of any license and a prohibition against cloning Apple products," Watrous wrote.
Apple goes on to accuse Samsung of trying to stall resolution of its request for a permanent injunction related to its 2012 patent trial win.
"Samsung persists in its strategy of delay-seeking to extend the briefing schedule for Apple's renewed motion, belatedly moving for discovery relating to Apple's negotiations with Samsung, requesting an evidentiary hearing even though the record is already fully developed, and asking the Court to stay enforcement of any injunction with respect to the '915 patent," Apple said in its filing.
CNET has contacted Samsung for comment and will update this report when we learn more.
In response to a federal judge's order that the two companies hold settlement talks, the chief executives of the two companies have agreed to meet with a mediator to try to resolve some of the companies' ongoing patent disputes. The mediation is scheduled to take place by February 19, but previous attempts by the two chiefs to iron out their legal issues have not resulted in a settlement.Three new CRT entries raise grid numbers from 21 to 24...
Factory team MotoGP riders (6):Jorge Lorenzo SPA - Factory Yamaha rider until end of 2014.Valentino Rossi ITA - Factory Yamaha until the end of 2014.Dani Pedrosa SPA - Repsol Honda rider until the end of 2014.Marc Marquez* SPA - Repsol Honda rider until the end of 2014.Nicky Hayden USA - Ducati Team until the end of 2013.Andrea Dovizioso ITA - Ducati Team until the end of 2014.
Satellite team MotoGP riders (6):Cal Crutchlow GBR - Tech 3 Yamaha until the end of 2013.Bradley Smith* GBR - Tech 3 Yamaha until the end of 2014.Ben Spies USA - Pramac Ducati until the end of 2013.Andrea Iannone* ITA - Pramac Ducati until the end of 2013.Stefan Bradl GER - LCR Honda/HRC until the end of 2014.Alvaro Bautista SPA - Gresini Honda until the end of 2013.
CRT MotoGP riders (12):Colin Edwards USA - Forward Racing (FTR-Kawasaki) until the end of 2013.Claudio Corti* ITA - Forward Racing (FTR-Kawasaki) until the end of 2013.Karel Abraham CZE - Cardion AB (ART) until the end of 2013.Randy de Puniet FRA - Power Electronics Aspar (ART) until the end of 2013.Alex Espargaro SPA- Power Electronics Aspar (ART) until the end of 2013.Hiroshi Aoyama JPN - Avintia Blusens (FTR-Kawasaki) until the end of 2013.Hector Barbera SPA - Avintia Blusens (FTR-Kawasaki) until the end of 2013.Danilo Petrucci ITA - IodaRacing (Suter-BMW) until the end of 2013.Lukas Pesek* CZE - IodaRacing (Suter-BMW) until the end of 2013.Bryan Staring* AUS - Honda Gresini (FTR-Honda) until the end of 2013.Michael Laverty* GBR - Paul Bird Motorsport (PBM-Aprilia) until the end of 2013.Yonny Hernandez COL - Paul Bird Motorsport (ART) until the end of 2013.
* RookieA day after Utah Republican leaders urged skeptical conservatives to back Donald Trump, independent presidential candidate Evan McMullin stepped up his outreach to millennials at a candidate forum at the University of Utah’s Hinckley Institute of Politics.
Evan McMullin points to Joel Gardner, a 22-year-old political science major who voted for Gary Johnson in 2012. Gardner wants to know McMullin’s stance on foreign policy and military interventions in the Middle East.
Gardner doesn’t say it during his question, but afterward reveals he went ahead and voted for Gary Johnson again.
“So I still think he’s pretty hawkish, which is the main reason I didn’t vote for him,” says Gardner. “I came out because he’s obviously going to be a player in the future. Especially in Utah politics, he’s going to be a player.”
Gardner exemplifies the strange electoral landscape of Utah politics this year. An active Mormon, he says this election has divided his whole family.
“I have a sister who is voting for Hillary, a sister voting for Trump and everybody else in my family is kind of across the board,” he says. "My family's never been divided on political issues before."
McMullin on Wednesday reiterated his strategy to win Utah’s six electoral votes by picking up younger voters, like Gardner, who seek out third-party candidates.
“The next audience is talking to people who are supporting Donald Trump and convincing them this is a better way,” says McMullin. “Come home to your principals, come home to true conservatism, come home to the ideals that made this country so special, so powerful and prosperous.”
Republican Vice Presidential candidate Mike Pence used this same “come home” phrase to a Salt Lake rally last week, as he attempted to woo conservatives back to the Trump train.
“They took our party, why can’t we take their phrase?” quipped McMullin.
Win or lose Utah, McMullin is hoping to launch a new conservative movement after the election to rebuild a fractured Republican party.Students protesting against fees in London. Photo by Adam Barnett
A version of this article first appeared on VICE UK.
Thousands of students in the UK are currently coming to from their dissertation-based stupor, waking up to a lifetime of loan repayments. If they did a three-year degree, they belong to the first batch of graduates potentially saddled with up to £27,000 ($42,000) of debt, thanks to the coalition decision in 2010 to allow universities to charge a maximum of £9,000 ($14,000) a year in tuition fees. What they have to pay back is nothing like the colossal, life-changing debt of American students, but compared to the carefree British graduates of 2014, they're fucked.
I wanted to know whether they could just sack it all off in return for never being able to get a credit card—which, in the long run, probably isn't such a bad thing anyway. To find out I called Nick Hillman, director of the Higher Education Policy Institute, the only think tank in the UK that specializes in higher education. He was also, as you may discover in furious comments underneath this article, Chief of Staff to former Tory Minister for Universities David Willetts from 2010 to 2013.
We spoke about whether an American-style mass default is even possible in the UK, and, if not, if the future for student loans is as bleak as it often looks.
A man shouting, presumably about tuition fees. Photo by Adam Barnett
VICE: So, firstly, what would be the consequences of everyone in the UK just defaulting on their loans?
Nick Hillman: I read the story you sent over from America, and I've read the New York Times piece over the week, and the first thing to say is it's not an easy thing to do. It's much easier in America than it is here, because the standard way of collecting student loans back in Britain is through the payroll. So, basically, anyone who's not self-employed never actually writes a check to the student loan company—the money just comes off their pay packet, a bit like income tax, before they ever see it, and the employer pays the student loan company and the government. So it's a lot harder to do.
There are people who could do it: Self-employed people could do it. But the difficulty is the parameters of the loan system are very different here to in the States. One is that they have that very efficient collection mechanism, which isn't a regular feature in America, and the second is that, actually, our repayment service is quite generous—you don't start repaying your student loan here until you've got a job that's earning at least £21,000 [about $33,000] per year, which is a lot higher than the States. Even then, you only pay 9 percent of your money above £21,000.
The other problem is that people who are in low-paid work are not paying their loans back anyway. So I suppose you could say they're defaulting, but it's the way the system works, so they're allowed to default. So I don't think there's a direct parallel to America.
I think where there might be a parallel is that students don't seem that bothered about getting into debt. So when tuition fees went up to £9,000, there were opinion polls that suggested everyone would stop going to university, and they didn't. They went to university in very significant numbers. In fact, we have more full-time students than ever before.
What I think will happen is, fast-forward 15 or 20 years... let's say there's a general election in 2030 and lots of graduates—everyone who's been to university between 2012 and 2030, basically—who are working in the labor market with very large student loans and actually no way to default on them. Except that there is one way to default on them: elect a government that promises to wipe them out. I think that the same way Margaret Thatcher found reducing income tax a very powerful electoral weapon, I don't think it's inconceivable that, in the future, a populist politician could come along and say, "We'll do something to your student loans." It would feel like a tax cut—people would feel it in their pay packet because the money is taken off by employers before they ever see it. So I think that would be a sort of official way to default, but an individual can't default in Britain the way they can default in America.
"It's pretty hard to default on your income tax, and it's pretty hard to default on your student loan."
When you start a new job and have to declare your loan status, is there a punishment for falsifying it?
The short answer is: I don't know. But I'm pretty sure the system would eventually catch up with you, because your employer would need to give your National Insurance number to Inland Revenue, and the Inland Revenue talks to the student loans company a lot, and I suspect it wouldn't take long for the Inland Revenue to work out that you're doing this job and you're having your tax deducted and you've also got a big outstanding student loan.
Now, if you move abroad, serious problems arise. One way people get out of repaying their student loans is to move abroad, because although when you move abroad you still owe the money—it's a contractual debt—the British government finds it very hard to track people down to say, "Why aren't you paying your loans?" So people who are really keen to get out of paying could all go and work abroad.
There are probably a few people who do that. That would be another way to avoid paying it. But our student loan repayments feel more like a tax than they do in America. It's pretty hard to default on your income tax, and it's pretty hard to default on your student loan.
We're about to get the first wave of the £9,000 kids graduating. Do you anticipate a movement to re-evaluate how these loans are repaid?
It's probably not the answer you want to hear, but I don't particularly anticipate it in the short-term. By the way, they graduate this summer, but they don't become liable for repayment until next April—so its April 2016 that's the key date. But lots of graduates get jobs at about £20,000 [$31,000] a year, and any graduate on a job of £20,000 a year won't be repaying their student loan, and even if the graduates lucky enough to get a job at, let's say £25,000 [$39,000] a year, they'll only be repaying 9 percent of £4,000, so they're only paying £360 a year, which is not much per week. It's less than £10 a week, isn't it? So that probably won't feel all that painful in the short term.
Now, it's possible the government will toughen up the repayment terms, and then it will feel a bit more real. The other challenge is whether students would rather many years of low payments, or a small number of years of high payments to get rid of their loan. That's why I say this whole thing here is much harder than in America.
Do you think we're reaching a point where we re-evaluate, if not the fees and the loans, how we value different degrees, and who should be paying back their full loans?
Yes. It's very difficult to do at the moment, because we can guess that someone doing a nursing degree will earn less than someone doing astrophysics, but we don't have good data on it. We know that, on average, people aren't predicted to pay back the whole of their student loan, but we don't know in advance which people they are. That data is slowly being gathered, by the way, so we will know in the future, and then I suspect the debate becomes less, "Who should be paying back their loan?" and more, "Should there be a different tuition fee cap for |
. roads.
Auto industry leaders have estimated that 3 million commercial truck jobs could eventually be at risk if self-driving vehicles replaced human drivers.
Spear and Clarke said they did not believe there would be a big near-term impact on jobs.
“Large scale displacement of drivers is not likely too happen, especially in the short and medium term,” Clarke said.
U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has said she is “very concerned” about the impact of self-driving cars on jobs.
The 1.4-million member International Brotherhood of Teamsters union is trying to convince Congress to reject new rules to speed self-driving truck deployment, warning they could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and reduce road safety.
“It is essential that American workers are not treated as guinea pigs for unproven technologies that could put their lives at risk,” Teamsters General Secretary Treasurer Ken Hall told the committee on Wednesday.
He argued that commercial trucks operate differently than passenger cars and any issues could cause more damage than those involving smaller vehicles.
Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, who has been working with Republicans to draft self-driving legislation, said at the hearing he did not support including commercial trucks and that safety and job impacts must be addressed.
Many Republican senators support including commercial trucks, as does Deborah Hersman, head of National Safety Council who testified at the hearing on Wednesday.
Senator John Thune, a Republican who chairs the panel, said trucking should be addressed in the legislation, but said no final decision had been made on commercial trucks. He said he hoped to work with Democrats “to strike the right balance.”
Thune said Wednesday he hoped to introduce a bill and get committee approval by early October.
Self-driving proponents note that 94 percent of U.S. car crashes are the result of human error and argue self-driving cars could dramatically cut the 35,000 annual road deaths.
Tech firms and shipping companies are bullish on the prospects for self-driving trucks, with Tesla Inc (TSLA.O), Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL]’s Otto unit and Alphabet Inc’s Waymo unit (GOOGL.O) working on automated trucks.BJP Executive Meet: Amit Shah was responding to the Rahul Gandhi's controversial remarks at Berkeley.
Highlights Amit Shah addresses 2,000 leaders of BJP in Delh Rahul Gandhi wrong to say dynastic politics is Indian culture: Shah That is a Congress tradition, says Shah, attacks Congress for graft too
Rahul Gandhi has it all wrong - dynasty or family connections in launching careers is "a tradition of the Congress and not of India", NDTV has learnt BJP chief Amit Shah said today, responding to the Congress Vice President's controversial remarks at Berkeley in California last month.Mr Gandhi, whose family is the pivotal force of the Congress, told students "this is how India works" when he was asked about dynasty politics. He also cited a list of Indians who have inherited their family's legacy to contend that he should not be singled out for benefiting from his last name. Among those offered as evidence by Mr Gandhi: the Ambanis, Abhishek Bachchan and several politicians like MK Stalin and Akhilesh Yadav.Mr Shah's rebuttal was offered in his opening remarks at BJP National Executive Meet in Delhi attended by 2,000 leaders including 13 Chief Ministers and the party's state and national law-makers.Mr Gandhi at the Berkeley session also accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government of eroding secularism and promoting intolerance. The BJP chief, who is the Prime Minister's closest aide, responded today that while Mr Gandhi has no problem criticizing the Indian government in a foreign country, the BJP's record speaks for itself. "Look at the huge corruption while the Congress was in power," Mr Shah said, referring to the many swindles in sectors ranging from coal to telecom that erupted with the collusion of government officials when the previous Congress-led government was in power. "There has not been one charge or corruption against the BJP in the last three years," Mr Shah said. His other comments emphasized the BJP's plans to expand its foothold in the northeast and the south.Federal Labor, Liberal members concerned about 'whole paragraphs of Hansard being changed'
Updated
There is concern from within both major parties that Hansard, the official record of Parliament, is being substantially altered.
Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan said he had "reams of examples" of "whole paragraphs of Hansard being changed".
After hearing Senator Heffernan's remarks, Federal Labor frontbencher Joe Fitzgibbon questioned the integrity of the system.
"If the system is breaking down to the extent that it's allowing people to make substantial changes to their Hansard after the event then that needs to be addressed and I'll be raising those issues with the Speaker this week," he said.
Mr Fitzgibbon has been pursuing the issue following erroneous comments Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce made in the House of Representatives about drought support last year.
Mr Joyce corrected the record in the chamber that day, but it was later revealed that the Hansard record of the original remarks had also been changed.
The Minister blamed a staffer, who he said had been "counselled".
Mr Joyce says Mr Fitzgibbon is paranoid.
"[A] mistake was made in my office, it was corrected, it's been investigated by the Senate, investigated by the Speaker of the House, investigated in a special Senate committee," Mr Joyce said.
Senator Heffernan revealed his concerns about widespread changes to Hansard in a Senate committee earlier this month.
"I have taken the trouble to understand changes to Hansard," he said.
"I have reams of examples in the last three weeks, which — and this may be a wake up call to everyone — includes whole paragraphs of Hansard being changed."
According to the House of Representatives Practice, although MPs have the right to correct their remarks, changes "which alter the sense of words used in debate or introduce new matter are not admissible".
It goes on to say: "In some instances of error or inaccuracy in the Hansard reports, the position is better clarified by a personal explanation."
It also says while only the House itself can exercise control over the content of Hansard, in practice the responsibility has been transferred to the Speaker.
Similar rules exist in the Senate.
Topics: federal-parliament, parliament-house-2600
First postedFord CEO Mark Fields announced today that Ford has canceled plans to invest $1.6 billion in a new plant in Mexico. Instead it will produce the vehicles the Mexican plant would have manufactured at facilities in Michigan and Illinois. The move is expect to create approximately 700 jobs in the U.S.
The Washington Post buries this news in an article about Trump “targeting” American automakers, especially General Motors, by threatening to impose new tariffs on imports. At the same time, Post reporters Ylan Mui and Steven Overly decline to attribute Ford’s decision, and the American jobs it will create, to Trump.
In the Post’s telling, Ford’s decision is down to a decrease in the demand for small vehicle due to lower fuel costs. This trend rendered the new facility unnecessary. The Post also notes that, according to Ford, the decision to produce the cars in the U.S. was made without consulting Donald Trump or his team.
The article takes a few additional shots at Trump. It refuses to credit Trump with any role in Ford’s decision.
Yet the Ford CEO, Mark Fields, gave Trump considerable credit. He said that Ford’s decision was influenced by the expectation, based on statements by the president-elect, that under Trump conditions for doing business in the U.S. will be favorable.
Indeed, Fields called Ford’s decision “literally a vote of confidence” in the pro-business environment being created by Donald Trump. He added that Ford is “really encouraged” by the regulatory and tax policies that Trump says he intends to put in place.
The dishonest Washington Post chooses to ignore this. Yet, there can be little doubt that Ford’s decision was influenced by Trump’s threat to impose a huge tariff on Ford, his promise to create a more favorable environment for businesses, or both.
Donald Trump’s “America First” approach stands in marked contrast to the America-effacing approach President Obama has pursued for the past eight years. Whether it’s in dealings with U.S. businesses, America’s allies, or our foreign adversaries (acknowledged by Obama or not), the current administration has left plenty of chips on the table.
President “Art of the Deal” will aggressively attempt to collect those chips.Created with @fordtato!
The theory:
President Nixon secretly made a ton of cheap magnet schools/honeypots for smart but poor disenfranchised students (America won the space race because of systematically disenfranchised black women who were great at math and computer programming. The Russians got ahead early on because they had a larger pool of geniuses to choose from). They make the students think they’re going to an awful school, but they’re really going to an incredibly advanced school on par with (if not surpassing) the Ivy Leagues.
Evidence:
Ivy Leagues racist and anti-semitic admissions policies
Not only does Backupsmore have multiple geniuses attending, but enough students to support and maintain classes in fifth dimensional calculus, applied quantum phase theory, etc.
geniuses attending, but enough students to support and maintain classes in fifth dimensional calculus, applied quantum phase theory, etc. The fact that they had a PhD program at all.
Possible Fourth Amendment violations (is the phrase “mostly bug free dorms” a double entendre?)
Heavy government involvement in school projects (the mind control tie was, after all, taken by the government despite the fact that Ronald Reagan wouldn’t run for president for years).
Introduction: Alarming Trends and Coincidences
Picture this: Young Stanford Pines is a prodigy amongst prodigies. Being gifted is one thing, but possessing the capability and ingenuity to create a physics-defying perpetual motion machine (at 17 no less!) is quite another. Ending up in Backupsmore instead of any Ivy League was nothing more than a tragedy—this genius of the future was left in an unassuming mostly-bug-free dorm, instead of a place where his skills could have been better cultivated.
Right?
Enter Fiddleford Hadron McGucket. This Backupsmore student is also years ahead of his time—decades even. Portable computer technology was a pipe dream in the 60’s and 70’s, but dream it he did, even completing a successful prototype in his thirties (given he and Ford are the same age, approximately). His specialty is robotic mechs unattainable even with today’s technology. He possesses a wealth of knowledge so vast that he was able to construct a polydimensional metavortex thousands of years before mankind had that kind of technology, And, despite all odds, he ended up in the same college as Stanford. Not just the same college, but the same dorm-room, even.
That’s no longer a coincidence. Two geniuses, leagues ahead of the world they live in, in the same dorm? One prodigy is an anomaly. But two? That’s a trend.
Why Backupsmore? Where are the Ivy Leagues?
One could make the argument that both Stanford and Fiddleford are poor, too poor to afford Ivy League colleges on scholarships that (at least Ford) wouldn’t get due to not being valedictorian or even likely in the top ten percent of his class.
But, since Ford is from New Jersey and Fiddlefordd from Tennessee, at least one of them has to be paying Backupsmore out of state tuition.
Plus, college overall was cheaper then, and the system at the time was designed to funnel white students through the system while poorer and less white students were conscripted and shipped off to Vietnam. And if not Ivy League, surely a less prestigious but more qualified school would have accepted either Ford or Fiddleford into their ranks? Perfect grades do not a college student make, after all.
I find it hard to believe that neither of them applied to another school and that neither had been accepted by a school other than Backupsmore.
However… Stanford Pines isn’t white (particularly not by 1960s standards). Stanford Pines is, after all, Jewish.
The Ivy Leagues? The Ivy Leagues are predominately Protestant. Their students come from old money families who would pull their kids out of school in a skinny minute if their “good protestant children” have to spend too much time surrounded by people who aren’t just like them.
On top of this, the Ivy Leagues (Harvard, Yale, etc) have a noted history of antisemitic admissions policies (whether official or not).
Come to think of it, this could also be why West Coast Tech was so quick to dismiss him. Stanford Pines is a very Jewish name, they likely made their decision before even meeting him. (The representatives were from California, not New Jersey, their attitude can’t be explained by the general culture of the Garden State).
Why is Backupsmore being used as a Magnet School though?
Consider: The year is most likely 1969. We know Ford came to Gravity Falls in 1975 so we can assume he spent most, if not all, of Nixon’s presidency in college.
From 1969 to 1972, there were six manned US moon landings, securing an American victory in the Space Race (and, arguably, the Cold War itself).
And who is responsible for the Apollo 11 moon landing?
None other than Katherine Johnson, a systematically disenfranchised black woman.
Now, consider Richard Nixon, the thirty-seventh president. Nixon was a paranoid, lying, scheming man who disenfranchised the anti-war hippie movement and the black power movement in one fell swoop (the effects of which we’re still feeling today), with his aide, John Ehrlichman, quoted as saying:
“You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Nixon also ended the draft with the specific intention of stopping the anti-war movement.
But consider what value Katherine Johnson and others like her presented to the Nixon administration, what pawns disenfranchised geniuses could be to the Nixon administration.
Consider that, by allowing the poor, by allowing people of color, allowing hippies, and Jewish people and Catholics (who were, at the time, considered outsiders, Jewish people much more so than Catholics but still) to get a quality education while thinking they’re receiving a poor one, all while doing the government’s dirty work, America could keep their newfound leg up on Soviet competition.
After all, why fight in a war with only a fraction of your people working with you?
Events of Note
“MOSTLY bug-free dorms” seems like an odd choice of words off the bat— and the tone of voice the speaker (the dean, I believe) says it in makes it sound like a positive thing. However, it’s well known that all college dorms are only mostly bug free. So why bring it up?
Well, if it is Nixon who’s making these magnet schools, and the government is heavily involved in the curriculum, why wouldn’t the dorms be bugged?
?
This is, of course, a violation of the fourth amendment, but since when has Richard Nixon cared about that?
? The “government-funded” mind control tie experiment sounds like something straight from a declassified CIA file.
Backupsmore has suspiciously advanced classes, for a “sub-par” school. Colleges rely on tuition payments to pay faculty members. And if a student underperforms/fails a class, they’re removed from campus.
Backupsmore University, therefore, must not only have enough students to justify hiring professors to teach their advanced classes (again: Applied Quantum Phase Theory and Fifth Dimensional Calculus! Not to mention Ford’s cryptography classes), but have enough students consistently passing these classes as well!
Conclusion
Gravity Falls Richard Nixon created at least one honeypot college for poor or otherwise disenfranchised students, so that he could use their work to further American agendas at home and abroad, all while refusing to actually work for social change, and none of these students actually received a leg up or any social leverage for their trouble.Lessons learned while refactoring javascript
Lucas Paulger Blocked Unblock Follow Following Jun 30, 2016
I’ve just spent the last week refactoring a large chunk of untested code. This came about from having to fix a bug there, but realizing there was absolutely no way that I would be able to write a regression test to prove the bug was tested and fixed.
So I set off on a journey to clean up the code, and to give myself and my team the assurance that the code was tested.
Understanding the code
Confronting some unknown code can be daunting at first. Sometimes the code being investigating was done as a quick fix. Maybe the author didn’t even understand their fix, but it worked so they left it to stay for the ages. I’ve encountered bug fixes that feel as if they were accidental. If a bug fix will cause code changes, make sure to fully understand how the changes impact the codebase.
Common bad code
While refactoring code, I’ve encountered some common patterns that, with some reasoning can be fixed fairly easily.
God-objects are huge chunks of code that do too much. If encountering such code, try to organize it into smaller relatable chunks of code that can be separated and tested appropriately. This will make it easier to make changes down the road.
Overly diluted code is code that is prematurely abstracted, causing it harder to follow the flow of the code. When straightforward code is moved out into its own private function, it costs future developers more time to dig one more layer to truly understand whats inside, when quite frankly that “abstracted” code was simple enough to have remained.
Here’s an example:
This is a dumbed down example, but I’ve seen abstractions similar to this, where the developer thought they were reducing duplication, but in fact that are creating more diluted, harder to reason about code.
Use factories to create new objects. I hope most people have figured this one out, but if the keyword “new” is sprinkled throughout the code, then most likely factory methods are not being used. Here are two great resources for getting started with factories:
Make dependencies more obvious. This, is a non-issue for most developers using a module loader. Requirejs and Commonjs are both well suited for declaring dependencies, making them obvious. That being said it’s still possible to encounter code with unclear dependencies.
Below are examples of good and bad declarations of dependencies:
Use a linter to catch un-used dependencies (and many other code flaws), which in turn keeps the code much cleaner. By declaring dependencies, the linter will catch the unused dependencies. If the code looks like the “Bad” example then it most likely won’t catch unused dependencies.
Eslint also can be configured to enforce a styleguide for the code. I think this is great for a codebases readability (may I suggest using airbnb’s eslint template).
Refactor using a test first approach
We’ve identified the bug, and now have a better understanding of the code. With this knowledge we can approach refactoring that code, but this time with unit tests that verify our code acts as we expect.
When refactoring, I pretend as if I’m writing the code for the first time, except that the existing code acts as the specifications.
This approach is particularly useful because it helps take a large refactoring, and breaks it into a smaller, more manageable refactoring.
When writing the new code, first write the test that explains what the code should do (remember, the specifications are the existing code, but ultimately end up being your interpretation). Now it’s possible to “move” that code from the untested god-object and into the much smaller, much more clearly intentioned classes which even contain a test!
I get that this technique might be hard to visualize, and of course every situation and codebase is different; but hopefully this will lead the code in the right direction.
Keep the markup simple
It’s pretty easy to find oneself fixing a bug within the html by throwing some logical javascript to see if the bug is fixed. Sure, that’s fine to verifying the fix, but please don’t leave it like that! It’s incredibly difficult to test that logic, and may cause issues for future developers trying to find the code handling that logic.
By moving that logic back into the javascript, and binding the markup to that method; the code can now be easily tested to ensure that it’s working as intended.
Reviewing the metricsRecent Hollywood blockbuster, ‘Zero Dark Thirty’, was quite an experience. Though sharp in its production and direction and largely accurate in depicting the events that led to the death of Osama Bin Laden, it went ballistic bad in depicting everyday life on the streets of Pakistan.
With millions of dollars at their disposal, I wonder why the makers of this film couldn’t hire even a most basic advisor to inform them that
1: Pakistanis speak Urdu, English and other regional languages and NOT Arabic;
2: Pakistani men do not go around wearing 17th and 18th century headgear in markets;
3: The only Urdu heard in the film is from a group of wild-eyed men protesting against an American diplomat, calling him ‘chor.’ Chor in Urdu means robber. And the protest rally was against US drone strikes. How did that make the diplomat a chor?
4: And how on earth was a green Mercedes packed with armed men parked only a few feet away from the US embassy in Islamabad? Haven’t the producers ever heard of an area called the Diplomatic Enclave in Islamabad? Even a squirrel these days has to run around for a permit to enter and climb trees in that particular area.
I can go on.
The following is what I have learned …
Pakistan according to Hollywood
________________________________
The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.What’s the language like in your office? Are people dropping F-bombs at will? Would the conversation at a typical meeting make a sailor blush?
If so, you might live in one of these cities.
The CareerBuilder study (conducted by Harris Interactive) of 2,000 hiring managers and 3,800 employees nationwide found that Washington, D.C., is the city with the filthiest mouth. More than 60 percent of respondents cited the nation’s capital as the place where workers are the most likely to swear.
Denver and Chicago were a close second and third, respectively. Minneapolis, which is No. 7, beat No. 9 New York—a slight shock since Minneapolis is a place where people are (supposed to be) nice.
Here’s the full list:
1. Washington D.C. – 62 percent
2. Denver – 60 percent
3. Chicago – 58 percent
4. Los Angeles – 56 percent
5. Boston – 56 percent
6. Atlanta – 54 percent
7. Minneapolis – 50 percent
8. Phoenix – 47 percent
9. New York – 46 percent
10. Philadelphia – 44 percent
The study noted that employees from 35 to 44 years of age are the most likely to swear on the job. Also, men cuss more often than women.
Hiring managers said workers who swear often are less likely to win promotions than their colleagues with cleaner mouths.
(Image via)MARCA QUERO
Laudo constatou presença de pelo de roedor no produto. A proibição vale para todo o território nacional
O extrato de tomate da marca Quero é fabricado pela Heinz Brasil
Foto: Reprodução
Estadão Conteúdo
A Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária (Anvisa) proibiu a venda e a distribuição de um lote do extrato de tomate da marca Quero, fabricado pela Heinz Brasil, após laudo que constatou presença de pelo de roedor no produto. A proibição vale para todo o território nacional e está publicada no Diário Oficial da União (DOU) desta segunda-feira (20).
De acordo com a Anvisa, o laudo "apresentou resultado insatisfatório ao detectar matéria estranha indicativa de risco à saúde humana, pelo de roedor, acima do limite máximo de tolerância pela legislação vigente".
Punição é sobre lote L. 11 07:35 do extrato de tomate da marca Quero
A punição é sobre o "lote L. 11 07:35 do produto extrato de tomate da marca Quero, produzido por Heinz Brasil S.A (CNPJ 50 955.707/0004-72), localizada na Rodovia GO 080 Km 26, Nerópolis-GO". Pela decisão da Anvisa, a empresa deverá recolher todo o estoque do lote insatisfatório existente no mercado.
Leia a íntegra da resposta da Quero:
Sobre publicação do Diário Oficial referente ao lote de produto fabricado em dezembro de 2015, a Quero Alimentos informa que, em total respeito ao consumidor e à ANVISA, já tomou as providências aplicáveis para retirar todo o referido lote do mercado em agosto de 2016, quando tomou ciência do ocorrido.
Ressalta, ainda, que nos últimos anos fez grandes investimentos em novas tecnologias para aumentar ainda mais a qualidade do tomate no campo e de seus produtos, e grandes progressos foram alcançados. A companhia afirma com segurança que os rigorosos controles no processo produtivo garantem a eliminação de qualquer risco ou prejuízo à saúde.
A Quero Alimentos reafirma sua transparência em todas as etapas da produção, desde o recebimento dos ingredientes até a distribuição do produto final, com foco no atendimento às legislações aplicáveis a alimentos, de forma a oferecer aos consumidores total confiabilidade no alto padrão de qualidade da marca.As mayor of Dallas from 2002 to 2007, Laura Miller helped lead the charge against a utility company called TXU that wanted to build 11 coal-fired power plants in Texas. Miller and her allies, including the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, stopped the coal plants, and in 2007 TXU was sold to two private-equity firms that promised to steer the company onto a greener path. Their story inspired a documentary film produced and narrated by Robert Redford that showcased Miller, as one magazine writer put it, as a “tough, smart and camera-friendly environmental heroine.”
Today, Miller, 53, who was a newspaper reporter before entering politics, again finds herself in the thick of a big Texas story about coal. This time, she’s trying to get a coal plant built — one that she says would be “the cleanest coal plant in the world.” As director of Texas projects for Summit Power, a Seattle-based energy firm, Miller has spent three years working on behalf of the Texas Clean Energy Project, an unusual $3 billion power facility that would capture carbon dioxide emissions and produce oil as well as coal.
Click to enlarge
Photo courtesy of llnlphotos.
Carbon capture and storage will require subsidies or carbon regulation to compete with conventional plants.
Click to enlarge
U.S. Department of Energy
The U.S. needs to develop lower-carbon technology and sell it to China and India, an NRDC official says.
MORE FROM YALE e360 Rethinking Carbon Dioxide:
From a Pollutant to an Asset Marc Gunther writes, these entrepreneurs believe the process of CO2 removal can eventually help cool an overheating planet. Three startup companies led by prominent scientists are working on new technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The scientific community is skeptical, but, aswrites, these entrepreneurs believe the process of CO2 removal can eventually help cool an overheating planet.
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Coal is, of course, the bane of climate-change activists. But Miller has secured the tacit support of environmentalists, including her old allies at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), for the Texas coal plant. They say the plant could help move the global power industry toward a goal that has proven elusive: low-carbon electricity made from coal.“With 300 years of coal in the ground, the United States needs to find out how to use it in a clean way,” Miller says. “This will raise the bar on all the other coal plants being built. It’s just a matter of spending the extra money to make something that was once dirty become clean.”John Thompson, the director of fossil transition for the nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, agrees. “This is a globally significant project,” he says. “Carbon capture and storage is so important that I don’t think we can avert the worst aspects of climate change without its wide-scale adoption.”That may well be true, but the prospects for clean coal remain uncertain at best. To understand why, it’s important to distinguish between carbon capture and storage (CCS) and what the coal industry and some electric utilities tout as “clean coal.” The industry uses the phrase to describe state-of-the-art pulverized-coal plants, which crush coal into a fine powder before it is burned; these plants emit fewer conventional pollutants (sulfur dioxide, particulates and mercury) than older plants, but they are big emitters of CO2. The average U.S. plant emits 2,249 pounds of CO2 for every megawatt hour (MWh) of electricity it generates, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Capturing and storing CO2 could reduce those emissions dramatically, but it’s expensive.Summit Power’s Texas project is planned for a 600-acre plot of land in the ghost town of Penwell, near Midland-Odessa in west Texas. (The site was previously a finalist for the U.S. Department of Energy’s ill-fated FutureGen clean-coal plant.) The company intends to build a 400-megawatt power plant that would all but eliminate conventional pollutants and capture 90 percent of its CO2 emissions, according to Eric Redman, the company president. He says CO2 emissions would amount to about 200 pounds per MWh, making the Texas plant far more climate-friendly than even the best combined-cycle natural-gas plants, which emit about 850 to 1,000 pounds per MWh.The technologies to accomplish this are well established. “There’s no breakthrough here,” Redman says. Coal can be “gasified” using a thermo-chemical process that strips it of pollutants including sulfur and mercury and separates virtually all of the CO2. This produces a flammable low-carbon synthetic gas, or syngas. (“A gasifier is like a refinery for coal,” Redman says.) The syngas is then burned to make electricity, and the captured CO2 is compressed into a semi-liquid. Compressed CO2 can be sold for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) in the oil-rich Permian Basin, where the project is located — just a mile from a 3,000-mile network of pipelines dedicated to CO2.The potential transformation of CO2 from a greenhouse gas pollutant into an asset is one reason why the Department of Energy awarded the plant $450 million in grants. “If I’m venting CO2 from a plant, and I can use it as a product and not as a waste stream, I’m going to do it all day long,” says Charles McConnell, assistant secretary for fossil energy at the DOE. Texas has used CO2 to extract oil from hard-to-reach undergroundformations for decades, but most of it is piped in from elsewhere — Mississippi, New Mexico and Colorado — and natural supplies are limited.What’s most innovative about the Texas plant, in fact, is a business model that depends on three major revenue streams, buttressed by the government grants and more than $1 billion in potential tax benefits realizable over a 10-year period. One source of income is the sale of CO2, for which demand is growing briskly in the oil patch. A second source of revenue, according to Summit, will be sales of urea fertilizer, which will be produced from syngas not burned for power.Finally, the plant will sell electricity, although only about 200 MW of the plant’s 400MW capacity will flow into the grid; the rest will be used to power the project’s operations, including the urea plant and CO2 compressors. Summit has contracted to sell the electricity to the city of San Antonio, the CO2 to an oil company called Whiting Petroleum (among others), and the fertilizer to an unnamed buyer. It also intends to sell carbon credits, potentially in California’s regulated carbon market.Despite all this, the plant is not yet fully financed, and its prospects are uncertain. RBS Securities, a unit of the Royal Bank of Scotland, has been hired by Summit to raise money; its offering says that “an estimated $700 million of additional equity and $300 million of debt” will be needed to complete construction. Most of that is now lined up, Redman says, but the company still needs a lead equity investor. Construction is expected to take three to four years.Howard Herzog, an expert on carbon capture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), says the Summit project could help move the industry closer to low-carbon coal. But, he says, carbon capture and storage will require either government subsidies or carbon regulation to compete with conventional coal or natural gas plants. “Ultimately, if you’re going to see CCS in the market, you’re going to have to some kind regulatory forcing,” Herzog says.Maybe the most remarkable thing about the Summit plan is that it sailed through the Texas regulatory process with no opposition, at a time when groups including the Sierra Club were running hard-hitting campaigns to shut down existing plants and stop new ones. To be sure, none of theenvironmental groups has formally endorsed the plant. Bruce Nilles, director of the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal initiative, said activists have more important battles to fight. “We’re not against demonstrating new technology,” he noted. More enthusiastic is David Frederick, an environmental lawyer who has worked for the Sierra Club and agreed to represent Summit Power in its effort to obtain an air permit. Why? By email, Frederick replied: “There is a Saudi Arabia of coal in the US, and, in the fullness of time, folks might use it. The Summit plant, if successful, would offer an incredibly low-CO2 way to use it.”There’s another big reason why environmentalists favor efforts to develop carbon capture: China, and its vast reserves of coal. “If no other country in the world existed other than China, it would warrant the development of CCS [carbon capture and storage],” says David Hawkins, director of climate programs at NRDC. Jim Marston, who leads EDF’s Texas office and directs its national energy program, told me: “We probably don’t need coal plants in the U.S. But China and India are likely to build coal plants, and we need to demonstrate that there is much lower carbon technology out there at an affordable cost. In fact, we ought to develop that technology and sell it to them.”Summit’s Texas project is one of three big coal plants under development in the U.S. that intend to capture carbon and use it to recover oil. Tenaska, a Nebraska-based energy company, wants to build a 600-MW plant near Sweetwater, Texas, that uses a post-combustion capture process to cut CO2 emissions by 85 to 90 percent. In Kemper,Mississippi, construction has begun on the Southern Co.’s 582-MW plant that will use coal gasification to reduce its emissions by about 65 percent. The Sierra Club has opposed those plants, citing water issues in Texas and land use, cost and pollution issues in Mississippi. Meanwhile, China, Canada, the Netherlands and the UK are developing their own large-scale CCS-EOR projects, according to an MIT CCS database If all these projects pan out, carbon-capture proponents contend, “clean coal” could emerge as a climate-friendly source of base-load electric power. Meantime, vast reserves of domestic oil in places like the Permian Basin could be unlocked by the newly produced CO2, easing pressures to drill in pristine areas like Alaska.“It’s the beginning of a new industry,” says John Thompson of the Clean Air Task Force. “As soon as these projects go online, everything that’s in operation seems obsolete. These are game-changers.”Agrokor has managed to agree on the financial structure of a special form of financing, which will bring the group about 400 million euros of fresh money to pay debts and current liabilities. Government-appointed extraordinary commissioner Ante Ramljak has confirmed that the loan has been agreed and that 20 financial institutions and banks will be involved, reports Večernji List on 6 July 2017.
The turnaround occurred among Russian creditors because the smaller Russian VTB bank, which has already provided Agrokor with about 300 million euros in loans, now intends to participate in the roll-up arrangement, while Sberbank, which gave 1.1 billion euros to Agrokor and was the biggest opponent of the new roll-up loans, has changed its tactics and is still considering whether or not to provide an additional sum of 110 million euros.
The Russians have changed their position after other Agrokor creditors did not join them in their boycott of the roll-up loan, but also under the pressure of the Commercial Court's decision that the roll-up is not illegal, which hindered their ability to win in any potential lawsuit against the extraordinary administration.
While a few days ago Sberbank categorically claimed they would not participate in the roll-up loan, yesterday they said that the option was being considered. The extraordinary administration has given them ten days to decide whether to use their 110 million euros quota or give it to Zagrebačka Banka and the US investment fund Knighthead Capital Management. In addition to Zagrebačka Banka, Erste Bank and Raiffeisen Bank will also participate in the financing, so the 160 million euros quota reserved for Croatian banks has been met.
Ramljak argues that Agrokor will not use the full amount available to it, but that current obligations will be paid from business revenues. According to the data presented by Ramljak to the provisional creditor council, Agrokor's businesses are doing better than last year. For example, in the first five months, Ledo and Jamnica have been doing better than in the first five months of 2016, with revenues and net profits rising. Konzum’s turnover fell by around 10.8 percent, but the loss is 10 million kunas less than in the same period of 2016 |
he could arrange the purchase of several kilos, the reverend referred to an unnamed buyer and said, “If he’s gonna do it, he’ll do it much more than that.” The FBI agent steered the conversation toward the possible procurement of cocaine, sources said, since investigators believed that Sharpton acquaintance Daniel Pagano--who was not present--was looking to consummate drug deals. Joseph Pagano, an East Harlem native who rose through a Genovese crew notorious for narcotics trafficking, spent nearly seven years in federal prison for heroin distribution.
While Sharpton did not explicitly offer to arrange a drug deal, some investigators thought his interaction with the undercover agent could be construed as a violation of federal conspiracy laws. Though an actual prosecution, an ex-FBI agent acknowledged, would have been “a reach,” agents decided to approach Sharpton and attempt to “flip” the activist, who was then shy of his 30th birthday. In light of Sharpton’s relationship with Don King, FBI agents wanted his help in connection with the bureau’s three-year-old boxing investigation, code named “Crown Royal” and headed by Spinelli and Pritchard.
The FBI agents confronted Sharpton with the undercover videos and warned that he could face criminal charges as a result of the secret recordings. Sharpton, of course, could have walked out and ran to King, Franzese, or Pagano and reported the FBI approach (and the fact that drug dealer “Victor Quintana” was actually a federal agent).
In subsequent denials that he had been “flipped,” Sharpton has contended that he stiffened in the face of the FBI agents, meeting their bluff with bluster and bravado. He claimed to have turned away Spinelli & Co., daring them to “Indict me” and “Prosecute.” Sharpton has complained that the seasoned investigators were “trying to sting me, entrap me…a young minister.”
In fact, Sharpton fell for the FBI ruse and agreed to cooperate, a far-reaching decision he made without input from a lawyer, according to sources. “I think there was some fear [of prosecution] on his part,” recalled a former federal agent. In a TSG interview, Sharpton claimed that he rebuffed the FBI agents, who, he added, threatened to serve him with a subpoena to testify before a federal grand jury investigating King. After being confronted by the bureau, Sharpton said he consulted with an attorney (whom he declined to identify).
Following bureau guidelines, agents formally opened a “137” informant file on Sharpton, a move that was approved by FBI supervisors, according to several sources. Agents anticipated using Sharpton in the “Crown Royal” case focusing on King, but during initial debriefings of their new recruit, it became clear that his contacts in the music business were equally appealing.
Sharpton had met James Brown in the mid-70s, and became extremely close to the R&B superstar. He worked for and traveled with the mercurial performer, married one of Brown’s backup singers, and wore the same processed hairdo as the entertainer. Like Brown, Sharpton would sometimes even wear a cowboy hat atop his tribute conk.
It was first through executives at Spring Records, a small Manhattan-based label affiliated with Brown, that Sharpton--who worked from the firm’s office--was introduced to various wiseguys, including Franzese. His circle of mob contacts would grow to include, among others, the Paganos, Carmine DeNoia, an imposing Pagano associate known as “Wassel,” and Joseph “Joe Bana” Buonanno, a Gambino crime family figure involved in record distribution and production.
At one point before he was “flipped,” Sharpton participated in a mob scheme to create a business front that would seek a share of lucrative Con Edison set-asides intended for minority-owned businesses. That deal, which involved garbage collection contracts, cratered when the power company determined that Sharpton’s silent partner was Genovese captain Matthew “Matty the Horse” Ianniello. Details of the Con Ed plot emerged at a federal criminal trial of Ianniello and his business partner Benjamin Cohen. It was Cohen, who worked across the hall from Spring Records, who recruited Sharpton for the mob garbage gambit.The key problem at the moment, with discourse about basic income, is that evaluations do not go beyond the superficial or the general. By generalising the policy concept of the basic income – of a guaranteed income provided by the government to citizens – and therefore ignoring the specifics or the permutations of different models through which basic income could be implemented, policymakers moot perspectives which are neither conclusive nor helpful. The same tired arguments are rehashed. Proponents of the basic income argue that recipients could take up more productive or innovative exploits, and that governments could reduce bureaucratic expenditure, while opponents point to high costs and the reduction of work incentives.
Prime Minister of Singapore Lee Hsien Loong, when asked during an interview with “TIME” magazine, said Singapore cannot afford a universal basic income. “Nobody has done it. Even the Swiss voted against it. Silicon Valley thinks it will solve the problem, but it is a vast expense and we do not know what the social consequences will be of doing that”, he added. Though it is precisely this uncertainty, of not knowing what might happen, which justifies the value of an experiment. What the prime minister did not mention, moreover, was that experiments – besides Finland – are readied in Canada, France, and the Netherlands.
Which is why the universal basic income experiment in Finland is so fascinating. (Finland, where I spent six months in, also has a special place in my heart). “The New York Times” ran a feature on December 17, describing the experiment as underscoring “the deep need to find effective means to alleviate the perils of globalisation … to lessen the vulnerabilities of working people exposed to the vagaries of global trade and automation”. But what is even more useful is a 62-page working paper – translated and abridged from a report in Finnish – published by Kela, or the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, in September.
Across the eight chapters, the working group sketched the experimental setting, though its exploration and comparison of different models and designs for the Finnish basic income experiment were based on extensive research and microsimulations. Here, I have summarised the most important insights from the Kela paper.
What is the universal basic income experiment in Finland?
2,000 unemployed Finns, between 25 and 58 years old, will be randomly selected for a two-year trial from 2017 to 2018. Each participant will be given 560 euros per month (S$844), and the results will then be assessed in 2019. Participation is mandatory so as to reduce bias, and the primary goal of this universal basic income experiment – which may seem counterintuitive – is to “promote employment” (page 58), by creating more jobs and by activating more unemployed people in the economy.
The total cost of the experiment is 20 million euros (S$30.2 million), and it is also part of a broader policy endeavour to make social security more participatory, to reduce bureaucracy, and to simplify the existing complex scheme.
Why conduct an experiment?
Two reasons. The first – as alluded to in the beginning – is that policymakers know little about universal basic income and its effects. “Discussing basic income at a general level is not a useful basis for the experiment because even small differences between basic income models may lead to very different outcomes” (page 8), and thus far forecasts around the world remain speculative. An experiment, in this vein, would “form a basis for sufficiently reliable assessments on the incentive and other effects of basic income in different population groups and an estimate of the total costs” (page 7), allowing the Finnish government to make more informed choices.
And given the objective “to estimate the causal effect of a basic income scheme on outcomes” (page 11, emphasis mine), random assignment in this field experiment is important. For the next two years, basic income will be “provided to a randomly chosen subset of the target population, and the rest continue receiving benefits as before” (page 11), and in 2019 researchers should be able to estimate the average treatment effect between the treatment group (those who received the basic income) and the control group (those who did not).
Were other models considered?
The basic income of 560 euros per month (S$844) is a partial basic income model, chosen from a range of proposals: a full basic income model, negative income tax, participation income, general benefit based on the Universal Credit, and a basic account.
The working group compared the models across different dimensions, though three were the focus. First, a full basic income model, which would “replace a large proportion of other social insurance based benefits” (page 19). Along this tangent, a partial basic income model just means “the level of benefit is substantially lower and the aim is not to replace other current transfers to the same extent as in full basic income” (page 24). Second is negative income tax. While the aims are similar to basic income – of guaranteeing minimum income and providing work incentives – it is “income compensation by means of taxation when an individual’s income remains below the agreed minimum level” (page 37). And third, participation income, disbursed by the government when individuals become “active”. What counts as “participation” and its conditions, nevertheless, remain debatable (page 42).
Is there popular and political support for the experiment?
Opinion surveys were conducted in 2002 and 2015. In 2015, 69 per cent of all the respondents were in favour of basic income, with the median level of basic income at 1,000 euros (S$1,508). There were no major differences across demographics or socio-economic indicators, and support for basic income is consistent across the various political parties too.
There is, however, a very important caveat. “Respondents – high-income earners in particular – become much more critical when they were told the tax rates needed to finance basic income” (page 10, emphasis mine). This unwillingness to pay for the financial costs and the effect of increased taxes on political support have also been quantified: “The support [for basic income] went down to 35 per cent for a basic income of 500 euros (S$754) a month with a flat rate tax of 40 per cent collected from income exceeding the level of basic income. An 800 euros (S$1,207) basic income level and a tax rate of 55 per cent were supported only by 29 per cent of Finns”.
What were the practical concerns and limitations?
The hope is that this pilot study will be followed by a larger experiment, to address existing constraints:
The 20 million euros (S$30.2 million) set aside has to also cover administrative cost, so “the factual amount available for benefit purposes is less than [that amount]” (page 60). A larger budget would avail more manpower and resources.
Exclusion of the Finnish Tax Administration means no changes can be made to the tax system.
There is no testing of the basic income at different levels. Earlier, the working group said that “the dynamics of a basic income model can only be properly understood if more than one treatment group with different levels of basic income and tax rates is included in the experiment” (pages 12 to 13), but towards the end they conceded that “the time constraints placed on the legislative process limited the choice of the target population and research model” (page 60).
The unemployed were ultimately chosen as the sample for this experiment, because “up-to-date recipient registries maintained by Kela make it easy to draw a sample of unemployment benefit recipients” (page 61).aren't
aware
We face an enormously difficult uphill climb to hold these White House criminals to account and to reverse the direction of our government and society. Many within the movement continue to hope that traditional protests - mass marches and rallies - will do the trick. But a way must be found under this particular set of circumstances to pierce the paralyzing atmosphere. The usual tools aren't up to the task. A way does exist: if we can create a scene that is seen by all then we can overcome to a significant extent, perhaps to a decisive extent, the suffocating dark cloud that has been asphyxiating us.
***
The atmosphere of the whole society must be altered in a way that by-passes the blockade put up by the mass media and the two major political parties to the mass sentiment against Bush and Cheney.
As David Addington - Dick Cheney's chief of staff and one of the key architects of the Bush regime's torture policy - is quoted as saying in Jack Goldsmith's new book The Terror Presidency: "We're going to push and push and push until some larger force stops us."
That larger force can be none other than the American people acting as THE PEOPLE, as an independent political force, not beholden to or voluntarily subordinating itself to any political candidate or party.
we the people
If everywhere you look - in rural, suburban and urban places - there are signs of protest against the Bush regime, if you see not only people wearing orange jumpsuits and carrying out other forms of political/street theatre both in the streets literally and indoors in theatres, but a multitude of other expressions of resistance, people engaging in civil resistance, people blocking the doors to politicians' offices demanding that they move for impeachment, people shutting down and/or blockading the war industry, people going to work and going everywhere in their lives wearing orange ribbons daily, crowds at sporting events and athletes in the games wearing orange, students breaking out of schools in a blaze of orange, cars and store windows, apartment balconies and office building festooned in orange banners, rallies, marches, trees and posts donning orange, people walking their dogs with orange ribbons on their pets - then we will be demonstrating in an unmistakable, dramatic fashion the fact that there are people in the millions all over the land who are standing up against these moral monsters, demanding a different path and a bright future, committing themselves to that task on the everyday level.
Some people who have heard of the Declare It Now: Wear Orange Daily campaign think that wearing orange isn't enough, that wearing orange couldn't possibly do what needs to be done. This is like saying while in a crowded stadium at night with no lights on that if I light a candle or turn on a flashlight it won't do anything to break the darkness that envelopes us. But if many, many of the individuals in that crowd do the same thing, a magical thing happens.
Let us further imagine in this metaphor that the show producers have a spotlight aimed upon part of the stage where the entertainment is going on. The rest of the stage is in darkness. Some people in the crowd discover that in the darkened section of the stage and backstage terrible events are occurring - theft, robbery, assassinations, torture, murders - and that people are being systematically picked up from the darkened crowd and subjected to these horrors, almost all of whom do not return. A few do return and try to tell the others in the audience what is going on. But their ability to convey this news to others is limited by the fact that they are swallowed in the darkened stadium and don't have access to the microphones on the stage.
Occasionally - very occasionally - the spotlight veers away from the featured attraction and for a very brief moment illuminates the monstrous, unseen events. This startles the crowd for a time. But then the dirty deeds are obscured again and most of the crowd, while feeling uneasy in the pits of their stomachs, go back to watching the main show. Those who are less swayed by the producers' antics and/or closer to the stage and can hear some of the muffled screams of those being tortured and murdered, try to alert the rest of the crowd. But because the klieg lights aren't in their hands, their ability to turn the crowd onto the truth is restricted. Some people try to get the attention of the people on the stage and plead with them to turn up the stadium lights, to stop the show, and to announce to the whole crowd what is going on. The people on the stage, however, turn a deaf ear to this because they are getting paid to stay quiet and they want to be one of the spotlighted star entertainers themselves. After all, the life in the spotlight is a good one with lots of perks.
Some other people in the crowd decide that they will try to get a lot of people to light a candle or turn on their flashlights. Some people within this group are not sure that they can convince enough people to do this. After all, most of the crowd did get a glimpse of the crimes going on, yet reverted back to swaying to the music from the lightened part of the stage. Some in the crowd also say back to these activists on the ground - what good will it do if I light a candle? I'm just one person and the darkness is so thick around us. What about all these other people who aren't lighting a candle? I'll do it when the rest of them do it. Until then, I'd rather stay in the dark and enjoy the show. The activists persist, even in the face of some of their own doubts, realizing that if enough people do this then the darkened stage that is concealing these horrors will be revealed to more people who in turn will start to spread the word themselves, turning on their flashlights. They are driven too by the knowledge that if they don't do something the horrors will spread.
That's what DIN and 333 are about. They are part of creating an unprecedented situation on the grassroots level and on the level of everyday life of people taking personal responsibility to fight the forces of the night and usher in a different condition altogether. Be not afraid dear friends. We have much to do. But we can win this fight.
everyone
all of the tim
Personally, I have fought against the color orange as being the color of dissent. Orange may have a lot of meaning in
, but for Americans it doesn't mean anything except "almost a red light", orange juice, and Gitmo jumpsuits. I wish that some more traditionally meaningful color to
Americans
had been chosen.
But it seems that this orange dissent thing has
, and I'm not going to nitpick about the color of something that already has legs.
While traditional rallies, marches, letters, and other actions of dissent are important, they are not nearly enough to change the direction of those in power. There won't be any change in policy or redress for wrongdoing until Americans are aware that the majority demands it and that we have the power to change things. But Americansthat the majority demands it and can change things -- or we are aware but can ignore it and go back to sleep andwe don't know it -- because the government and the military-entertainment complex (formerly known as the "Mainstream Media") censor these facts, and because it doesn't enter into our daily experiences.So we're in a vicious circle, and we can't gather enough momentum to change things for the better. But there may be a way out of the Catch-22.As Dennis Loo (co-author of Impeach the President: the Case Against Bush and Cheney ) wrote yesterday Before giving his suggestion for how to overcome censorship to get out of this mess, Loo paints a realistically dark picture about the current police state. He goes on to point out that the Neocons have admitted that they will do worse and worse things until they are stopped:Cheney's number 1 himself is saying that the neocons will push and push and push, and do more and more and more fascist and illegal things untilstop them.So how can we stop them from running our country into the ground? Loo says:I think Loo makes vital points thathas to proteste, in some visual way or through action. This is the only thing that will prevent the fascism which has already been poured around all of us from hardening into concrete and setting the destruction of our country in stone.Never underestimate the contagious nature of hope, courage, and thinking for oneself. Never underestimate the power of feeling like we're on a team that has a chance of winning. By giving people constant reminders of dissent, it will empower everyone to act like Americans instead of good Germans.A 17-year-old linked to a series of attacks on women and carjackings may have had as many as two partners, according to police.
Steve Spigner was indicted Friday in Fulton County for allegedly attacking a woman in the parking lot of Phipps Plaza Mall earlier this month. Then a few hours later he appeared before a DeKalb County magistrate on charges of attacking two others and taking their cars in July.
The magistrate declined to set bond because Spigner has a hearing in DeKalb Superior Court later this month on charges of stealing a car from a fourth woman.
“They would stalk their victims while walking to their cars and punch them in the face,” investigator Tyrone Dennis with the Atlanta Police Department’s gang unit said of Spigner and the others who might have been involved.
Dennis said there was yet another case in DeKalb County, but the woman attacked at Stone Crest Mall on July 14 had not been able to identify Spigner.
Dennis said more arrests are expected but he declined to discuss details or name other suspects.
The charges that brought Spigner to court on Friday were robbery by force and misdemeanor battery involving two women.
On July 5, a woman had just stepped out of of her 2011 Mercedes on a lower level parking lot near the Target at the Edgewood Shopping District when she was punched in the head and knocked to the ground. Her attacker took her car.
Two days later, on East Lake Boulevard in a section of Atlanta that is in DeKalb County, Natissia Adderley was getting things out of the trunk of her Mercedes when she was punched in the face and knocked to the ground. Her attacker drove off in her car as well.
Marquita Cook had just stepped out of her Ford Escape in the parking lot of the Long John Silver Restaurant in East Atlanta when Spigner allegedly got into her car and tried to drive off. Cook jumped on the hood of her car and she held on as he pulled on to Moreland Avenue and then into a bank parking. She let go only after he threatened to shoot her, according to the police report
Police said it was the theft of Cook’s car on July 12 that allowed them to link the three cases as well as two that came after.
The incident at Stonecrest Mall was on July 14. That woman also was punched before her car was taken, police said.
Michelle Wing’s BMW was taken after she was punched as she was walking toward her car parked outside a restaurant at Phipps Plaza on Aug. 4. Spigner is charged with aggravated battery because the bone around Wing’s eye was broken.
Spigner’s parents have also faced criminal charges and were sentenced to prison five years ago for their roles in what federal prosecutors called a multi-state drug trafficking organization based in Snellville.
The father, also named Steven Spigner, was 40 at the time he was sentenced in January 2009, to 30 years in prison, followed by 5 years of supervised release. His wife, Yojuana Spigner, was sentenced to 3 years. She was 31 at the time she was sentenced.
According to former U.S. Attorney David E. Nahmias and information presented in federal court, Steven Spigner distributed multi-kilo quantities of cocaine in the South Carolina, Washington and Baltimore areas.Image caption Phil Jones's comments last year have become a touchstone for climate "sceptics"
Climate warming since 1995 is now statistically significant, according to Phil Jones, the UK scientist targeted in the "ClimateGate" affair.
Last year, he told BBC News that post-1995 warming was not significant - a statement still seen on blogs critical of the idea of man-made climate change.
But another year of data has pushed the trend past the threshold usually used to assess whether trends are "real".
Dr Jones says this shows the importance of using longer records for analysis.
It just shows the difficulty of achieving significance with a short time series Phil Jones
By widespread convention, scientists use a minimum threshold of 95% to assess whether a trend is likely to be down to an underlying cause, rather than emerging by chance.
If a trend meets the 95% threshold, it basically means that the odds of it being down to chance are less than one in 20.
Last year's analysis, which went to 2009, did not reach this threshold; but adding data for 2010 takes it over the line.
"The trend over the period 1995-2009 was significant at the 90% level, but wasn't significant at the standard 95% level that people use," Professor Jones told BBC News.
"Basically what's changed is one more year [of data]. That period 1995-2009 was just 15 years - and because of the uncertainty in estimating trends over short periods, an extra year has made that trend significant at the 95% level which is the traditional threshold that statisticians have used for many years.
"It just shows the difficulty of achieving significance with a short time series, and that's why longer series - 20 or 30 years - would be a much better way of estimating trends and getting significance on a consistent basis."
Professor Jones' previous comment, from a BBC interview in Febuary 2010, is routinely quoted - erroneously - as demonstration that the Earth's surface temperature is not rising.
Globally consistent
The dataset that Professor Jones helps to compile - HadCRUT3 - is a joint project between the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where he is based, and the UK Met Office.
Image caption Phil Jones is back at the scientific helm of CRU, though relieved of administrative leadership
It is one of the main global temperature records used by bodies such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
HadCRUT shows a warming 1995-2010 of 0.19C - consistent with the other major records, which all use slightly different ways of analysing the data in order to compensate for issues such as the dearth of measuring stations in polar regions.
Shortly before the UN climate summit in Copenhagen, Phil Jones found himself at the centre of the affair that came to be known as "ClimateGate", which saw the release of more than 1,000 emails taken from a CRU server.
Critics alleged the emails showed CRU scientists and others attempting to subvert the usual processes of science, and of manipulating data in order to paint an unfounded picture of globally rising temperatures.
Subsequent enquiries found the scientists and their institutions did fall short of best practice in areas such as routine use of professional statisticians and response to Freedom of Information requests, but found no case to answer on the charges of manipulation.
Since then, nothing has emerged through mainstream science to challenge the IPCC's basic picture of a world warming through greenhouse gas emissions.
And a new initiative to construct a global temperature record, based at Stanford University in California whose funders include "climate sceptical" organisations, has reached early conclusions that match established records closely.No doubt, we'll see a collection of Obama's Best Bombs on 'Saturday Night Live' this weekend, one right after the other. No doubt. Can you imagine the media coverage of such repeated historical ignorance if it had been the last Ivy League alum president who said it?
If you talk as much as this guy likes to talk instead of governing, if you believe you are a Real Good Talker as much as this guy does, you're gonna blow a few lines. But this many?
...$447-billion boondoggle he proposed to a joint session of Congress this month because his previous $787-billion boondoggle didn't create anywhere near as many jobs as Joe Biden had promised.
This president is in a jam. The economy sucks. Unemployment sucks. His job approval sucks and his economic approval sucks worse. Independents have abandoned the flailing White House occupant, so are some Jews, liberals and even blacks. His Hollywood bundlers had trouble selling out the POTUS fundraisers in L.A. next week.
Obama's own Democratic Party controls the Senate and won't put their leader's jobs bill on the schedule because more wild spending like this doomed bill could also doom some Dem senators next year.
So here's how the ex-state senator from the Chicago machine reacts: At an operating cost of $181,000 per hour, he flies Air Force One nearly four hours roundtrip for 17 minutes of remarks touting infrastructure repairs by a bridge that doesn't need them.
The real reason he's at the Brent Spence Bridge is because it links the home states of both congressional Republican leaders, John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. So Obama can cutely blame Republicans for holding up his jobs bill, even though it's Nevada Democrat Harry Reid.
Obama turns the empty rhetoric into a pep rally for himself, leading the obedient audience to chant, "Pass this bill! Pass this bill!"
This guy, who will ride around in Secret Service SUVs for the rest of his life, has this thing for railroads that other people should ride in. So, according to the White House transcript (scroll down for full version and related stories), here's what passes for Obama leadership:
Now, we used to have the best infrastructure in the world here in America. We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad, the Interstate Highway System. We built the Hoover Dam. We built the Grand Central Station. So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads? And let Europe build the best highways? And have Singapore build a nicer airport?
Quick question: Has anyone ever heard any American express jealousy over Singapore's sweet airport?
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-- Andrew Malcolm
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President Obama's remarks on the American Jobs Act, as provided by the White House
THE PRESIDENT: Hello, Cincinnati! (Applause.) Well, it is good to see all of you. It is good to be back in Cincinnati. (Applause.) I have to say I drove by the Bengals’ practice -- (laughter.) And I was scouting out some plays in case they play the Bears -- (laughter.) Did I hear somebody boo the Bears?
AUDIENCE: Booo! (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: We've got some folks I just want to make sure are acknowledged here today. First of all, the Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, is in the house. Give him a round of applause. (Applause.) We've got the mayor of the great city of Cincinnati -- Mark Mallory is here. (Applause.) We've got the mayor of Covington, Mayor Denny Bowman. (Applause.) Senator Rand Paul is here.
AUDIENCE: Booo --
THE PRESIDENT: Rand is going to be supporting bridges, so we've got to -- (applause.) And we've got Congressman John Yarmuth in the house. (Applause.)
Now, it is good to be back. I was just in Columbus a little while ago, and I figured I couldn't get away with not giving Cincinnati a little bit of love. (Applause.)
I want to thank the good folks at Hilltop Concrete for having us here today. I especially want to thank Ron for his introduction.
Companies like Hilltop, construction companies, have been hit harder by this economic crisis than almost any other industry in America. And there are millions of construction workers who are still out there looking for a job.
They're ready to work, but things have been a little tough. That doesn’t mean that there is not plenty of construction waiting to get done in this country.
Behind us stands the Brent Spence Bridge. It’s located on one of the busiest trucking routes in North America. It sees about 150,000 vehicles every single day. And it’s in such poor condition that it's been labeled "functionally obsolete." Think about that -- functionally obsolete. That doesn’t sound good, does it?
AUDIENCE: Nooo!
THE PRESIDENT: It’s safe to --
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Kind of like John Boehner. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: It's safe to drive on, but it was not designed to accommodate today’s traffic, which can stretch out for a mile. Shipping companies try to have their trucks avoid the bridge. Of course, that only ends up costing them more money as well.
The thing is there are bridges and roads and highways like that throughout the region. A major bridge that connects Kentucky and Indiana just closed down for safety reasons. Another aging bridge that crosses over the Ohio River in Ironton could be replaced right now. There are rail stations in Cleveland and Toledo in desperate need of repair. And the same is true in cities and towns all across America. It makes your commute longer. It costs our businesses billions of dollars -- they could be moving products faster if they had better transportation routes. And in some cases, it’s not safe.
Now, we used to have the best infrastructure in the world here in America. We’re the country that built the Intercontinental Railroad, the Interstate Highway System. (Applause.) We built the Hoover Dam. We built the Grand Central Station. (Applause.)
So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads? And let Europe build the best highways? And have Singapore build a nicer airport? At a time when we've got millions of unemployed construction workers out there just ready to get on the job, ready to do the work to rebuilding America. (Applause.)
So, Cincinnati, we are better than that. We're smarter than that. And that’s why I sent Congress the American Jobs Act 10 days ago. (Applause.) This bill is not that complicated. It's a bill that would put people back to work rebuilding America -- repairing our roads, repairing our bridges, repairing our schools. It would lead to jobs for concrete workers like the ones here at Hilltop; jobs for construction workers and masons, carpenters, plumbers, electricians, architects, engineers, ironworkers -- put folks back to work. (Applause.)
There is work to be done, and there are workers ready to do it. So let’s tell Congress to pass this jobs bill right away. (Applause.)
AUDIENCE: Pass this bill! Pass this bill! Pass this bill!
THE PRESIDENT: Pass this bill! (Laughter.) Pass the bill!
Tell them to pass the jobs bill, and not only will we start rebuilding America, but we can also put thousands of teachers back to work. (Applause.)
I was with the President of South Korea -- I was up at the United Nations. We were doing a bunch of stuff. And he's told me in the past -- I've asked him, I said, what's your biggest challenge? He says, oh, education. I said, well, what are you dealing with? He said, well, you know what, we're hiring so many teachers we can barely keep up, because we know that if we're going to compete in the future we've got to have the best teachers. (Applause.) And we've got to have our....
.... kids in school longer. And we've got to make sure that they're learning math and science. Well, while they're hiring teachers in droves, what are we doing? We're laying off teachers.
It makes no sense in this new global economy where our young people's success is going to depend on the kind of education that they get. So for us to be laying off teachers doesn’t make sense for our kids, it doesn’t make sense for us, it doesn’t make sense for our economy. Pass this jobs bill and put teachers back in the classroom where they belong. (Applause.)
AUDIENCE: Pass this bill! Pass this bill! Pass this bill!
THE PRESIDENT: They need to go and pass it.
Tell Congress to pass this jobs bill, and companies will get tax credit for hiring America’s veterans. (Applause.) We've been through a decade of war now. Almost 2 million people have served. And think about it. They're suspending their careers; they're leaving their families; they're putting themselves in harm way -- all to protect us. The last thing they should have to do is fight for a job when they come home. (Applause.) And if we pass this jobs bill it makes it easier for employers to hire those veterans. That’s why we need to tell Congress to do what? To pass the bill.
AUDIENCE: Pass this bill! Pass this bill! Pass this bill!
THE PRESIDENT: The American Jobs Act will cut taxes for the typical working family by $1,500 next year. It will cut taxes for every small business in America. It will give an extra tax cut to every small business owner who either hires more workers or raises those workers’ wages. How many people here would like a raise? (Applause.)
And we know that most small businesses are the creators of new jobs. We’ve got a lot of folks in Congress who love to say how they’re behind America’s job creators. Well, if that’s the case, then you should be passing this bill, because that’s what this bill is all about, is helping small businesses all across America.
Everything in this jobs bill has been supported in the past by Republicans and Democrats. Everything in this jobs bill is paid for. The idea for a big boost in construction is supported by the AFL-CIO, but it’s also supported by the Chamber of Commerce. Those two don't get along on much, but they agree we should rebuild America. (Applause.)
And, by the way, thanks to the reforms that we’ve put into place, when we start rebuilding America we’re going to change how business is done. No more earmarks. No more boondoggles. No more bridges to nowhere. We’re going to cut the red tape that prevents some of these construction projects from getting started as quickly as possible.
And we’ll set up an independent fund to attract private dollars and issue loans based on two criteria: how badly is a construction project needed, and how much good will it do for the community. Those are the only things we should be thinking about. Not politics. (Applause.) And, by the way, that’s an idea that’s supported by a Massachusetts Democrat and a Texas Republican. It’s a good idea.
So my question is, what's Congress waiting for? Why is it taking so long? Now, the bridge behind us just happens to connect the state that’s home to the Speaker of the House --
AUDIENCE: Booo --
THE PRESIDENT: -- with the home state of the Republican leader in the Senate.
AUDIENCE: Booo --
THE PRESIDENT: Now, that’s just a coincidence. (Laughter.) Purely accidental that that happened. (Laughter.) But |
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The AFL’s Ken Wood reminded clubs that they were not permitted to request, invite, allow, require or direct a player who had attended the combine or state screening session to be tested, evaluated or do any form of training with the club.We are in a small slaughterhouse seventy-five miles from Minneapolis. A United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) inspector’s report captures the scene: A slaughter plant manager slit a cow’s throat, but the animal did not die. The plant manager was legally required to shoot her again, but instead he electrocuted her with a shock prod, over and over, trying to get her to leave the stun box, where she was trapped with another cow in a space intended to hold just one animal.
Because the gate to the stun box was partially down, the cow’s escape was a “physical[] impossibility,” but that did not stop the plant manager from trying. The cow’s screaming drew a crowd, including two USDA inspectors, but their presence did not deter the plant manager from continuing to repeatedly electrocute this poor animal. The electric shocks were tormenting, and so the cow tried to cram her body through the gate. Because this was impossible, her “hide [was] peeled back... and there was blood and hair throughout the wound, as well as blood and hair on the lift gate.” The entire ordeal lasted fifteen minutes....Two Colorado electors made a last-ditch effort Tuesday to revive their longshot attempt to deny Donald Trump the presidency, appealing a federal judge’s ruling that they must vote for the presidential ticket that won their state’s popular vote.
A lawyer for electors Polly Baca and Robert Nemanich filed the appeal to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals a day after U.S. District Court Wiley Daniel agreed with attorneys representing Colorado and Trump that the electors are required by state law to vote for Hillary Clinton, who won Colorado on Nov. 8.
The two Democrat electors want to vote instead for a Republican besides Trump in hopes of cutting a deal with enough electors to put someone other than the former reality show star in the White House. But Daniel’s ruling makes that highly unlikely since 28 other states have similar laws binding their electors to winners of their popular vote.
It’s unclear whether the appeals court will hear the case before the electors are required to vote on Dec. 19. There are similar lawsuits in California and Washington seeking to overturn state laws binding electors.
The Colorado electors could face up to one year in jail and a $1,000 fine if they defy Colorado law and vote for someone other than Clinton.
On Tuesday afternoon, Colorado’s Republican Secretary of State is scheduled to ask a state judge to advise his office on possible penalties in the event that the electors rebel. Williams has been highly critical of the plan, contending it undermines democracy.
Trump won 306 electors last month, well over the 270 needed to put him in the White House.“If Republicans are serious about rejecting white supremacy,” House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said in a statement last week, “I call upon Speaker Ryan to join Democrats to remove the Confederate statues from the Capitol immediately.”
The 10 statues include Confederate General Robert E. Lee, Confederate States of America president Jefferson Davis, and vice president Alexander Hamilton Stephens. As the Washington Post noted, the Robert E. Lee statue dates from 1909 and the others arrived during the following 20 years, with Jefferson Davis and Confederate colonel James George joining their fellow rebels in 1931.
Southern Democrats played a major role in placement of these statues, which never drew protests from prominent Democrats such as Sen. Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klucker who became a mentor to Hillary Clinton. Tilting at statues is a new cause for contemporary Democrats, but California got something of a head start.
In 2014, governor Jerry Brown signed legislation that outlawed the sale or display of the Confederate flag on state property. In 2015, state senator Steve Glazer, Orinda Democrat, authored a bill to remove the names of Confederate political leaders and senior military officers from public schools, buildings, parks, roads and so forth.
As it turned out, Glazer’s bill would affect only two southern California schools. For Ben Boychuk, it amounted to “an attack on history itself,” but the conservative writer wondered why Glazer was not more inclusive.
For example, Henry Haight, California’s 10th governor, “was an unabashed racist and opponent of the post-Civil War reconstruction.” Even so, Haight has a school named after him and San Francisco’s Haight Street is named for the 10th governor and/or his banker uncle.
California’s purge-happy Democrats can also find fertile ground in Spanish colonialism, and on that theme the timing is good.
The same day South Carolina lowered the Confederate battle flag, Pope Francis apologized for “many serious sins against the native peoples,” of the Americas committed during European colonization. The Pope has a strong case for repentance because Spanish colonialism was built on enslavement of the native peoples they conquered.
Under the encomienda system, native peoples were part of the land grants the conquistadores gave to Spanish settlers. The native peoples were required to work for the encomenderos, who considered them property. The white Spanish imperialists were also unabashed racists who exploited slaves from western Africa for mining and agriculture.
The Spanish imperialists regarded all native peoples as heathen savages and sought to convert them to Roman Catholicism by any means necessary. The 1513 El Requerimiento drafted for King Ferdinand declares that the Pope rules all people. So convert or else the Spanish, with the help of God, will use force against you, “declaring war” by all possible means, and “enslave your persons, wives, and sons,” as the King sees fit.
Not much room there for negotiation, diversity, or democracy. And no separation of church and state.
California’s chain of religious missions is the direct legacy of Spanish colonialism. So are city names such as San Diego, Santa Ana, Santa Barbara and many others. Father Juan Crespi came up with El Rio de Nuestra Señora la Reyna de Los Angeles de Porciúncula, more commonly known as Los Angeles.
By the standards of the historical purge crew, these names are long overdue for fundamental change. Los Angeles could become Mickey Mouse City and San Diego the Navy Base City. San Francisco could opt for Sanctuary City and the state capital of Sacramento could be Politicianburg.
The change could start with Franciscan Father Junípero Serra, still hailed as the “founder of California.” The Golden State boasts scores of Serra statues, including one erected in 1976 at a rest stop on Interstate 280, also known as the Junípero Serra Freeway.
Those statues recall a legacy of imperialism, racism and slavery, and by the standards of Pelosi’s crew they should all come down. On the other hand, the statue of Harry Lundeberg should be left standing outside the Sailors’ Union of the Pacific in San Francisco.
Lundeberg was an “uncompromising foe of communism in labor” who battled it out with the Communist Party USA and Soviet agent Harry Bridges. One of Bridges’ biggest fans, as it turns out, is Nancy Pelosi.
In 2001, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, Pelosi wrote in the Congressional Record: “Harry Bridges was arguably the most significant labor leader of the twentieth century,” a man “beloved by the workers of this nation, and recognized as one of the most important labor leaders in the world.”
For the San Francisco Democrat, Bridges’ International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen's Union was “the most progressive union of the time.” The House Minority Leader never had second thoughts about celebrating her “favorite Stalinist,” as Joshua Muravchik put it. The Democrats have no problem with that, and faithfully keep Pelosi, 77, in a leadership role.
Robert E. Lee, meanwhile, commanded the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant on April 8, 1965, and died on October 12, 1870. Lee also shows up in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” by The Band. Maybe Nancy Pelosi’s Democrat purge squad will target that tune, even the version by Joan Baez.Image copyright Eric Jones
A Denbighshire community council has been branded "intransigent" for refusing to change a Welsh-only policy.
The Public Services Ombudsman for Wales said Cynwyd Community Council let residents down by not providing all its documents in English, as well as Welsh.
Karen Roden, a member of the public who made the original complaint, said she backed the Welsh language "100%"- but thought local democracy was being hit.
The community council said there was no case to answer.
The ombudsman Nick Bennett said: "While I fully support the principle of any Welsh council conducting its business through the medium of Welsh, it should also ensure those who consider English as their first language are not excluded.
"It is worrying that the council has taken such an intransigent position throughout my investigation, and their refusal to act reasonably has let down their local community, both Welsh and English speaking."
Media playback is unsupported on your device Media caption Council's 'failure to act' blamed in language row
His findings followed a complaint made by a member of the public, who did not speak Welsh.
Karen Roden, who is referred to as Mrs X in the report, told BBC Wales: "I am not expecting them to carry out their business in English to please me."
But she argued that providing an agenda bilingually would help encourage others to get involved in local democracy.
"I don't feel you can participate properly if you don't know what there are discussing," she said.
"It puts you at a disadvantage."
Mr Bennett said he made "entirely reasonable" recommendations but local councillors refused to accept them.
He told BBC's Good Morning Wales programme that he believed the issue could have been resolved "very easily". But one year on and following a "lot of intransigence and a failure to act" by the community council, he reluctantly published the report.
'Last resort'
Mr Bennett said the council was "not a private club that makes its own rules", adding: "It is there for a reason to serve its local community and that should always be its focus."
He said the report was published as "a last resort" and he hoped the community council would respond with what it intended to do by the middle of December.
Mrs Roden told BBC Wales that she welcomed the findings, but had rejected a suggestion that she should receive £100 for her troubles - adding that she did not want to take money from a community council coffers.
Responding to the report, council clerk Alwyn Jones Parry insisted there was a "reasonable translation process" and there would be no apology to Mrs Roden.
A council reply to the Ombudsman said: "We emphatically say that Cynwyd Community Council believes that we have no case to answer.
"The complaint is without foundation, time wasting, a waste of money, and incorrect use of the Ombudsman."CLOSE Minorities are expressing fear and reporting racial and religious discrimination after Donald Trump's victory. USA TODAY NETWORK
Marta Lunez, a Hillary Clinton supporter, reacts to Donald Trump's success on election night at the Javits Center in New York on Nov. 8, 2016. (Photo: Don Emmert, AFP/Getty Images)
More than 200 hate incidents — ranging from swastika graffiti to physical threats — have been reported across the country since Donald Trump's election, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit that monitors hate groups in the USA.
Now many people of color, women and LGBT people who have long faced threats large and small must grapple with the knowledge that half of their fellow Americans who voted elected someone who has talked about keeping Muslims and immigrants out of the country, using police tactics considered racially biased such as stop-and-frisk, and grabbing women without consent.
They are part of the other half of Americans who voted, many of whom wept on election night and since, crying not because their horse in the race lost but because they fear for their safety and well-being.
"I think it's normal in any election, one side is going to demonize the other," says Monnica Williams, a licensed clinical psychologist.
"In this case, Trump actually said those awful things about women, about minorities, and he stands by those remarks," Williams says. "It's very scary for people who are part of marginalized and stigmatized communities."
And yet, many people who are upset have been told, even by Trump opponents, to calm down — that it was just an election and that America would continue as it always has.
don't tell me to "relax" and "take it easy" when everything i am and believe in is on the line — sad eggplant (@raneemisabbos) November 9, 2016
"To say that this was just another election is blindly ignorant to just how... viscerally this campaign ripped open the wounds of racial resentment in this country," says Ryan Lenz, a Southern Poverty Law Center spokesperson. "And if it's not apparent to you now, I believe it soon will be."
Indeed, for many people who aren't straight, white American males, these latest hate incidents come on top of a year that was already terrifying and degrading.
• Five months ago to the day, 49 people were gunned down at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando. It was the deadliest attack on U.S. soil since 9/11.
• A week before that, the Stanford sexual assault survivor highlighted the disregard many rape victims endure after her attacker, Brock Turner, received a six-month sentence. (He served just three months.)
• A month later, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were shot and killed by police in separate incidents within a day of one another.
Pulse, Stanford, Sterling and Castile weren't isolated incidents:
• This year, 385 black, Hispanic and Native American people have been shot and killed by police, according to The Guardian.
• Every two minutes, an American is sexually assaulted, according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network.
• More than 1,114 people were victims of hate crimes because of their sexual orientation or gender identity, according the FBI's 2014 data.
The outbreak of post-election violence aimed at minority groups is "not that surprising" given the language heard and violence seen at Trump rallies, Lenz says.
"Over the course of his campaign, Donald Trump has blown a dog whistle at a number of far-right ideologies from anti-Muslim extremists to flat-out neo-Nazis," says Lenz. "With his election, many racists feel they've been legitimized."
Some Trump supporters — former KKK grand wizard David Duke or students who chanted "build the wall," for instance — openly praised this rhetoric.
But many Trump voters looked past his words, rather than condoned them. Exit polls in Wisconsin, a big win for Trump, show that 21% of voters who had a negative opinion of him voted for him anyway.
"I don't want to give the impression that everyone who voted for Trump is a racist," says Williams, who pointed to economic issues, abortion and problems with Hillary Clinton as other reasons for Trump's victory. "That being said, I think there were a number of people who were racist who said, 'it's about time someone is saying these things.'"
Trump’s campaign, however, has objected to the idea that he has encouraged racism.
“We totally disavow hateful rhetoric,” spokeswoman Hope Hicks has said. “Online or otherwise.”
The Southern Poverty Law Center has called on Trump to "distance himself" from "extremists."
"This violence that is starting to boil over is a reminder of how much work we have to do now to bridge the cultural gaps that are apparent in this country," Lenz says. "This election does not legitimize racial hatred."
Read or Share this story: http://usat.ly/2fl8QYvColorado State University’s spring commencement ceremonies, which conclude Saturday, will recognize 3,044 undergraduate and 1,058 graduate students, including 90 doctoral students. Forty-nine students are candidates for distinction as summa cum laude, 150 as magna cum laude and 260 as cum laude, according to Colorado State University’s website.
Weld County resident Bill Webster has been a lot of things in his 81 years: an innovator in the cattle industry, dedicated philanthropist, county commissioner and state representative.
Today, Webster will become something he's always wanted to be: a college graduate.
"I've always regretted not getting a degree," said Webster, who will graduate from Colorado State University with a bachelor's degree in animal science. "I just decided one day I'm going to get it."
Webster, born in the early 1930s, was a child during the Great Depression, and his father, William, who worked as the second assistant to William Mayo at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, brought health care innovations to Greeley.
"He got paid with chickens and eggs and ham for the medical bills," Bill Webster said.
Webster said having lived through the toils of the Great Depression, his father encouraged him to earn a college degree.
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Webster said he completed three years of schooling at Colorado State University and returned to school after serving in the U.S. Army, but he was simply too eager to start working on the farm to finish his last 18 credits.
"I got tired of it," he said. "I got tired of school."
Webster ultimately formed Webster Land and Cattle Co. and Webster Feed Lots Inc., pioneering the feeding of "flaked" corn and helping to introduce computer technology to the cattle industry.
Webster was a founder of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Weld County, on boards for the National Cattlemen's Association and the United Way of Weld County and served on the Greeley Planning Commission.
Webster served for eight years as a Weld County commissioner and for two terms as a representative at the state Legislature.
Webster has always been surrounded by people with college educations, a fact that was constantly in the back of his mind. On top of his vast experience in the medical field, Webster's father earned a law degree at the age of 65.
"When he died, he was working on his CPA," Webster said of his father. "He was one of those guys. He was a brilliant fellow. That's another reason (for going back to college). I thought maybe he was looking down at me, that I better get that degree."
Webster's wife, Sylvia, founder of the North Colorado Medical Center Foundation and who served on the Greeley-Evans School District 6 Board of Education among other boards, earned two degrees, one from the University of Northern Colorado and one from CSU.
"I always wanted to borrow one of those," Bill said with a chuckle.
Although Webster didn't officially earn a diploma, he and his wife encouraged their children to pursue higher education — a goal all three of them fulfilled.
Webster said he is extremely proud of his children: Wade, a doctor in Seattle; Dan, who took over the family's feedlot; and Perry Buck, now following in her father's footsteps in her first term as a representative at the state Legislature.
Wade Webster said in his family, skipping college has just never seemed like an option. He said with all of his father's accomplishments it didn't seem necessary for him to earn a degree, but he's glad to know his father will finally have the diploma he's always wanted.
"He's expected us, all of us including his grandchildren, to get their degrees, so I know it was important for him that way," Wade said, pointing out his daughter will be graduating from college this spring, as well. "I think there's going to be a real peacefulness that he might not have had otherwise."
To fulfill his remaining 18 credits at CSU, Webster took two classes at Aims Community College and several at CSU.
He said he lectured students on cattle feeding, animal nutrition and feedlot management — topics where he's the expert — to earn credit.
Webster said he deeply enjoyed his history class at Aims, taught by Professor Clint Heiner. The class covered the Civil War through World War II, and Webster said since he remembers growing up during part of that time period, he liked the lectures.
Webster said he tried to limit his comments to avoid being a distraction.
"I wanted the students to not feel that I was infringing upon their education," he said.
But Heiner said Webster's presence in the classroom was much the opposite.
"He just enriched the classroom to a degree that I've never really experienced before," Heiner said. "He's a really good example of living history."
Heiner said several students told him they learned a great deal from having Webster in their classroom, noting those who sat next to Webster would often listen with their mouths agape as he talked about World War II and events like the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor.
"It was just such a pleasure to be able to have that firsthand experience," Heiner said. "I think my students got more out of it than reading and writing. He was able to give us a sense of what it felt like to actually live then. It really brought it to life."
Wade said he's always watched his mother support his father and vise versa, and this endeavor has been no different.
"They were always that kind of couple I wanted to have a relationship like," Wade said. "It's been a real team effort."
Sylvia said she never pressured her husband to earn a degree, but she was happy to see him decide to go back to college because she knew it's always been a goal of his.
"It's never even been mentioned, so I never would have expected this to come about at 80 years old," she said.
Webster said he's been a longtime supporter of the CSU Rams, and he looks forward to officially being an alumni as he roots on his team. He said he plans to walk across the stage on graduation day — cap, gown and all — with his family there to celebrate with him.
"They want me to go through the procession, so I will do that, and I will be very, very happy to have the diploma in my pocket," Webster said.Cyrus Nemati is a Web production manager at the New America Foundation and a voice actor in his spare time.
Dear NSA,
We need to have a chat, so I trust you’re reading this.
Of course you are. Good. Now, let’s see... how should I put this? Look, you’ve done a great job cultivating that whole “spook” image for the past 60 years. Really, you’ve just been terrifyingly adept at creating an environment of ironclad secrecy, even more so than the CIA, who has bungled too many overseas jobs to be the omnipotent, untouchable agency it would like us to think it is.
Times are changing, though. For the past several generations, you’ve been the rulers of all information, with no one to challenge you. Americans just had to trust that the good quiet folk at the NSA were looking out for them, because no one else could handle data on such a large scale. It was a simpler time, back when the Internet was young and the Web was just a seed of an idea, and our idea of “big data” was the Yellow Pages.
There are new kids in town, though—kids who grew up on data. They were raised to dish out and take in as much data as possible, and they do it for fun. To you, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and all the rest of it are the latest places from which to siphon information. To these new kids, it’s home. It’s where they grew up, which is why they’re much better at it, and why you hire so many of them.
Now, what happens when you raise a generation on a steady diet of data, and then try to keep naughty secrets? They’re going to ask questions. They grew up in a world where information was free, and they took advantage of that fact. They learned more about the world around them than could ever be learned in school, and they went online for the answers to the questions their parents and teachers wouldn’t answer. They grew up not just appreciating that information was free, but expecting information to be free.
It gets worse. Not only are you hiring millennials, for whom secrecy is anathema—you’re hiring millennial hackers. And hacking, as you well know, means finding ways of turning technology to serve a purpose other than its intended one. When information isn’t free, these people have the ability and the will to free it.
I know this because I’m one of them. I may not have top-secret clearance and make six figures working for one of your contractors, but Edward Snowden’s demographic profile still hits close to home. When I was a boy, I used to hack into my computer games to add fart sounds to them. I built my own computers. I made my sister’s Teddy Ruxpin say horrible, horrible things. When I get a new phone, its hackability is its number-one buying point.
When I get my hands on a new piece of technology, my first thought isn’t about what it can do—it’s about what it can’t do, and how can I force it to overcome its limitations to do what I want. I then wonder, “Why wasn’t I ‘allowed’ to do this in the first place?” See, we millennial hackers simply cannot take anything at face value. We’re a bit contrarian and stubborn by nature. It’s why we’re good at what we do. The more constraints you place on us (be they workplace, physical, technological, or copyright) the more we feel a need to disregard, challenge, or overcome those constraints.
To be a hacker is to be cynical about whatever “solid” information or limits you’re faced with, to remove layers of consumer sheen or government spin until raw components are laid bare to reconstruct at will. You reward people like me with fat salaries when we do this with technology, so there’s little sense in expecting us not do the same in the rest of our lives—with your policies, rules, information, even with our own personal lives. We tinker, probe, deconstruct, and reassemble for other purposes. One thing we don’t do is blindly put hand to heart and sing “God Bless America”—unless we’re in a North Korean gulag and it’s a contrarian move.
Do you see the problem? You need my kind of people for our understanding of data, but we don’t necessarily want or need you. You are anathema to our values and expectations. Sure, you’ve got some very smart graybeards who can do some amazing things, but they’re not going to be the bulk of your army for long, if they even still are. You have no choice but to keep hiring these hackers who didn’t grow up having data hidden from them. It’s ironic that you’ve become so reliant on people who really have no business in a tight-lipped, hierarchical quasi-militarized institution. We are the ones you should be snooping on, if only you could snoop without us.
I feel your pain.
Edward Snowden smoked you, and it wasn’t even very hard for him. Now, I know what you’re going to say. “It won’t happen again! We’ll improve security!”
Who is going to improve your security? Is it going to be the naval officers you used to hire, respectful of hierarchy and used to a military lifestyle? Or maybe, say, more young, technical lay-people—contractors with the information freedom ideals of the millennial hacker? Yeah, I thought so.
Let’s face it: This isn’t going to be the last time your secrets are aired to the public. It’s probably not even going to be the last time this year that your secrets are aired to the public by another Edward Snowden, because you’ve got countless Edward Snowdens on your payroll whose first—not last—instinct is to blow open your information infrastructure. I mean, you tried to recruit me years ago, for goodness' sake. Those confidential recruitment materials that said “For Your Eyes Only” all over them? Yeah, I showed those to everyone I knew, mostly because you were so heavy-handed with all the confidential stuff.
The important thing now is not to panic. No tears. You’re a big, strong, spooky organization, right? You don’t have to clean out your desk. You’ve still got a big role to play in the cyber-warfare of the next several decades. You’re just learning a hard lesson here, and I realize you’re partly being demonized for implementing what the White House and Congress want. However, you have no choice but to keep hiring these young, entitled, informed, data-driven hackers, who pretty soon might not have any secrets to leak because the Snowdens in your midst will have forced you to turn into a fully transparent (but still efficient!) organization.
Now that I think of it, you really should have played up the six-figure salary and Hawaii angle in those recruiting materials you gave me. I would’ve kept your secrets. Really.
Cheers,
Cyrus
This article originally appeared on Zócalo Public Square.
Listing image by madd0Donald Trump has vowed to build a 'big, beautiful, powerful wall' spanning the 1,933 mile land border between Mexico and America, which will make crossing over an even greater challenge for illegal immigrants.
But these photographs suggest that there are bound to be some who will try.
They reveal the extraordinary lengths desperate immigrants have gone to in their bids to evade Customs and Border Protection guards undetected and start a new life in the US.
They range from the heart-breaking discovery last month of children being smuggled in hot car trunks to December's interception of a fake, but convincing, border patrol vehicle packed with immigrants.
Other attempts include a Jeep Cherokee balanced precariously atop the border fence and the infamous sight of a man sewn into a car seat.
Another astonishing smuggling bid involved a woman hiding in a car dashboard. Wall or no wall, border guards will need to keep their eyes peeled.
The infamous 2006 picture of a man discovered sewn into the upholstery of a van seat to get across Mexican/US border
Driven to desperation: Two people hidden in the engine compartment of a van. They were caught in May 2010
Illegal immigrants crammed in the back of a tractor trailer in June 2010. Donald Trump has vowed to build a 'big, beautiful, powerful wall' spanning the 1,933 mile land border between Mexico and America
Hide and found: An illegal immigrant hidden behind the back seat of a car in July 2009
Squashed: In May 2010 a woman was discovered by US border guards hidden in the dashboard of a car
Rumbled: Illegal immigrants found in compartments in the floor of a car in May 2010
Agents arrested a male subject attempting to smuggle illegal immigrants from Mexico to the US using this cloned Border Patrol Chevy Tahoe on December 10, 2015. The fake vehicle had a different bumper than the SUVs used by border agents and also did not have lights on top
Twelve people were found crammed into the back of the fake patrol vehicleJust 1 week after having surgery to clean up damage to the meniscus in his left knee, Oregon St.'s Sean Mannion was back in pads, and taking reps in practice today.
Mannion's status is day to day, according to head coach Mike Riley. How Mannion's knee responds after today's workout will tell us a lot more. Riley wouldn't rule Mannion in or out of Saturday night's Homecoming contest against Utah as the backup quarterback at this point.
Next Saturday night at Washington certainly looks like a possibility, though.
Meanwhile, Cody Vaz remains the starter, and his performance against BYU certainly makes that a comfortable prospect.
Running back Storm Woods, who sprained his knee in the BYU game, is also working at full speed in practice. Woods sat out the first part of Monday's practice, but when an MRI done earlier in the day revealed no problems, Woods was able to convince the coaches he could go, and got on the field for the latter part of the day. He's been active in both practices since then.
Finally, and fortunately, Brandin Cooks has shown no lingering ill-effects from the turned right ankle he suffered in the first quarter Saturday. Cooks returned to have the best receiving day of the game, after having his ankle re-taped, but there are always concerns about how a joint may respond a day later after such an episode.
Cooks certainly won't want to miss the opportunity to perform in front of James Rodgers, the star he's doing such a good job of replacing, Saturday night. With a bye on the Atlanta Falcons' schedule this weekend, both James and Jacquizz Rodgers are making the trip back to Corvallis for Homecoming.
Andy_Wooldridge@yahoo.comPhoto: YURI CORTEZ / AFP/Getty Images Image 1 of / 26 Caption Close
Image 2 of 26 Jarritos
Fruity soda pop.
(Photo source) less Fruity soda pop. Jarritos
Fruity soda pop.
(Photo... more Fruity soda pop. Photo: Alina Angenete on Flickr
Image 3 of 26 Gansito Marinela
Snack cakes
(Photo source) less Snack cakes Gansito Marinela
Snack cakes
(Photo... more Snack cakes Photo: Sean Hoyer on Flickr
Image 4 of 26 Bubu Lubu
Chocolate-covered marshmallow thing.
(Photo source) less Chocolate-covered marshmallow thing. Bubu Lubu
Chocolate-covered marshmallow thing.
... more Chocolate-covered marshmallow thing. Photo: TheCX on Flickr
Image 5 of 26 Mexican Coke
It's the cult hero of colas.
(Photo source) less It's the cult hero of colas. Mexican Coke
It's the cult hero of colas.
... more It's the cult hero of colas. Photo: Mike Mozart on Flickr
Image 6 of 26 <strong>Topo Chico</strong><br> Bubbly water that's getting more hip in the U.S. <strong>Topo Chico</strong><br> Bubbly water that's getting more hip in the U.S. Photo: Camilo Smith
Image 7 of 26 Valentina
Yet another hot sauce brand.
(Photo source) less Yet another hot sauce brand. Valentina
Yet another hot sauce brand.
... more Yet another hot sauce brand. Photo: Leslie Seaton on Flickr
Image 8 of 26 Sabritones
Spicy puffed wheat snack.
(Photo source) less Spicy puffed wheat snack. Sabritones
Spicy puffed wheat snack.
(Photo... more Spicy puffed wheat snack. Photo: BiblioMama on Flickr
Image 10 of 26 <strong>Tacos</strong><br> It doesn't get more Mexican than this. <strong>Tacos</strong><br> It doesn't get more Mexican than this. Photo: The Washington Post / The Washington Post/Getty Images
Image 12 of 26 Pulparindo
Salty, Spicy, sweet and sour tamarind pulp candy.
(Photo source) less Salty, Spicy, sweet and sour tamarind pulp candy. Pulparindo
Salty, Spicy, sweet and sour tamarind pulp candy.
... more Salty, Spicy, sweet and sour tamarind pulp candy. Photo: Zak Greant on Flickr
Image 13 of 26 Rancheritos
Tortilla chips
(Photo source) less Tortilla chips Rancheritos
Tortilla chips
... more Tortilla chips Photo: El Gran Dee on Flickr
Image 14 of 26 Alpura leche
Cow's milk in a box
(Photo source) less Cow's milk in a box Alpura leche
Cow's milk in a box
(Photo... more Cow's milk in a box Photo: Phil_websurfer on Flickr
Image 15 of 26 Tajin
If salt, chile pepper and lime had a child, this seasoning would be the result.
(Photo source) less If salt, chile pepper and lime had a child, this seasoning would be the result. Tajin
If salt, chile pepper and lime had a child, this seasoning would be the result.
... more If salt, chile pepper and lime had a child, this seasoning would be the result. Photo: K. Latham on Flickr
Image 16 of 26 <strong>Mazapanes De la Rosa</strong><br> Sweet peanut snack.<br> <a href="http://www.mexgrocer.com/9223.html#" target="_blank">(Photo source)</a> <strong>Mazapanes De la Rosa</strong><br> Sweet peanut snack.<br> <a href="http://www.mexgrocer.com/9223.html#" target="_blank">(Photo source)</a> Photo: Mexgrocer.com
Image 17 of 26 Salsagheti
Imagine one long gummy worm straw to suck out a spicy, tangy and awesome tamarind sauce.
(Photo source) less Imagine one long gummy worm straw to suck out a spicy, tangy and awesome tamarind sauce. Salsagheti
Imagine one long gummy worm straw to suck out a spicy, tangy and awesome tamarind sauce.
(Photo... more Imagine one long gummy worm straw to suck out a spicy, tangy and awesome tamarind sauce. Photo: Lance Fisher on Flickr
Image 18 of 26 <strong>Horchata</strong><br> You don't pronounce the "H" in this refreshing rice drink. <strong>Horchata</strong><br> You don't pronounce the "H" in this refreshing rice drink. Photo: Mel Melcon / LA Times via Getty Images
Image 19 of 26 <strong>Takis</strong><br> A corn snack that comes in various forms of spicy. <strong>Takis</strong><br> A corn snack that comes in various forms of spicy. Photo: Takisusa.com / Takisusa.com
Image 20 of 26 <strong>Mexican beer</strong><br> Take your pick. <strong>Mexican beer</strong><br> Take your pick. Photo: Kevin Schafer / Getty Images
Image 21 of 26 <strong>Tapatio</strong><br> Even more hot sauce. <strong>Tapatio</strong><br> Even more hot sauce. Photo: Kevin Schafer / Getty Images
Image 22 of 26 Cholula
Hot sauce
(Photo source) less Hot sauce Cholula
Hot sauce
... more Hot sauce Photo: Mike Mozart on Flickr
Image 23 of 26 <strong>Chicharrones</strong><br> Fried pig skin. You might have to settle for the small version in a bag. < |
.”
President Frederick emphasized five distinct priorities for his administration: building a culture of academic excellence and rigor; revitalizing the manner in which higher education institutions meet the needs of both students and the world today; infusing service into the University culture; increasing the philanthropic efforts of the University community; and engaging in scholarship and research grounded in solving contemporary problems.
“We must make Howard University the go-to institution, when external events occur, particularly those related to our mission,” said President Frederick. “As president, I commit to working with our faculty and the University community to ensure that we remain actively engaged in public affairs. Where there is a need to speak about justice and inequality, I will lead.”
President Frederick, who was selected as president of Howard University in July 2014, after a national search, brings to his new role a broad skillset well-suited to the leadership of a comprehensive national university. His longstanding personal relationship with the institution also gives him a unique appreciation for Howard’s needs.
As a triple alumnus, President Frederick’s dedication to Howard University spans more than two decades. Born in Port of Spain, Trinidad, with sickle cell anemia, a hereditary disease, his childhood dream of becoming a physician was realized when he earned his medical degree from Howard University in 1994.
President Frederick earned a Bachelor of Science degree and a Doctor of Medicine in a combined six-year program and completed his surgical residency training at Howard University Hospital. After fulfilling his post-doctoral research and surgical oncology fellowships at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, he began his academic career at the University of Connecticut. He served on the faculty of the Department of Surgery, as well as the Associate Program Director of the Surgery Residency and Associate Director of the Cancer Center.
Since returning to Howard University in 2006, President Frederick has served as Division Chief in the Department of Surgery, Director of the Cancer Center, Associate Dean in the College of Medicine, Deputy Provost for Health Sciences, Provost and Chief Academic Officer, and Interim President. He also earned a Master of Business Administration from Howard in 2011.
The inauguration and Charter Day festivities culminated a week-long series of events that included public service activities; a faculty art show; and a symposium on diversity and technology, featuring leaders from Facebook, Yahoo and Google, who discussed strategies for diversifying Silicon Valley.
Board of Trustees Chairman Stacey J. Mobley, J.D., expressed his sentiments about Howard’s legacy. “Our achievements have been outstanding, from the deep belief of our founders that slaves and the children of slaves could be educated in the same manner as all others, and that the advantages of higher education should be made available to all persons without distinction of race, creed, sex or nationality,” said Mobley.
To view video of the event, visit:
http://www.whur.com/inauguration2015/
Chairman Stacey J. Mobley, J.D., expressed his sentiments about Howard’s legacy. “Our achievements have been outstanding, from the deep belief of our founders that slaves and the children of slaves could be educated in the same manner as all others, and that the advantages of higher education should be made available to all persons without distinction of race, creed, sex or nationality,” said Mobley.Port Hedland dust levels so bad residents should be moved, new housing banned, report finds
Updated
Dust levels in Port Hedland are so dangerous the West Australian Government has been advised to ban new housing, aged care facilities and childcare centres in the town's West End, a leaked report has revealed.
The report by the Port Hedland Dust Management Taskforce, obtained by the ABC, also recommends removing permanent residents from dust-affected areas of the Pilbara mining town.
The taskforce comprises representatives from a number of Government departments, major port users and the Town of Port Hedland.
It says a "special control area" should be set up west of Taplin Street, where new housing developments, aged care and childcare facilities were banned in 2010 as a temporary precaution.
The taskforce also recommends "the progressive transition" from permanent residential uses under the current West End residential zone, towards a longer term land use scenario that only includes short-term accommodation west of Acton Street.
Port Hedland is the world's largest volume port for exporting bulk materials and there have been ongoing concerns about dust levels in the area.
Iron ore, salt, manganese, chrome and copper concentrates are just some of the commodities that pass through the port, and the town's rapid growth has meant that some residents live in close proximity to the port, in the town's west.
But Premier Colin Barnett, who is in Port Hedland to announce the development of a multi-million dollar marina in the area, said residents were welcome to continue living in the West End.
"We won't be telling people to leave the West End of Port Hedland. What we need to do is work with the companies so they can keep dust levels to an absolute minimum," the Premier said.
"If new developments are built there will be stricter standards in terms of the building codes. That is how we will deal with the issue."
Mr Barnett said the proposed marina would go ahead despite the taskforce's report but it would not include permanent housing.
"There will be short-stay, caravan camping areas, hotels and the like but not permanent residential accommodation, so that is in response to the dust issue."
Port Hedland resident says dust 'horrific'
Kerry Jacoby, a Port Hedland resident for 44 years, said she regularly called BHP to complain about the dust, but many people were too worried about the repercussions of speaking out.
"It is horrific … we've lived with the dust for so many years, but it's gotten so bad now with the westerlies coming over from Finucane Island straight onto the homes," she said.
"There's too many people tied up with the mining companies and they're too scared to say anything."
Port users urged to act on dust levels
Town of Port Hedland Acting Mayor Camilo Blanco said the taskforce should have consulted with the community before recommending any changes to planning regulations.
"I believe [further planning regulations] will have catastrophic consequences for the future development of the West End and the wider Hedland community."
But he also urged port users to do more to fix the problems.
"Port Hedland port users [need to] stop putting dust on my town and our people … upgrade your operations so World Health Organisation standards are complied with," he said.
The report is the culmination of more than six years of dust monitoring and follows a Health Department assessment earlier this year that found dust levels in Port Hedland could have negative effects on human health.
This month BHP applied to the Department of Environment Regulation to amend its operating licence to increase loading or unloading capacity from 270 million tonnes per annum to 290 million tonnes.
The department has sought community comment on the application.
A BHP spokeswoman said the company put the health and safety of its employees and host communities first.
"We support the recommendations of the Port Hedland Health Risk Assessment, especially the need for proper land use planning controls to guide development in the West End, which is consistent with the Dust Management Taskforce Report," she said.
Topics: environmental-management, mining-environmental-issues, environmental-health, urban-development-and-planning, port-hedland-6721
First postedWhen African Grey parrots talk, do they mimic sounds or consciously understand their speech? Irene Pepperberg, a comparative psychologist at both Brandeis and Harvard universities believes African Greys actually know what they?'re talking about.
"They understand things like categories of color, material and shape, number concepts, and concepts of bigger and smaller, concepts of similarity and difference, and absence; things we once thought that a bird could not comprehend, these parrots are showing us it's possible," says Pepperberg.
With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Pepperberg studies the cognitive and communicative abilities of African Greys. She says the birds have the social skills of a 2-year-old child and the intelligence of a 5-year-old. That statement might ruffle some feathers, but in Pepperberg's lab at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., she's out to prove that talking with the animals isn't just the stuff of fiction.
To start, talking with these birds means simplifying language down to "motherese." Instead of asking what something is made of, Pepperberg will ask, "What matter?" And, when she asks the bird "What shape?" instead of saying "square," they say "four-corner," to clarify the relationship between shape and numbers of points on an object.
One of the things Pepperberg studies is the parrots' ability to identify partially obscured shapes.
"In the wild, we expect these birds to be able to do that because if you see part of a predator, you want to respond as if it is an entire predator," says Pepperberg.
She demonstrates this by showing a parrot a square, partially obscured by a circle, and the bird is still able to identify the shape as "four-corner."
If the parrot responds to "What shape?" by just saying "corner," Pepperberg asks "How many corners?" and the parrot responds "four." The bird doesn't get it right 100 percent of the time, but Pepperberg's data suggests they understand the concept of a square even when it is partially obscured.
When testing, Pepperberg is cautious, making sure she doesn't send subtle cues to the birds. "We have controlled for that many times," she explains. "We have different people training versus testing. We mix up different types of questions in each test session. The testing is basically blind."
Pepperberg says her research on talking with birds has benefits for humans. "A colleague has used our training techniques--a two-person modeling system--with autistic children to help them learn speech and communication skills," she says.
Pepperberg believes that despite the birds having a brain the size of a shelled walnut, their contribution to understanding language and intelligence is significant. "All of our work is trying to show people that 'birdbrain' should really be a compliment," she adds.
Miles O'Brien, Science Nation Correspondent
Jon Baime, Science Nation ProducerPHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Nelson Agholor couldn’t hold it in any longer.
After the Eagles’ 29-23 overtime loss against the Cowboys on Sunday night, Agholor — who caught three of his four targets — went on a rant when he was asked about his first-quarter red zone drop.
Related: Nelson Agholor: Placing Blame On Drops Is ‘Stupid’
Head coach Doug Pederson says the 2015 first-round pick is letting the criticism get to him.
“I personally think that sometimes it’s just the person themself,” Pederson said when asked about Agholor’s struggles. “I think that sometimes you can’t get out of your way. I think you press too much, I think you try too hard. Because you’re hearing all of the outside noise from the media and the fans, you’re trying to do too much. It bothers you individually and so I think that’s what is happening with Nelson right now. He’s a talented, talented wide receiver.”
Listen: Doug Pederson on the 94WIP Morning Show
Agholor has just 21 catches in seven games this season for 216 yards and one touchdown. He is the only receiver in the NFL to start at least 18 games since the start of 2015, and total less than 500 yards and five touchdowns, per 94WIP’s Joe Giglio.
“This will be my message to him this week is, ‘Just relax and go play. Trust your instincts, trust your ability, let’s work hard everyday. Don’t worry about the outside noise,'” Pederson said.
“And I’m just gonna go, ‘Nelson if you’re getting it, guess what? I’m getting it too. Let’s just work through this thing together and we’ll be fine.'”
The NFL trade deadline is Tuesday at 4:00 p.m. and last week reports circulated involving the Eagles’ interest in 49ers WR Torrey Smith and Bears WR Alshon Jeffery. However, Pederson said there was “no legitimacy” to those reports.This is not a good sign for online education: 72 percent of professors who have taught Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) don’t believe that students should get official college credit, even if they did well in the class. More importantly, these are the professors who voluntarily took time to teach online courses, which means the actual number of professors who discount the quality of MOOCs is probably much (much) higher. The survey reveals the Grand Canyon-size gap between the higher-education establishment and the coalition of tech companies and lawmakers that are mandating college credit for online courses.
Since the largest university system in the world, the California State University system, announced a pilot for low-cost online lower-division courses, schools from all over the country have raced to replace physical college instruction at a crazy fast pace. In only a month’s time, the University of Wisconsin started offering a fully legitimate college degree without any class time required and scores of schools announced that they will be emulating CSU lower-division pilots in the near future.
But, this is mostly administration-driven. Professors, by and large, are freaking out. When the California state legislator proposed mandating that online courses be accepted, the faculty senate sent a strongly worded letter to lawmakers: “There is no possibility that UC faculty will shirk its responsibility to our students by ceding authority over courses to any outside agency”
This latest survey from The Chronicle Of Education reveals how little confidence professors have in their own courses. “The deck was somewhat stacked with true believers,” writes Steve Kolowich of The Chronicle about the survey, which polled the 184 known professors who have taught a MOOC.
It’s early days for online education, and the old guard isn’t going down without a fight.
[Image Credit: Flickr User Ed Yourdon]Haraz N. Ghanbari/Associated Press
Jamie Dimon and the 10 other directors of JPMorgan Chase had reason to be confident before they took private jets to Tampa on Monday, the eve of the bank’s annual meeting. Early indications were that a shareholder vote to split Mr. Dimon’s jobs as chairman and chief executive was heading to a resounding defeat.
There was just one problem: One director was not going to Florida.
Related Links Live Blog: At the Shareholder Meeting
Ellen V. Futter, a longtime member of the board’s risk policy committee who had come under fire over her lack of a background in finance, had decided at the last minute not to attend the meeting.
Ms. Futter, the president of the American Museum of Natural History, was sick of the swirl of negative attention surrounding her, worried that it needlessly detracted from JPMorgan’s strengths and that it might hurt the reputation of the museum, people briefed on the matter said. She wanted off the board.
A resignation by a bank director would have distracted from what was shaping up to be a victory parade for Mr. Dimon. The charismatic chief executive called her on Monday to try to convince her to stay, although he acknowledged that it was a personal decision, the people briefed on the matter said. That discussion was followed by calls from at least two other directors, the people said. They urged Ms. Futter to remain on the board, adding that her resignation would drag her back into the spotlight.
In the end, Ms. Futter, who narrowly eked out re-election, changed her mind.
JPMorgan’s Trading Loss
Mr. Dimon’s art of persuasion was also in evidence on Tuesday as nearly 70 percent of the shares were voted to reject decisively a proposal for an independent chairman.
The shareholder vote had shaped up to be a rare challenge to Mr. Dimon, who was widely praised for piloting the bank through the turmoil of the financial crisis. Since the crisis, three years of consecutive quarterly profits at JPMorgan have added to his laurels.
Yet a surprising multibillion-dollar trading loss last year — one that has helped drive top lieutenants from the bank and produced a range of investigations — has raised questions about the chief executive’s leadership.
The shareholder resolution, while intended to improve corporate governance by having an independent chairman as a counterweight to a chief executive, became a referendum on Mr. Dimon himself. It was a test he easily passed.
“To some extent this was a referendum on Jamie Dimon, and he is quite unique and special and no one can deny that,” said Marvin Schwartz, a portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, which controls roughly 12 million shares and voted against the resolution. “To hold against him one unfortunate loss in the trading area, I think, is quite unfair.”
Even though some 40 percent of the shares last year had supported a similar proposal to split the top two jobs at the bank, this year’s resolution was supported by only 32.2 percent of the shares. The divide in the vote was apparent, with institutional investors like Neuberger Berman voting overwhelmingly against the proposal and pension funds voting for it, according to people briefed on the matter.
In an e-mail to employees after the annual meeting, Mr. Dimon wrote: “I love coming to work here every day — and hope to be doing it for years to come.”
Chris O’Meara/Associated Press
Shares of JPMorgan rose as much as 2.6 percent on Tuesday, before closing up 1.4 percent, at $53.02.
The hearty endorsement of the chief executive — which was announced on his 30th wedding anniversary — came after months of behind-the-scenes lobbying by the bank.
At its Park Avenue headquarters, JPMorgan assembled a war room where executives kept close tallies as shareholder votes began streaming in, according to two people briefed on the matter. To sway investors, these people said, influential board members were paired with large shareholders.
Part of the message was to remind shareholders that the directors were already a powerful check on Mr. Dimon, noting that board had earlier moved to root out problems in the aftermath of the losses and to claw back $100 million from the traders at the center of the outsized wagers.
The bank held conference calls with several big investors, including Neuberger Berman. Mr. Schwartz said that during that call, which lasted roughly 40 minutes, Neuberger portfolio managers had a “frank give and take” with JPMorgan executives.
Still, roughly two weeks before the shareholder meeting, the proposal sponsors were winning, according to people briefed on the tallies. The vote was going against Mr. Dimon.
On May 6, Lee R. Raymond, the lead director of the bank’s board, and William C. Weldon, the chairman of the board’s corporate governance and nominating committee, met with officials from the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, one of the main backers of the proposal to divide the roles.
A close ally of Mr. Dimon even tried to enlist former President Bill Clinton to help broker a compromise with Afscme, according to two people with knowledge of the discussion. Mr. Clinton declined.
“I think that given the resources that the management and the board threw at this, it’s not a surprise that the vote was lower than last year,” said Lisa Lindsley, the director of capital strategies at Afscme.
The bank pulled other levers as well, some shareholders said.
“First we hear Jamie might leave if things go against him and then people start talking about the damage to the stock price,” said one major shareholder, who asked not to be named because of a company policy against speaking to the media. “It was effective.”
People close to the bank say a turning point in the campaign came from an unexpected source, an influential shareholder advisory firm, Institutional Shareholder Services, which urged shareholders earlier this month to withhold their votes from three directors on the board’s policy committee.
In a scathing 33-page report, the firm faulted three directors, saying they lacked risk expertise. By zeroing in on the board members, several people close to the bank said, the advisory firm effectively gave shareholders an alternative. They could register their dissatisfaction with JPMorgan without going after Mr. Dimon, the people said.
Indeed, the preliminary vote totals for the three directors were effectively rebukes. Ms. Futter received just 53 percent of the voting shares, while the two other directors on the committee did only a little better: James S. Crown received about 57 percent of the vote; and David M. Cote received 59 percent. (In comparison, Mr. Dimon received 98 percent of the vote for his board seat, while Mr. Raymond, the lead director, received 95 percent.)
As a result of this sign of disapproval from shareholders, it is almost certain the board will make some changes. On Tuesday, Mr. Raymond told shareholders to “stay tuned” when he was asked if the board is planning to make changes to the risk committee. It is likely Ms. Futter will come off the risk committee, and the board may replace her or others with directors that have more knowledge of financial risk.
“The vote proved to be a referendum on the board’s oversight of risk rather than over whether to split the chairman/C.E.O. job,” said Michael Garland, an assistant comptroller who heads corporate governance for the New York City comptroller, John Liu, which co-sponsored the bill. “I don’t think this is a setback because it put a spotlight on the issue and the clock is now ticking on director reform.”For thousands of years people around the world have enjoyed midwinter festivals. With the arrival of Christianity, pagan festivals became mixed with Christmas celebrations. One of the leftovers from these pagan days is the custom of bedecking houses and churches with evergreen plants like mistletoe, holly and ivy. Apparently, as well as their magical connection in protecting us from evil spirits, they also encourage the return of spring.
No era in history however, has influenced the way in which we celebrate Christmas, quite as much as the Victorians.
Before Victoria‘s reign started in 1837 nobody in Britain had heard of Santa Claus or Christmas Crackers. No Christmas cards were sent and most people did not have holidays from work. The wealth and technologies generated by the industrial revolution of the Victorian era changed the face of Christmas forever. Sentimental do-gooders like Charles Dickens wrote books like “Christmas Carol”, published in 1843, which actually encouraged rich Victorians to redistribute their wealth by giving money and gifts to the poor – Humbug! These radical middle class ideals eventually spread to the not-quite-so-poor as well.
From ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens
The holidays – The wealth generated by the new factories and industries of the Victorian age allowed middle class families in England and Wales to take time off work and celebrate over two days, Christmas Day and Boxing Day. Boxing Day, December 26th, earned its name as the day servants and working people opened the boxes in which they had collected gifts of money from the “rich folk”. Those new fangled inventions, the railways allowed the country folk who had moved into the towns and cities in search of work to return home for a family Christmas.
The Scots have always preferred to postpone the celebrations for a few days to welcome in the New Year, in the style that is Hogmanay. Christmas Day itself did not become a holiday in Scotland until many years after Victoria’s reign and it has only been within the last 20-30 years that this has been extended to include Boxing Day.
The Gifts –At the start of Victoria’s reign, children’s toys tended to be handmade and hence expensive, generally restricting availability to those “rich folk” again. With factories however came mass production, which brought with it games, dolls, books and clockwork toys all at a more affordable price. Affordable that is to “middle class” children. In a “poor child’s” Christmas stocking, which first became popular from around 1870, only an apple, orange and a few nuts could be found.
Father Christmas
Father Christmas / Santa Claus – Normally associated with the bringer of the above gifts, is Father Christmas or Santa Claus. The two are in fact two entirely separate stories. Father Christmas was originally part of an old English midwinter festival, normally dressed in green, a sign of the returning spring. The stories of St. Nicholas (Sinter Klaas in Holland) came via Dutch settlers to America in the 17th Century. From the 1870’s Sinter Klass became known in Britain as Santa Claus and with him came his unique gift and toy distribution system – reindeer and sleigh.
Christmas Cards – The “Penny Post” was first introduced in Britain in 1840 by Rowland Hill. The idea was simple, a penny stamp paid for the postage of a letter or card to anywhere in Britain. This simple idea paved the way for the sending of the first Christmas cards. Sir Henry Cole tested the water in 1843 by printing a thousand cards for sale in his art shop in London at one shilling each. The popularity of sending cards was helped along when in 1870 a halfpenny postage rate was introduced as a result of the efficiencies brought about by those new fangled railways.
Turkey Time – Turkeys had been brought to Britain from America hundreds of years before Victorian times. When Victoria first came to the throne however, both chicken and turkey were too expensive for most people to enjoy. In northern England roast beef was the traditional fayre for Christmas dinner while in London and the south, goose was favourite. Many poor people made do with rabbit. On the other hand, the Christmas Day menu for Queen Victoria and family in 1840 included both beef and of course a royal roast swan or two. By the end of the century most people feasted on turkey for their Christmas dinner. The great journey to London started for the turkey sometime in October. Feet clad in fashionable but hardwearing leather the unsuspecting birds would have set out on the 80-mile hike from the Norfolk farms. Arriving obviously a little tired and on the scrawny side they must have thought London hospitality unbeatable as they feasted and fattened on the last few weeks before Christmas!
The Tree – Queen Victoria’s German husband Prince Albert helped to make the Christmas tree as popular in Britain as they where in his native Germany, when he brought one to Windsor Castle in the 1840’s.
The Crackers – Invented by Tom Smith, a London sweet maker in 1846. The original idea was to wrap his sweets in a twist of fancy coloured paper, but this developed and sold much better when he added love notes (motto’s), paper hats, small toys and made them go off BANG!
Carol Singers – Carol Singers and Musicians “The Waits” visited houses singing and playing the new popular carols;
1843 – O Come all ye Faithful
1848 – Once in Royal David’s City
1851 – See Amid the Winters Snow
1868 – O Little Town of Bethlehem
1883 – Away in a MangerWe're excited to premiere a brand new single from The Amity Affliction titled “Chasing Ghosts” from their upcoming eponymously titled album, out September 18 via Roadrunner. Below you can listen to the song and read a statement from frontman Joel Birch about the track.
“I wrote Chasing Ghosts as a narrative based wholly around someone that has committed suicide and has passed onto the other side. It's a story that I hope people will see for what it is; an example in song of why you should turn to someone close and talk instead of taking that last fatal step towards death prematurely. I just want to reiterate to people that once you're gone, that's it. There's no ghosts. There's no heaven, no hell, just finality and the wreckage left behind in the wake of their decision.”Baltimore officials have agreed to a $400,000 settlement with a man who sued the city after he was shot by police in January 2013.
Shaun Mouzon, 35, was shot by officers after they said in charging documents that Mouzon drove his car at them. But Mouzon’s attorney, A. Dwight Pettit, said surveillance camera video he obtained from the city showed none of the officers appeared to be standing directly in front of the car as Mouzon slowly pulled off and fled the area.
“We were confident with the video amplified and put before a jury,” along with expert testimony, that “we could make the case beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pettit said. But instead of going to trial, Mouzon accepted an offer from the city, Pettit said.
The terms of the settlement were filed in federal court Monday, and still must go before the city’s Board of Estimates for approval. The spending panel is controlled by Mayor Catherine E. Pugh.
Interim Baltimore Solicitor David Ralph and Anthony McCarthy, a spokesman for the mayor, did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.
Through his attorney, Mouzon declined to comment. The settlement agreement includes a non-disparagement clause that prohibits plaintiffs from discussing the settlement publicly.
The settlement comes the same week that city and state officials approved a combined $1 million to settle a suit filed after 44-year-old Tyrone West died in 2013 during an altercation with police during a traffic stop in Northeast Baltimore.
Mouzon filed a lawsuit in April 2014 against the city and several police officers involved in the shooting that occurred in January 2013. The suit was later amended after Pettit received the surveillance video from the city.
Officers wrote in charging documents that they suspected Mouzon had a handgun and they attempted to stop him.
The video shows Mouzon's vehicle pulling into traffic at a stoplight on Edmondson Avenue in Southwest Baltimore, with several officers following in an unmarked patrol car, their lights activated. Officers run up to the driver's and passenger sides, but it’s unclear when the officers begin firing.
An officer said he saw Mouzon reach down with his right hand between the seat and center console. Mouzon then "let off the brakes and began to accelerate toward the officers in front of the vehicle. At this time, a police involved shooting occurred," the charging documents said.
In the video, none of the officers appear to be standing directly in front of the car as it slowly pulls off and flees the area. Pettit said the video shows officers firing even before the vehicle starts to move, and that an expert witness would have testified to that if the case had gone to trial.
The three officers who opened fire on Mouzon's car were cleared of wrongdoing by the Baltimore state's attorney's office in July 2013.
Mouzon was charged with one count of having a handgun in a vehicle, one count of illegal possession of a handgun, a charge of failing to obey a lawful order, and traffic violations, all of which were later dropped.
Pettit said no gun was ever recovered.
He said his client is still recovering from injuries suffered from the shooting.
“He’s going to be going to recovering all of his life. He has future surgeries,” Pettit said.
jkanderson@baltsun.com
twitter.com/janders5Bundling front-end and adding compilation (you are here!) Decreasing front-end size and improving caching Speeding up build and improving the development workflow This is the first part of a three-part introduction into webpack: Want to stay tuned for the future posts? Subscribe
What is webpack#
Webpack is a front-end bundler. And a front-end bundler is a tool that combines multiple modules into a single file called bundle:
While the main purpose of webpack is bundling, it also has a lot of other abilities. For example, webpack can compile your front-end, split your code into multiple files or optimize your bundle size. I’m reviewing many of these abilities in this series of posts.
If you’re not familiar with the concept of bundling, Preethi Kasireddy wrote a good introduction to it. Check it out and come back!
Task Bundle front-end#
Given: you have an application that consists of lots of modules. Like Cut the Rope:
You want to bundle the modules into a single file: to speed up the loading of an app*, or to serve a library as a single module, or for another reason. Let’s see how webpack can help with this.
* – if you’re thinking “Wait, HTTP/2 made bundling unnecessary”, see the Khan Academy’s post about why no bundling is a bad idea
Good case: your code uses a popular module system#
// comments.js define(['./dist/lodash.js'], (_) => { // … return { … }; }); // index.js define(['./comments', …], (comments, …) => { // … comments.render(commentsData, '#comments'); });
If your code uses AMD, CommonJS or ES modules, everything is simple. Webpack supports these module systems out of the box, so to compile a project with them, you’ll only need to specify the entry file and the name of the resulting file.
To do this, create a file called webpack.config.js in the root of your project with the content like this:
// webpack.config.js module.exports = { // An entry point. It’s the main module of your application // that references all the other modules entry: './src/index.js', output: { // The directory where the bundle should be placed path: './dist', // The name of the resulting bundle filename: 'bundle.js', }, };
Then, run webpack:
npm install --global webpack cd your/project/directory webpack
Once you launch webpack, it will compile your project and generate a bundle with all your JavaScript. What’s left? Replace the import of your old entry file with the name of the new file:
// index.html <!doctype html> <body> <!-- … --> - <script src="./src/index.js"></script> + <script src="./dist/bundle.js"></script> </body>
Task solved.
Bonus point: all module types at once# Webpack supports all three module types in the same project simultaneously. So if a part of your code is in AMD and the other part is in ES modules, it will just work. This can be helpful if you decide to gradually migrate from one module format to another.
Bad case: your code uses your own module system#
// comments.js MyApp.define(['./dist/lodash.js'], (_) => { // … return { … }; }); // index.js MyApp.define(['./comments', …], (comments, …) => { // … comments.render(commentsData, '#comments'); });
In case your code uses a module system different from AMD, CommonJS or ES modules, things get more complicated. To make webpack work with your code:
either migrate your code to a supported module format. Facebook has a tool called codemod which can automate a massive refactoring and could be useful for you;
Facebook has a tool called codemod which can automate a massive refactoring and could be useful for you; or write a Babel plugin for converting your custom module format to AMD, CommonJS or ES modules. This plugin will be executed on each compilation. Take a look at babel-plugin-transform-amd-to-commonjs to get an idea of how to write it. (We’ll see how to enable Babel a bit later.)
After you deal with the custom module format, configure the entry point and the output as described in “Good case” above.
Bonus point: global webpack installation# Although installing webpack globally ( npm install –global webpack ) is the easiest way to do the build, I prefer using it through npm scripts. webpack is often installed as a project dependency (because it provides plugins that are used in the configuration), so using it from npm scripts prevents the version conflict. Also, npm scripts can be run from any directory inside the project, not only from the root: // package.json { "scripts": { "build": "webpack" } } # Console npm run build
Task Compile JavaScript#
Given: you have some code that cannot be run in the browser. This can be code that uses features from the next JavaScript standard or even code in another language like TypeScript:
// comments.js import _ from 'lodash'; export async render(…) { const userData = await getUserData(userId); // … }
You want to compile it to make it work. Let’s see how webpack helps to solve this task.
Assume you’re using Babel. You may have used it from the command line specifying the input and the output:
babel./src -d./dist
Or you may have used it from Gulp as a part of a stream:
gulp.task('default', () => { return gulp.src('./src/**/*.js').pipe(babel()).pipe(gulp.dest('dist')); });
webpack has a bit different approach. It uses loaders.
A loader is a JavaScript module. Webpack pipes all files through specified loaders before adding them into bundle.
A loader accepts any input and converts it to JavaScript which webpack works with. Loaders can be organized into chains; a chain accepts any input, pipes it through the loaders and passes the result to webpack. In this case, intermediate loaders can return anything, not only JavaScript.
In webpack, Babel works as a loader. To use it, install babel-loader with its peer dependencies. Then, tell webpack to apply the loader with the module.rules option:
// webpack.config.js module.exports = { //... module: { rules: [ { // Take every JavaScript file imported into a bundle... test: /.js$/, //...and pipe it through babel-loader... use: ['babel-loader'], //...with the following options options: { presets: ['env'], }, }, ], }, };
The same approach works for TypeScript:
// webpack.config.js module.exports = { //... module: { rules: [ { test: /.ts$/, use: ['ts-loader'] } ] } };
Or you can chain Babel and Typescript to do transformations that aren’t supported by the latter:
// webpack.config.js module.exports = { //... module: { rules: [ { test: /.ts$/, // Loaders are applied from right to left use: ['ts-loader', 'babel-loader'] } ] } };
You can find the list of the most popular loaders in webpack docs.
Bonus point: different ways to specify a loader# Above, I passed a string array into the use property to apply a loader. There’re two more ways to specify loaders. Here’re all of them: // Specifies a single loader with or without options { test: /.js$/, loader: 'babel-loader', options: {... } }, // Specifies multiple loaders without options { test: /.ts$/, use: ['ts-loader', 'babel-loader'] }, // Specifies multiple loaders with or without options { test: /.ts$/, use: ['ts-loader', { loader: 'babel-loader', options: {... } }] } Choose between them based on your needs. Bonus point: loaders in the require query# Apart from specifying loaders in webpack.config.js, you can also specify them in your import request: import comments from 'ts-loader!babel-loader?presets[]=env!./comments.ts'; This can be useful for testing. Nevertheless, I don’t recommend using it in production because it makes your code dependent on a specific bundler.
Task Manage other files#
Webpack can also help you manage your styles, images or any other files.
Given: front-end application with styles and |
:434). This example shows the Shōbōgenzō's position on the nature and importance of correct doctrinal belief by focusing on a doctrine that is fundamental to most Buddhist thought. The same essential attitude, however, is presented on many matters of correct belief and practice, from the doctrine of karma to the details of monastic practice. There is a right way of belief and practice in all matters that is knowable and verifiable as true and efficacious. How can one correctly distinguish p 261 the true from the false? [4] The Shōbōgenzō's answer to this question in the above example is a pattern that appears throughout the text. Tradition, "the Buddhas and Patriarchs," supplies the standard by which to judge the truth of doctrine. "Anyone who wishes to determine if a teaching is correct or not should use the standards of the Buddhas and Patriarchs. They are the true masters of the wheel of the Law whom we should consult" (1977:23;1970:392). A doctrine can be verified as correct if it can be found to be the teaching of Buddhas and Patriarchs. Furthermore, the Shōbōgenzō holds that the content of correct belief and practice has been accurately transmitted from the Buddhas through centuries of tradition. [5] "I also learned (from a sutra) that the Patriarchs transmit the Dharma free of error" (1983b:100;1972:400). That the Patriarchs' transmission can be trusted Dōgen claims to have learned from a sutra. The tradition apparently verifies itself. Furthermore, because the transmission of doctrine is unbroken, the Buddhist Dharma has been able to escape the vicissitudes of history: "... it is not difficult to authenticate a doctrine even if removed by centuries from the Buddhas and Patriarchs" (1983b:72). Dōgen is aware of at least some of the historical and hermeneutical problems that arise when the truth of historically transmitted doctrine is based upon the word or confession of that same transmission. The divergence and plurality of belief is an often mentioned and much lamented fact in the Shōbōgenzō. But Dōgen's response is simply that the others have received it incorrectly, and that the truth runs like a single unbroken thread down through the centuries. "Shakyamuni's Eye and Treasury of the true Law and supreme enlightenment was only rightly transmitted to Mahakasyapa, and no one else. The right transmission surely passed to Mahakasyapa" (1977:23;1970:392). But in spite of the continuity of tradition, there are those who hold "mistaken and distorted views." "Unfortunately many masters have proclaimed the teaching based on their own limited mistaken views... They distorted the teachings to conform to their own misguided interpretation which they contested to be true Buddhism" (1983b: 16; 1972:345). Although these people think they possess the p 262 truth, they are caught in an illusory perspective that can only be exposed by showing them the correct interpretation of the teachings. "Inferior monks remain ignorant and do not know that their teaching is twisted. It is a pity that they are trapped in illusion. Such people have not experienced the Dharma and do not know how to think properly" (1983a:83;1972:76). Apparently those who hold a correct viewpoint and those who adhere to incorrect doctrine both believe that their view is true, and both verify that view by reference to the tradition. Yet nothing in the Shōbōgenzō indicates how one might adjudicate the conflict of interpretations. The circularity of an appeal to tradition as a means to verify an interpretation of tradition is not raised to the status of an issue. Therefore, even the pivotal principle itself can be stated in circular terms: "This is the Buddhist teaching of right transmission — only those with right transmission can correctly calculate right transmission" (1983a:68;1972:38). As Dōgen seems to sense, the whole procedure seems to rest on one crucial belief: "belief in right transmission" (1977: 181). But even if there is difficulty in grounding correct belief, it nevertheless remains a central theme throughout the Shōbōgenzō that the truth or falsity of one's doctrine and practice is a matter of great significance. In contrast to much of the Zen tradition that precedes it, the Shōbōgenzō is adamant that doctrine does make a difference. To bring the significance of this position into focus, one might contrast Dōgen’s relentless critique of false views with Nagarjuna's famous "critique of all views." For Dōgen, not all views obstruct realization, only those "outside the way" (gedo). Others, sanctioned by Buddhas and Patriarchs, are to be cultivated. It is significant that the Shōbōgenzō commonly refers to the Lotus Siitra as the highest standard for truth, because this text can clearly be seen to support Dōgen's emphasis on correctness and truth of belief. But this same sutra also expresses a concern for universality and all-inclusiveness. It probes toward a position that, rather than simply contradicting other positions, attempts to take them all in, including them in one universal Dharma. This is also Dōgen's concern, a concern which derives from a second approach to the question of truth. Truth as the Embodiment of Dharmata Some sections of the Shōbōgenzō take a different position on the question of truth. Rather than focusing on conceptual or propositional truth, they maintain that truth is neither graspable in concepts nor expressable in propositions. Although nowhere in the Shōbōgenzō is a systematic theory of knowledge articulated, it is not difficult to p 263 sense, in many chapters, that the Buddhist concepts of impermanence and emptiness (as well as Dōgen’s own practice) stand behind his view that truth, dharmata, is not graspable in conceptual knowledge. Many passages demonstrate a profound insight into the Mahayana understanding of "ungraspability," "unattainability," "incomprehensibility." Two such passages read: "When you have complete understanding then even the ideas of the wisdom of enlightenment or the status of detachment will be seen for what they are — tentative and delusive"(1975:70;1970:260). "We cannot say that there is; or is not, practice and enlightenment — it cannot be comprehended or attained. Again the great meaning is beyond attainment or comprehension. We cannot say that there are no holy truths, practice or enlightenment, nor can we say that there are holy truths, etc. Nothing can be attained, nothing can be comprehended" (1977:5;1970:307)." On this basis, it would be inappropriate to hold, with unquestioning certainty, any view. Such holding is a kind of grasping that prevents attainment of the way. This second understanding of truth appears to stand in sharp contrast to the first which advocates "correct views" and which seeks to expose heresy (gedo). Some sections of the text even go so far as to proclaim the impossibility of propositional correctness and its inadequacy as the goal of praxis. Even in its most anti-heresy passages, the Shōbōgenzō never comes close to saying that enlightenment consists in absolute knowledge or correct understanding. Clearly, realization does not consist in transcending human limitations; it entails instead an awareness of them and the "unattainability" of perfect knowledge. Thus the Genjokoan chapter maintains that, "when the Dharma is completely present, there is a realization of one's insufficiencies" (1975:2;1970:37). Dharma or truth, therefore, must include those insufficiencies along with an understanding of them. One of the Shobogetizo's most famous passages says, "To have great enlightenment about illusion is to be a Buddha" (1975:1;1970:35). This radical grasp of illusion characterizing a "Buddha" is contrasted with the "great illusions about enlightenment" which characterize sentient beings. One has "great illusions about enlightenment" when one takes it to be the perfect possession of knowledge rather than the humble practice of "no-mind." One who truly practices the way, realizes the "insufficiencies" of all views and is, therefore, less inclined to engage in the self-centered struggle to have one's own view prevail. In matters of thought, it is more fruitful to seek the strength or the truth of all views. In this vein Dōgen can say, "Never take your own viewpoint to be definitive, alternative interpretations must be studied to develop unified understanding" (1983b:49;1970:130). The attitude appropriate to this kind of p 264 truth is detachment. Such truth becomes manifest only when all self-centered grasping for it is set aside and replaced by a mode of being characterized by openness. Thus the Shōbōgenzō occasionally interrupts meditation on an idea to remind the reader that the text's message can only be understood in a released state of mind. "If there is no detachment, there can be no attainment of this observation" (1975:20;1970:85). No matter how subtle and open a discussion is, the conceptual process inevitably tends toward abstraction, objectification and attachment. "Remember though, that real Buddha mind is detached even from these statements" (1975:20;1970:85).
On this basis Dōgen concludes that ordinary thinking is inadequate to this highest form oftruth. Our rational thought processes only attain the perspectives and opinions criticized above; by their very nature they cannot grasp "the true nature of all dharmas" (dharmata / hossho). On the other hand, a simple negation of thinking gets one no closer to realization. Because non-thinking is a willful, active, and mediated relation to immediate experience it shares essential features with its supposed opposite, thinking. Both thinking and non-thinking express the subject's own effort to determine and "frame" experience in a particular way. Dōgen sets out to show that there is a fundamentally different kind of "thinking" (experience) which he calls "thinking without thinking." [6] "Without thinking" (hishiryo) is not "non-thinking" (fushiryo) just as Buddhist "no-mind" is not mindlessness. Rather, it is the foundation of mind that encompasses mindfulness and mindlessness — all forms of mind — and thus actualizes mind in its entirety. Dōgen puts it this way: "After we develop the mind of practice through enlightenment, we will realize that the source of all these forms of mind is "no-mind." "No-mind" is the true Buddhist mind undivided, beyond discrimination of opposites — and contains no analysis. To comprehend the true way we need "thinking without thinking" (1975:9;1970:74-75). "Without thinking," according to Dōgen, is the fundamental state of mind; it precedes all discrimination, analysis, and subject/object separation. This prereflective "pure experience" is the basis of all positive and negative reflection. All experiential, linguistic, and conceptual structures arise out of it. This level of experience is prereflective — it precedes thought — both in the sense that it comes first and in the sense that it grounds all reflection. All conceptualized experience has a basis in and is elicited by the world that appears to us preconceptually. The one who does the thinking — the individual subject or self — makes his/her appearance in p 265 the course of time, [7] gradually, and in different ways, but does so, according to the Shōbōgenzō, on the basis of a prior unity. Although forgotten or obscured, this unity is nevertheless always present; without it neither subject nor object would appear. Dharmata (Hossho), "the true nature of all dharmas" is not, therefore, the subject's correct experience of objective dharmas — it is the "presence of things as they are" (genjokoan) prior to the reflective separation between subject and object. Therefore, very often, when Dōgen (and others in his tradition of language practice) speak of mind (shin), they signify neither the subject's reflection, nor the mechanism of reflection, but the total, unbroken process whereby the world comes to manifestation through the subject. In the deepest sense, mind is the unity of experience: "This is the stage of pre-thought beyond egocentric cognition. If you reach this state of pre-thought you will realize the true luminous nature of mind — prethought must become the eye through which you view phenomena" (1975:10;1970:75).[8] Reflective, second and third order experience, "enforms" and "enframes" this prereflective presence in particular ways. Pattern, structure, and a framework order experience in various ways that are meaningful, suggestive, and useful. But for Dōgen, this thoughtfulness loses track of its character and its basis. The forms and structures of conceptuality are taken to be "the true nature of things" — a closure that fails to see other structures and perspectives, as well as the experiential basis of all subsequent structuring. Fundamentally, mind is open and undetermined. Structural closure is a static and narrowing focus. For this reason, "without thinking" (pre-thought) is characterized in terms of openness and receptivity. Hence Dōgen exhorts his listeners and readers to look at things from different angles and perspectives, to pry open the rigidity of frameworks, and thus, perhaps, to work back through them to their foundation — the pre-reflective, unframed presence of things as they are.
This is the function of zazen, for Dōgen, the practice of things as they are and the occasion for things to be as they are. In true zazen, the practitioner penetrates beneath the structures and norms of conceptualization, beneath even subjectivity and objectivity, to the pure becoming present of dharmas — what is in truth. This truth is transcendent, unlike the truth of propositional correspondence, because it is not conceptually constructed, nor is it graspable in that form. "It completely goes beyond ideas of difference and identity, separation and unity, between this phenomenal world and dharmata" p 266 (1977:64). Its transcendence, however, is its depth and proximity rather than its distance from us. As what is most fundamental and deeply rooted (hon), the truth of dharmata lies so close to us and is so all-pervasive that, immersed in it, we cannot grasp it as something at hand. [9] The fact that this truth encompasses all beings, whether they know it or not, allows Dōgen, in ecstatic language, to play with the meaning of enlightenment and the dichotomy between enlightenment and illusion. "Priests of the present day think that there are two distinct states: unenlightenment and enlightenment. They think that unenlightenment becomes enlightenment and it is attained from somewhere or someone else. But even that idea is nothing but great enlightenment.... Consequently, everything, right now, is the eternal present in great enlightenment. This is great enlightenment, this is great enlightenment" (1975:38;1970:24). All views, including the enlightened and unenlightened, derive from what is most primordial and, therefore, common to all beings. Great enlightenment encompasses everything; it is the "true nature of all dharmas" and is experienced in pre-reflective immediate presence. Therefore, it cannot properly be contrasted with an opposite — unenlightenment.
Thus the text says: "We should not study enlightenment as something that occurs when unenlightened people are awakened to great enlightenment. Both people in illusion and enlightened people have great enlightenment; unenlightened people and those who are not in illusion also have great enlightenment" (1977:55;1972:21).
Truth in this second sense of dharma does not stand in contrast to an opposite such as untruth, falsity or ignorance: "Wisdom and ignorance appear to be in opposition like the sun to the moon but ultimately they transcend this opposition" (1975:62). Rather, untruth or ignorance is simply another form that dharma takes. The Shōbōgenzō continually plays with this paradox: "Turning one's back or opposing truth is malicious. However, truth can even be found in those actions. Who can fathom the relation between maliciousness and truth?" (1975:52;1972:154). Furthermore, this level of truth is indifferent to the distinction between doubt and belief so important to the first meaning of truth discussed. "Even if we doubt it, still Buddha-nature has emerged in us" (1983b:123;1970:48). Dharmata, the true nature of all dharmas, is all-inclusive and inescapable. Neither illusion, doubt, nor everyday mindlessness puts one outside of its scope. Dōgen shows this conclusively in one of the p 267 Shōbōgenzō's most beautifully crafted sections by appealing to the Zen master Baso: "Zen master Baso said, 'Sentient beings have never left the state of dharmatta samadhi throughout myriads of kalpas. They are always in a state of dharmatta samadhi, putting on their clothes, eating rice, greeting their visitors, and using the six sense organs. All their actions are the function of dharmata" (1977:64;1972:84).
Truth in the sense of dharmatta is not something that anyone lacks; not is it, therefore, the legitimate goal or aim of anyone's quest. We already reside within it in an undivided and unqualified way. But what, then, is Dōgen’s Zen about, if not just such a quest? What is the meaning of the Buddhist way of practice if we are already possessed by its goal? According to the traditional story of Dōgen’s life, this very question set Dōgen himself out on his way (from the Buddhist establishment at Hieizan), forcing him to probe beneath the objectifications of Buddhist doctrine toward the experience that initially generated them. For Dōgen, the question was answered and its problematic character dissolved, when, through his own practice and the guidance of his teacher, he discovered that practice is ill-conceived when it is taken, as it had been traditionally in Buddhism, to be a means to the goal of enlightenment. Dōgen’s realization was that practice is the goal; the goal is to practice (that is, to undertake and perform in all one's actions and at all times) enlightenment. [10] The relationship between practice (shu) and realization (sho) is not to be conceived as a relationship between means and end where one practices in order to attain what one lacks. Rather, in practice, one authenticates the prior presence of Buddha-nature; and Buddha-nature shows its fundamental presence in any act or moment of practice. [11] Practice (exemplified in, but not limited to, zazen) is simply openness to the pre-reflective immediacy that is already present, although hidden beneath conceptual structures and reified ways of framing experience. On this account, practice is not abandoned when realization is attained, it is heightened and becomes more thoroughgoing as the presence of the Buddha-nature is revealed more and more concretely. Therefore, Dōgen says: "Even after attainment of the way, they neither relax nor abandon their practice. Their essence cannot be measured; their essence is their bearing and manner, and this manner is their attain- p 268 ment of the Way" (1977:87). Attainment of the way of practice manifests its results, we see in this passage from Dōgen, in a transformation of one's "bearing" or "manner". This bearing or manner is described as "continuous practice and study of the Way" (1983a:2;1970:166). To practice in this way is to "reside in the truth" (Yokoi: 176) at all times including "daily action, drinking tea and eating rice" (1983a:11;1970:181). In Dōgen’s view, this all-inclusive and very subtle understanding of practice is the most adequate because it mitigates against dualistic conceptions of practice, which separate it from realization. Therefore, Dōgen calls for practice without expectation of enlightenment, because in this view, such practice is enlightenment. Thus Dōgen exhorts his followers: "Concentrate on practice. Do not expect great enlightenment; great enlightenment is daily action, drinking tea and eating rice" (1983a:11;1970:181). Throughout this discussion, however, another more subtle distinction emerges: that between those who are engaged in authentic practice and those who are not. Yet how can this distinction be maintained against Dōgen’s claim that all sentient beings are always in the enlightened state of dharmata and that the distinction between enlightened mind and ordinary mind is false? "All minds are mindfullness. The minds of fools and saints, grass and trees" (1977:76; 1972: 184). The crucial distinction that remains and that Dōgen’s Zen must presuppose is that while dharmata expresses an ontological identity (all experience has its ground in pre-reflective unity), one must still acknowledge that some beings recognize and live in accordance with that realization and some do not. Although all acts are practice and all beings are Buddha-nature, not all beings live in awareness of that fundamental identity. Therefore, in traditional Mahayana terms, while the bodhisattva experiences the identity and emptiness of all beings, as this experience matures in practice, it becomes more and more obvious that most other beings do not recognize the reality in which they live. This difference comes to be experienced as crucial and gives rise to the bodhisattva's compassion. This important distinction can be seen throughout the Shōbōgenzō. In the following passage Dōgen says that doubt and belief are both forms of truth, but whether one realizes this or not makes all the difference: "Even doubts about the dharma are true form. Those who possess the Buddha's wisdom realize this, for they experience a peaceful existence" (1983b:114). Or as the following passage expresses it in paradoxical form, neither enlightenment nor illusion exist, yet to recognize that is enlightenment and not to do so is illusion: "We should p 269 know that neither enlightenment nor illusion exist. Those who are aware of this have attained enlightenment of absolute truth and are called Buddhas" (1983a:129 — my emphasis). In the Gyoji chapter of the Shōbōgenzō, Dōgen encourages his followers to engage in the "ceaseless practice of the present" (1983a:2;1970:166). But then, further down the page, he says something that could be taken to undercut any basis for encouragement: that all actions already are ceaseless practice (1983a:2; 1970: 166). If all actions already are ceaseless practice, why should one strive to practice ceaselessly? Dōgen’s point here is clearly that one's relation to practice makes all the difference. Although everyone always practices, that is, acts out their destiny in "daily life, eating rice, and drinking tea," most human beings tend to live in a narrowly conceived world of representations that limit and determine the openness and depth of life. To most people daily life is ordinary and dull, while the Buddha-nature they seek is exalted and otherworldly. But to Dōgen, for one who realizes it and practices it, daily life is the life of the Buddha. There is no difference between the acts of the enlightened and unenlightened: both eat rice and drink tea. The difference is manifest only in one's awareness of the activity. For the unenlightened, daily life is that with which one is occupied when one is not practicing. For the enlightened, daily life is practice, and what one practices is openness to the continual manifestation of what is present beyond the subject's own interests, concerns, and projections — indeed, beyond the self's individuated existence. The second meaning of truth in the Shōbōgenzō, truth as dharmata, goes beyond propositional correctness and correspondence. The "truth" is simply what is — what comes to be — beyond any partial and perspectival grasp that I have on it. This truth grounds all of us, enlightened and unenlightened; we are immersed in it; we speak, think, and act out of it. Still, Dōgen exhorts his listeners/readers: "Look into zazen for the truth" (1977:44;1970:448). Zazen in this passage is the "place" where one can most readily find the truth that already resides within and around one. "Truth" refers both to dharmata and to the awareness of dharmata. The former is nondualistic; dharmata is all that is. But the latter is distinct from its opposite, the absence of such awareness. This distinction between awareness and unawareness of truth generates the difference in "bearing" or "manner" that distinguishes "attainment of the Way" from non-attainment. Such "enlightened bearing" is the mode of being of one whose primary activity is "ceaseless practice of the present" and whose experience, therefore, reflects the "presence of things as they are." p 270 Doctrine and the Unity/Diversity of Truth In "pure experience" (junsui keikan), a contemporary way of referring to Dōgen’s pre-thinking mode of zazen, no reflective distinctions obtain. All that is, before thought, is the "presence of things as they are" (genjokoan). Nevertheless, as we have seen, the bodhisattva, immersed in this "emptiness", experiences an acute difference among living beings — that some are aware of pure experience and some are not. This experience gives rise to the bodhisattva's compassion and the call to activity. Dōgen’s reflections on this aspect of the tradition, and his own' experience of it, acknowledge the tension between the open receptivity of "pure experience" and the bodhisattva's calling to act and to "make a difference" for other beings. In classical Mahayana language, this is the tension between the experience of emptiness and compassion. Thus Dōgen says that even though doubt is itself the truth of dharmata, still we should enlighten and transform all doubt: "Even though disbelief is itself true form, still we should enlighten the true lotus flower and thus clarify the eternal existence of Buddha" (1983b:116). Although "pure experience" is empty and doctrineless, doctrine and teaching are not irrelevant to the bodhisattva's practice. On the contrary, Dōgen claims that teaching and thought are important aspects of the practice, and that these are inevitably doctrinal matters. Dōgen is relentless in his critique of the "wordless dharma," the view, widespread in the Zen tradition, that since ultimate truth is beyond language, any form of linguistic or doctrinal teaching is misleading or irrelevant (1977:188-9;1972:261). According to Dōgen, this position is naive about what really takes place in the tradition. "Those who think they know that words are just names and forms do not know that Shakyamuni's words are not bound by letters and forms. Those people are not liberated from ordinary mind. The Buddhas and Patriarchs who have totally cast off body and mind use words to proclaim the Dharma and turn the wheel of law and many benefit from seeing and hearing it. Those who have faith and follow the Dharma will be influenced by both the spoken and wordless Buddhist teachings" (1977:60;1972:57). The text appears to say that doctrine is one means by which one comes to experience the emptiness of doctrine. That doctrine is empty is itself a doctrine that must be appropriated in practice. Thus Dōgen radically reinterprets the role of language and doctrine in the Zen tradition. On this basis he says that the Zen admonition to "'Abandon profound and marvelous speech' is just another form of profound and marvelous speech" (1977:53;1972: 19). But the specific status of such "profound and marvelous speech" or doctrinal teaching is as ambiguous a matter as it is important. p 271 Several different possibilities are suggested throughout the text. There are passages that seem to imply that, although doctrine is not ultimately true itself, it can function as a means to the experience of truth. Thus the first meaning of truth as correct doctrine would stand in an instrumental relation to the second, truth as dharmata. In this light Dōgen can say, "Such an enlightened understanding must be developed by continuous practice and study of the Way" (1977:59;1972:56; Yokoi: 169). [12] But this view is explicitly and rigorously denied by other passages. One of the clearest themes in the Shōbōgenzō is that practice — including doctrinal practice, religious thinking — is not to be conceived as a means to the goal of realization. On the contrary, practice is based on enlightenment and issues from it. Practice in order to enlighten oneself is inauthentic practice, while a single instance of authentic practice actualizes enlightened "bearing." The unity of practice and realization (shusho-ittot / shushoichinyo) applies for thinking and doctrinal understanding in the same way that it does for zazen. Therefore, authentic understanding of the doctrine of genjokoan (the presence of things as they are), for example, is based upon the presence of things as they are, but no amount of thinking about the doctrine of genjokoan puts one in the presence of things as they are. Pure pre-reflective experience, the Buddha-nature that grounds all beings, is the basis for all thought; reflection (and all activities of the subject) has its point of departure in the unity of subject and object that is pre-reflective. But, human beings differ in the extent to which "pure experience" is obscured or manifested in daily life. Thus, one's thought or doctrinal understanding reflects the state of one's practice and realization. What one thinks and says (or does, writes, paints, etc.) corresponds to, and therefore reveals, one's mental state and depth of realization. Thought both arises out of and reveals the extent to which one practices and realizes the truth of dharmata in "pure experience." [13]
In the Shōbōgenzō, the conventional means/end relation between practice and realization is inverted: practice is based on realization. This understanding leads Dōgen beyond the view that correct belief or doctrine is a prerequisite for realization. Instead, the text typically asserts that realization — the presence of things as they are in pre-reflective experience — authenticates doctrine. Doctrine is authenticated (sho) in pure experience in the sense that one comes to understand it for the first time. Prior to this transformation of experience, p 272 one's understanding was superficial and grounded more in subjectivity than in the unity of the situation. In the experience, however, seeing and believing are the same activity. To experience deeply the impermanence of all things is to understand the doctrine of impermanence. To be in "the presence of things as they are" (genjokoan) is to know finally what genjokoan means, thus authenticating a doctrine that before was only superficially believed. While this theme is crucial for understanding the relation between doctrine and realization in the Shōbōgenzō, it is still incomplete. Even if realization authenticates doctrine, we can still ask: How is doctrine itself significant? Authentic practice — which is realization — is the heart of the matter for Dōgen. That doctrine is authenticated in the process seems almost beside the point until we can see what significance it might have in itself. Indeed, the text's insistence that doctrine not be considered a means to the goal of realization, raises the question: Why does Dōgen bother with doctrine at all? An adequate answer to this question requires a brief clarification of the apparent opposition between Dōgen’s terms "thinking" (shiryo) and "without-thinking" (hishiryo). If realization isho) is truly "without thinking" (pre-reflective), and if thought does not function as a means to realization, then doctrine would seem to have no role to play in Dōgen’s Zen. But realization is not a negation of thinking (jushiryo), and the Shōbōgenzō is Dōgen’s finest doctrinal expression. For Dōgen, to ground oneself in pre-reflective experience (hishiruo) is not to abandon thought. On the contrary, such experience gives rise to thought of the purest kind, thought that reflects perfectly the "presence of things as they are." "To think without thinking" is to have so thoroughly set aside one's own will, desire, and subjectivity that one's thought reflects the occasion or situation at hand and not one's own design on it. Thought responds to the situation that evokes it by taking its bearings primarily from what is present, both here and now. Ordinary thinking (shiryo) is the subject's own creation. It accords more with the subject's desire or habits than with the situation at hand. The failure of ordinary thought is that it pre-forms all experience; it simply cannot allow what is to be present as it is. "Thinking without thinking" requires that the subject let go of its own plans and devices, and attend to what is as it comes to presence. Rather than eliminating thought, this simply realigns thought with reality, beyond the subject's own will to enframe it. On some occasions, it is sufficient to be aware of the situation at hand directly, without thinking. More complex situations call for more elaborate and systematic reflection. Both extremes, however, are grounded in the situation rather than in the subject, and both call for an openness that is uncharacteristic of p 273 anything we typically regard as thinking. Pure experience then, gives rise to thought of its own accord, and Dōgen’s religious thought is one form that this thinking can take. This understanding has far reaching consequences for the status of doctrine. If the situations to which thought conforms are impermanent, always turning into new situations, then doctrine would have to change along with them. Dōgen does not shy away from this conclusion: the teachings are impermanent: "Therefore, teaching, clarifying impermanence, and practice are by their nature impermanent. Kanzeon proclaims the Dharma by manifesting himself in a form best suited to save sentients. This is Buddha-nature. Sometimes they use a long form to proclaim a long Dharma, sometimes a short form for a short Dharma. Impermanence itself is Buddha-nature" (1983b:128; 1970:54). What this means is that there cannot be one permanent body of correct doctrine because the reality to which it would have to conform is itself variable and in transformation. As the text says clearly, "circumstances are constantly changing the form of suchness" (1975:130;1972:252). Religious thinking that originates in pure experience does correspond to the reality of the situation, but it is also empty (Ku) in the sense that it originates dependent upon the particularities of the given situation. As an expression (dotoku) of a given occasion (jisetsu), it is neither permanent nor universally applicable. On this account therefore, the Shōbōgenzō should be read as a series of such expressions occasioned or elicited by various and changing circumstances in Dōgen’s world between 1231 and the year of his death in 1253. If so then Dōgen’s Zen would appear to be ultimately baseless, without any kind of stable and enduring foundation. Again, the text, (Immo chapter) radically confirms our reservations: Suchness is the real form of truth as it appears throughout the world — it is fluid and differs from any static substance. Our body is not really ours. Our life is easily changed by life and circumstances and never remains static. Countless things pass and we will never see them again. Our mind is also continually changing. Some people wonder: If this is true on what can we rely? But others who have the resolve to seek enlightenment, use this constant flux to deepen their enlightenment (1975: 58). Dōgen’s position is simply that doctrine's ultimate baselessness is nothing to fear. In fact, that baseless quality of impermanence is the Buddha-nature towards which all authentic doctrine should direct us. But once again a qualification is required. Authentic thinking is not completely baseless. There is something concretely given to which it p 274 must correspond. That is the given situation itself, which comes into being in its own unique form and structure. All thought and action must take their bearings from this situation, responding to it in accordance with the situation's own requirements. Doctrine is authentic to the extent that it is such an open response and to the extent that it includes within it some recognition of its own impermanence/emptiness. If authentic Zen thinking is a spontaneous response to the situation arising out of "pure experience," it requires no justification in terms of function. As such, it simply belongs to the situation itself, as does the person, whose role is simply to be open to and to respond to "things as they are." Thus Dōgen can suggest (in Mujo-seppo) that his dharma discourse is not so much his as the dharma's own discourse, speaking through him as it does through all kinds of beings (1983a:68). But the Shōbōgenzō implies further that this thoughtful response to the given situation is extremely important. For Dōgen, as for the Mahayana tradition generally, doctrinal expressions correspond to the suffering and ignorance of the world. Buddhist thought suits the occasion whenever it alleviates suffering and enlightens ignorance. Since authentic doctrine expresses the "bearing" and "manner" of pure experience, it may function as an inspiration, an enabling power, or an opening toward the experience from which it derives for anyone who is in a position to appropriate it. Doctrinal expressions also make experience explicit; they bring a pre-reflective mode of being to conscious reflection. The Shōbōgenzō implies in numerous places that this process of thematic understanding is not a supplement to realization. Rather, it seems to be a necessary part of the development of enlightened awareness. Thus the paradoxical phrase "thinking without thinking" appears to express a reciprocal relation between thought and "without thinking." |
you made a thinking, leveling undead.”
Yvlon’s eyes could have bored a hole through the mage. He shook his head.
“I was taught a theoretical piece of magic, it’s true. But it’s still not perfect. It wasn’t even certain my creation—Toren—would be able to level.”
“But he did. And he learned to think!”
“Evidently.”
Pisces stared uncomfortably at Erin, and then away. She had a haunted, horrified look on her face.
“I made him do chores. But he could think the entire time?”
“Erin…”
Ceria reached out and touched her friend. Erin shuddered, and then stared at Pisces angrily.
“Okay, he was alive. But why did he start killing people? I never told him to do that! He just did chores for me!”
Pisces spread his hands out, helplessly.
“He probably wished to. I can only speculate, but as I told you once, Toren is not meant for peaceful activities. He may have rebelled out of his desire to fight.”
“Why? He’s not evil! I mean—he wasn’t made that way, right? All he did was do chores! How could he just kill like that?”
Erin tried to snap her fingers, but couldn’t. She was trembling. Pisces closed his eyes, when he opened them, he looked regretful for a moment.
“It is what he was made to do. You see—I made him to fight, to protect. I imbued him with the capability for rational thought in the fashion of Golems. Problem-solving skills; but nothing more, certainly not a groundwork for actual cognition. But I never gave him anything else.”
Erin turned towards Ceria. The half-Elf crossed her arms.
“He didn’t give him a conscience. Or…morality.”
“What? Why not?”
Pisces shrugged eloquently at Yvlon. She clenched her fist, and Ceria interjected.
“He can’t. He doesn’t know how.”
“Then why make a creature like that? You’re just inviting trouble!”
Ceria wasn’t about to defend Pisces on that. He just looked at her, though, haughty and unrepentant.
“Cognita has no moral compass. She functions well enough without one.”
“She’s a monster too. She’s killed more [Mages] than any other being in the world, I’ll wager. She might be helpful to some, but you know she’ll kill without a qualm as well.”
Pisces nodded reluctantly, but he still didn’t appear convinced what he’d done was wrong. Remorseful, yes, guilty, even. But he looked like he’d done when he stood in front of the Council of Wistram the day they’d exiled him. He was certain, and it made Ceria sick because at least in some way, he was right.
He’d done it. He’d actually done it. She could hardly bear to look at him.
Pisces turned back to Erin. The young woman was pale. She looked like she was about to vomit. The [Mage] modulated his tone, spoke softly and, for Pisces, gently.
“Let me be clear, Erin. This was not your fault. The error lay with me in underestimating the capability of my creation. Toren was a loyal servant until he grew strong enough to break the orders you and I had given him. Now he is a threat.”
“A killer. He killed people. Men. Women. Children. But he’s also like…a baby, isn’t he?”
“An odd way of looking at it. But I suppose he would be young.”
“Could you change him? Make him…not kill people?”
Erin looked up at Pisces, a glimmer of hope in his eyes. Ceria waited too. Pisces hesitated, but after a moment shook his head regretfully.
“I could stop him, perhaps. But it would be dangerous and all I would be able to do is render him harmless. Ceria is correct: I cannot give him a conscience. I do not know how. No one does.”
“You have to stop him.”
Yvlon said that. She stood up, staring at Pisces and Erin.
“If what you say is true, that skeleton is a huge threat. A thinking undead, one capable of leveling and leading others? It could become a threat capable of taking on Gold-ranked adventurers soon if not stopped.”
“Yeah.”
Erin’s voice was quiet, but her eyes were suddenly focused. Her hands—she kept them on the table, but they trembled as she looked at Pisces.
“Can you stop him?”
“I can.”
The [Necromancer] said it quietly. He looked at Ceria and she understood.
“Severing the link?”
“It’s the easiest way.”
Pisces explained to Erin and the others.
“Erin feeds Toren with her natural mana. No matter how far away she is, he and she are connected. Without her mana, he cannot survive, powerful as he may be. If I cut it, he will cease to…live.”
Silence fell over the room. Yvlon opened her mouth, clearly wanting to tell Pisces to do it now, but she stopped when she saw Erin’s face. Ceria understood, a little bit. For all Erin yelled at her skeleton, Ceria had seen it with her since as long as she’d known Erin. It was Erin’s…
What? Friend was too strong a word. The girl had thought Toren was a mindless tool for the entire time. But she’d relied on him, even liked him. What he was to her couldn’t be explained in words.
And now she had to kill him.
“Perhaps we can track him down.”
That came from Ceria’s mouth. She blinked when she said it, but everyone stared at her and so she spoke, desperately trying to give Erin another option.
“If we set out, we might be able to track him down. You said he was at Esthelm? He may still be in the area. Or we could find him, look for rumors—”
“No. Do it now.”
Erin cut her friend off. She stared at Pisces. The mage stared back, looking as shocked as Ceria felt.
“Now?”
“Yes. Cut Toren’s supply of mana right now. This instant!”
“Are you sure?”
Why was Ksmvr saying that? But the Antinium had the same sense Ceria did. Erin was shuddering. Her face was pale and sweat stood out on her forehead. She was not well. But the look in her eyes was steel.
She spoke quietly to the others.
“He killed people. I asked, and I made sure. Toren killed people. Not just one, not just two, and not in self-defense. He killed them because…because he wanted to. And he’s going to keep killing people if he’s not stopped.”
She stopped, gulped. Erin closed her eyes, but then went on, voice hoarse, choking on her next words.
“If this were a movie…or a play…I’d be the stupid idiot who didn’t stop Toren before he killed thousands of people. He’s already killed dozens, maybe hundreds. And how strong would he become if he kept leveling up? Maybe if I knew I could find him I’d—but I can’t. He’s too far away. And I won’t let him kill anyone else. It has to be now.”
No one could answer her. It was the right decision. Pisces hesitated as Erin walked over to him.
“Do you need to cast a spell or something?”
“No. It’s a simple enough procedure. As the one who cast the spell I can unravel it. It will just take a minute—”
“Do it, then.”
Ceria stared at Pisces. He looked at her, uncertain. She just stared back. See, she wanted to ask him. See what you’ve done?
Pisces looked away. He made no sound, but after a moment laid his hands on Erin’s head. She shifted, once, and then was still.
No sound. No grand show of lights, no mystical chanting. Pisces just moved magic and Ceria saw a thread, thinner than silk and stronger than stone flowing from Erin out into the world. Pisces pulled at it and slowly, the connection broke.
That was it. It was over. He let go of Erin and she stared up at him.
“It’s done? He’s gone?”
“He will be. No undead can live without mana and Toren consumes…consumed more than most.”
“Okay.”
Erin took a few steps away from Pisces. She stared blankly at him, and then looked around the room. Everyone stared at her, Yvlon with a pale face, Ksmvr silently, Pisces full of what might have been regret, and Ceria with no idea what to say.
“I’m tired. I’m gonna go to sleep, okay?”
So saying, Erin began to walk up the stairs. She left the Horns of Hammerad behind and went into the small room that wasn’t hers and crawled onto the bed. She didn’t bother undressing, and lay down in the rough blanket. She put her pillow over her head, and curled up into the smallest ball possible.
She didn’t cry. She couldn’t cry. But something in her heart broke. Erin whispered the words into the night.
“Goodbye.”
She listened, hoping to hear a reply. But all she heard was silence.
Previous Chapter Next ChapterWhile iOS App Store purchase volume may be losing ground from a marketshare perspective by number of downloads, Apple continues to dominate the market in consumer spending by a wide margin and still growing.
According to new data published by analytical firm App Annie, the app store market as a whole is growing by 15 percent per year in number of downloads. Google Play leads the charge gaining at 20 percent year over year with games being the main driver, and holds a 135 percent lead over Apple's iOS App Store.The gap is driven by emerging markets, as well as the overall lower selling price of Android smartphones. App Annie expects the increase in total downloads, as well as the widening gap between Apple's iOS App Store and Google Play to continue for some time.Apple's download total still grew by 5 percent. China continues to be the driving force behind the growth, with Russia seeing the largest market share growth, and India coming in third.Number of downloads isn't the only metric that app stores can be measured by. Apple continues to hold 95 percent more of the money spent on apps, even with the disparity in total downloads.In the year ago quarter, Apple opened its lead up by five percent, with the second quarter of 2016 seeing Apple holding a 90 percent lead over Google Play. Both app stores saw significant growth in consumer spend year over year with iOS and Google Play growing 35 percent and 30 percent, respectively.China remains the largest growth market for consumer spending. As with download totals, games remain the largest contributor to spending, followed closely by video and music streaming apps. It is not clear if Apple Music subscriptions are included in App Annie's totals.App Annie Intelligence consumer spend estimates represent the total consumer spend on both the iOS App Store and Google Play prior to fees taken out by Apple and Google. Amazon's store, and other Android app stores are not included.Consumer spend estimates reflect what consumers spend in app stores for paid downloads and in-app purchases including subscriptions. They do not include revenue earned from in-app advertising.When you step out of the global economy, you cut yourself off from the imperial wealth pump that provides people in America with the kind of abundance they take for granted, and the lifestyles that are available in the absence of that wealth pump are far more restricted, and far more impoverished, than most would-be relocalizers like to think. Peasant cultures around the world are by and large cultures of poverty, and there’s a good reason for that: by the time you, your family, and the other people of your village have provided food on the table, thatch on the roof, a few necessary possessions, and enough of the local equivalent of cash to cover payments to the powers that be, whether those happen to be feudal magnates or the local property tax collector, you’ve just accounted for every minute of labor you can squeeze out of a day.
Excerpted from John Michael Greer:
“Those of my readers who have been following the peak oil scene for any length of time will have encountered any number of enthusiastic discussions of relocalization: the process, that is, of disconnecting from the vast and extravagant global networks of production, consumption, and control that define so much of industrial society, in order to restore or reinvent local systems that will be more resilient in the face of energy shortages and other disruptions, and provide more security and more autonomy to those who embrace them.
* The arguments in favor:
A very good case can be made for this strategy. On the one hand, the extreme centralization of the global economy has become a source of massive vulnerabilities straight across the spectrum from the most abstract realms of high finance right down to the sprawling corporate structures that put food on your table. Shortfalls of every kind, from grain and fuel to financial capital, are becoming a daily reality for many people around the world as soaring energy costs put a galaxy of direct and indirect pressures on brittle and overextended systems. That’s only going to become worse as petroleum reserves and other vital resources continue to deplete. As this process continues, ways of getting access to necessities that are deliberately disconnected from the global economic system, and thus less subject to its vulnerabilities, are going to be well worth having in place.
At the same time, participation in the global economy brings with it vulnerabilities of another kind. For anyone who has to depend for their daily survival on the functioning of a vast industrial structure which is not answerable to the average citizen, talk about personal autonomy is little more than a bad joke, and the ability of communities to make their own choices and seek their own futures in such a context is simply another form of wishful thinking. Many people involved in efforts to relocalize have grasped this, and believe that deliberately standing aside from systems controlled by national governments and multinational corporations offers one of the few options for regaining personal and community autonomy in the face of an increasingly troubled future.
There are more points that can be made in favor of relocalization schemes, and you can find them rehashed endlessly on pro-relocalization websites all over the internet. For our present purposes, though, this fast tour of the upside will do, because each of these arguments comes with its own downside, which by and large you won’t find mentioned anywhere on those same websites.
* The hidden downsides
The downside to the first argument? When you step out of the global economy, you cut yourself off from the imperial wealth pump that provides people in America with the kind of abundance they take for granted, and the lifestyles that are available in the absence of that wealth pump are far more restricted, and far more impoverished, than most would-be relocalizers like to think. Peasant cultures around the world are by and large cultures of poverty, and there’s a good reason for that: by the time you, your family, and the other people of your village have provided food on the table, thatch on the roof, a few necessary possessions, and enough of the local equivalent of cash to cover payments to the powers that be, whether those happen to be feudal magnates or the local property tax collector, you’ve just accounted for every minute of labor you can squeeze out of a day.
That’s the rock on which the back-to-the-land movement of the Sixties broke; the life of a full-time peasant farmer scratching a living out of the soil is viable, and it may even be rewarding, but it’s not the kind of life that the pampered youth of the Baby Boom era was willing to put up with for more than a fairly brief interval. It may well be that economic relocalization is still the best available option for dealing with the ongoing unraveling of the industrial economy—in fact, I’d agree that this is the case—but I wonder how many of its proponents have grappled with the fact that what they’re proposing may amount to no more than a way to starve with dignity while many others are starving without it.
The downside to the second argument is subtler, but in some ways even more revealing. The best way to grasp it is to imagine two relocalization projects, one in Massachusetts and the other in South Carolina. The people in both groups are enthusiastic about the prospect of regaining their personal autonomy from the faceless institutions of a centralized society, and just as eager to to bring back home to their own communities the power to make choices and pursue a better future. Now ask yourself this: what will these two groups do if they get that power? And what will the people in Massachusetts think about what the people in South Carolina will do once they get that power?
I’ve conducted a modest experiment of sorts along these lines, by reminding relocalization fans in blue states what people in red states are likely to do with the renewed local autonomy the people in the blue states want for themselves, and vice versa. Every so often, to be sure, I run across someone—more often on the red side of the line than on the blue one—whose response amounts to “let ‘em do what they want, so long as they let us do what we want.” Far more often, though, people on either side are horrified to realize that their opposite numbers on the other side of America’s widening cultural divide would use relocalization to enact their own ideals in their own communities.
More than once, in fact, the response has amounted to a flurry of proposals to hedge relocalization about with restrictions so that it can only be used to support the speaker’s own political and social agendas, with federal bureaucracies hovering over every relocalizing community, ready to pounce on any sign that a community might try to do something that would offend sensibilities in Boston or San Francisco, on the one hand, or the Bible Belt on the other. You might think, dear reader, that it would be obvious that this would be relocalization in name only; you might also think that it would be just as obvious that those same bureaucracies would fall promptly into the hands of the same economic and political interests that have made the current system as much of a mess as it is. Permit me to assure you that in my experience, among a certain segment of the people who like to talk about relocalization, these things are apparently not obvious at all.
By this point in the discussion, I suspect most of my readers have come to believe that I’m opposed to relocalization schemes. Quite the contrary, I think they’re among the best options we have, and the fact that they have significant downsides, drawbacks, and tradeoffs does not nullify that. Every possible strategy, again, has downsides, drawbacks, and tradeoffs; whatever we choose to do to face the onset of the Long Descent, as individuals, as communities, or as a nation, problems are going to ensue and people are going to get hurt. Trying to find an option that has no downsides simply guarantees that we will do nothing at all; and in that case, equally, problems are going to ensue and people are going to get hurt. That’s how things work in the real world—and it may be worth reminding my readers that we don’t live in Neverland.
Thus I’d like to suggest that a movement toward relocalization is another crucial ingredient of a viable post-imperial America. In point of fact, we’ve got the structures in place to do the thing already; the only thing that’s lacking is a willingness to push back, hard, against certain dubious habits in the US political system that have rendered those structures inoperative.”I cannot think of a Jew who has done more to promote “anti-Semitism” in recent years than Bernard-Henri Lévy. He seems to be completely unselfconscious and oblivious to what he is doing.
The latest example has been Lévy’s going on French radio to promote his most recent book, “on which [he] has been working for 20 years,” called L’Esprit du Judaïsme (The Spirit of Judaism). Lévy’s books don’t sell and are even mocked as inane and narcissistic in mainstream Anglo-American media. And yet, The Spirit of Judaism is already enjoying a cover story in L’Express magazine. L’Express incidentally has a circulation of almost half a million and incidentally is owned by his fellow Zionist and co-ethnic Patrick Drahi.
Enjoying systematic promotion in the mass media despite his evident nullity, Lévy has for years been the visible tip of the iceberg of the influence of ethnocentric Jewish networks in France. For many, he has been the spark to their awakening to the Jewish question.
Lévy has made a number of surreal tweets summarizing his talking points on the radio show — the usual warmongering and hypocritically anti-French-nationalist statements — followed by the hashtag #SpiritofJudaism to promote the book. He is thus openly suggesting, in a shockingly unselfconscious way, that his evil views derive from his Judaic ideology.
Hence Judaism is anti-nationalism (for non-Jews):
“It is universalism which I am defending in this book. #SpiritofJudaism”
War against Arabs:
“I have no regrets. One cannot regret saving a population from a massacre. #Libya #SpiritofJudaism”
Je n’ai aucun regret. On n’a pas de regret quand on sauve une population entière d’un massacre #Libye @franceculture #EspritduJudaisme — Bernard-Henri Lévy (@BHL) February 3, 2016
More war against Arabs:
“The absolute mistake of the international community was the non-intervention in Syria. #SpiritofJudaism”
Le tort absolu de la communauté internationale, cela a été la non intervention en #Syrie. @franceculture #EspritduJudaisme — Bernard-Henri Lévy (@BHL) February 3, 2016
Lévy has previously said that he pushed for war in Libya “as a Jew” and with “faithfulness to Zionism and to Israel.”
French nationalists should continue to be excluded from power:
“The old French anti-Semitism is still alive. The FN has not really changed. #SpiritofJudaism”
Le vieil antisémitisme français est toujours vivant. Le FN n’a pas vraiment changé @franceculture #EspritduJudaisme — Bernard-Henri Lévy (@BHL) February 3, 2016
On the other hand, opponents of Jewish ethno-nationalist wrongdoing are warmongers:
“The people who advocate the boycott are not for peace, but for war. #BDS #Israel #SpiritofJudaism”
Les gens qui prônent le boycott ne sont pas pour la paix, mais pour la guerre #BDS #Israel @franceculture #EspritduJudaisme — Bernard-Henri Lévy (@BHL) February 3, 2016
Finally there is the usual dollop of sheer self-contradicting nonsense, with no other purpose than rationalizing Jewish privilege:
“The great question of Judaism is that of otherness, thus the opposite of communitarianism. #SpiritofJudaism”
La grande question juive, c’est la question de l’altérité, soit le contraire du communautarisme @franceculture #EspritduJudaisme — Bernard-Henri Lévy (@BHL) February 3, 2016
“Communitarianism,” the widely-used French term for ethnocentrism, is almost universally condemned in France. Here Lévy is in effect saying: Jewish ethnocentrism is the opposite of ethnocentrism. Hence, Jewish ethnocentrism is supremely good, whereas every other ethnocentrism is supremely bad.
For anyone else, such obviously nonsensical statements would be considered a sign of mental illness. Ethnocentrism is universal and ethnic double standards are common throughout the world (e.g., it is not unusual for violence against another people to seem trifling compared to violence against one’s own). But here this psychological mechanism is hypertrophied to a truly absurd degree, completely overwhelming basic reason, self-awareness, or even simple common sense.
Lévy really is nutty in a way which is difficult for us to fathom. Which of us can even contemplate the wiring in that brain?
I am only half-joking when I say that Bernard-Henri Lévy has perhaps done more to undermine Jewish privilege and hypocrisy than anyone else in the world today. His every media appearance is like a crash course in The Culture of Critique. Without him, Alain Soral or Dieudonné would have not have been quite as successful as they have been in preaching the anti-Zionist gospel (and for “Zionism,” read: “International Zionism” or “liberal-Zionism”) throughout the French-speaking world.
Anyway, I won’t be reading Lévy’s new book. Once you’ve got the message, you’ve really got to hang up.A deadly hotel bombing in Mogadishu has killed at least 19 people, including three Somali Cabinet ministers. Some reports say the death toll could be higher. The blast targeted a university graduation ceremony being attended by a number of government officials.
Mogadishu's Shamu Hotel was hosting a graduation ceremony for Banadir University. Eyewitnesses tell VOA a suicide bomber gained access to the venue dressed as a woman, donning a full abaya and a veil.
The attacker was wearing an explosive strapped to his torso, but was not patted down by security.
Former Islamic Courts Union members at the scene identified the bomber, whose head and face had been completely shaven, as a member of al-Shabab, the ultra-conservative militant Islamist group believed to have links to al-Qaida.
Somali Health Minister Qamar Aden Ali, Education Minister Ahmed Abdullahi Waayeel, and Higher Education Minister Ibrahim Hassan Adow were killed in the attack on Hotel Shamo.
Adow served as the foreign secretary of the insurgent Islamic Courts Union when it took power in 2006. The Somali minister for sports is also reported to be hospitalized and in critical condition.
Mohamed Mohamoud, an attending graduate of the ceremony, says he personally saw the remains of the health minister on the ground, as well as the corpses of other government officials.
Two journalists, a reporter for Radio Shabelle and a cameraman with al-Arabia TV, were also found dead from the explosion. The National Union of Somali Journalists has issued a statement condemning the attack and expressing outrage at the loss of their colleagues.
Somalia is one of the world's most dangerous places for journalists to work. Eight have been killed in Somalia since the beginning of 2009.
Hotel Shamo is often chosen by government officials to host events and at one time was a popular lodging option for foreign journalists. Recently-released Canadian journalist Amanda Lindhout and Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan were staying at the hotel before their capture last year.
The hotel security staff say that they were kicked out of the room prior to the ceremony, as government security officials wanted sole handling of the event. The government officials were attending the graduation of 43 students from the local Banadir University.
The attack is the latest in a string of incidents linking al-Shabab to common insurgent tactics used by Islamist terrorist groups in other parts of the world. Until recently suicide bombings were an alien practice in Somalia.
In September, al-Shabab claimed responsibility for a bold attack on a meeting between government officials and the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia, known as AMISOM, which killed 17 peacekeepers, including the top Burundian commander. Two vehicles containing explosives were given entry to the AMISOM base and subsequently blew up.
The rebel group is battling for control of the war-ravaged nation against the Western-backed Transitional Federal Government, led by former Islamic insurgent Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Rebel groups control much of southern and central Somalia, as well as significant portions of the capital city, Mogadishu.
The government is being bolstered by the continuing presence of the peacekeeping force composed of Ugandans and Burundians. The AMISOM forces are mandated with the protection of key city sites such as the airport, seaport, and presidential palace.
The official death toll from the blast is expected to continue to rise, with some reports indicating that more than 60 people have been found dead.Visual analytics shines in solar research
Researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center work with massive amounts of simulated data in their efforts to understand how the magnetic arches rising from the sun’s surface affect Earth’s power grids and satellites.
But finding the exact time and place when these magnetic disturbances take place has been like looking for a needle in a haystack. While the researchers have access to massive datasets generated by simulations run on supercomputers, they can only make qualified guesses as to where in the data they might find evidence of the magnetic phenomenon by studying slices or samplings of the data. Even when evidence of magnetic disturbances is discovered, researchers cannot be sure they’ve found all the relevant data.
The problem was sifting through “the growing amount of data we have from numerical solutions of sun simulations,” said Lars Daldorff, a contracted researcher at Goddard. The agency was looking for an existing commercial solution that would search, categorize and filter all the solar research data from the simulations – not just the samples.
To improve on its “guess, fail, repeat” cycle, Goddard turned to SAS Visual Analytics for help detecting and identifying when and where the magnetic events occur. Researchers restructured the sun simulation datasets and loaded them into a big data in-memory environment on a Microsoft Azure cloud running SAS Visual Analytics, according to Daldorff.
Daldorff’s team used statistical analytical methods widely used in the business world on its sun simulations data, combining computational power and statistics to identify points of interest, find relevant data relationships, perform analysis and create visualizations and reports. The scientists were then able to use web-based SAS Visual Analytics, which helped them summarize and join data and enhance the predictive power of the collected data.
By displaying massive stores of information visually, researchers were able to extract more relevant data from more sources in less time. Visual analytics helped researchers not only find the data that they were specifically targeting but also locate any other relevant information that might have otherwise been overlooked.
Raw data from the simulations can now be converted into actionable data in a day rather than a week, reducing cost, man hours and the need for additional resources. The time between when the data was collected and what insights can be drawn from it is greatly decreased; perhaps one of the most crucial improvements for Daldorff and his team.
Overall, the findings from this data will help NASA determine the effects of the increase in X-ray and ultraviolet radiation crossing the solar atmosphere and penetrating the upper atmosphere of Earth. “It provides us with more of an understanding of what’s going on,” Daldorff said.
Daldorff’s team hopes to continue its work with SAS Visual Analytics for this study, future projects and daily use. “We need to experiment a little more with it and see how we can use it and its capabilities for our purposes.” But, he said, “so far, so good.”FCO 30/1048: Heath knew it was treason
This classified government document dated April 1971 remained secret until it was released under the 30 year rule. It proves Heath's government knew the 1972 EEC Treaty would lead to the loss of sovereignty, and was therefore treason. They had a stunningly accurate picture of the EU, which never was the EEC (an Economic Community), expecting Britain to be abolished after the turn of the century.
The authors, all civil servants or ministers, are very pro EU, their intent is clearly to conceal the loss of sovereignty. But they understood perfectly it would all be abolished.
In public Heath's government all lied the treaty would not affect our sovereignty. This includes Douglas Hurd, still an active senior Conservative, who is also both a liar and a traitor, a point we put to him at the Conservative Conference in Blackpool. He assured us his connections in the legal profession would ensure he was never convicted.
Here are just a few of the damning sentences:
Parliament controlled
11. Membership of the Communities will involve us in extensive limitations upon our freedom of action.
For the first time. Parliament is binding its successors.
Increasing loss of sovereignty
The loss of external sovereignty will however increase as the Community develops, according to the intention of the preamble to the Treaty of Rome "to establish the foundations of an even closer union among the European peoples ".
Small threats to sovereignty, like Burgess, Blunt and Maclean's selling secrets to the Russians, attract 30 year jail sentences. The penalty for actually loosing even small parts of it until 1998 was "to hang by the neck until dead."
King Charles 1st was executed for treason that was, by comparison, relatively minor.
Lord Haw Haw (“Germany Calling” - William Joyce) was hanged for treason on 3rd January 1946. His efforts on behalf of Germany were tiny by comparison with Edward Heath’s.
Our law subservient
12. (ii) The power of the European Court to consider the extent to which a UK statute is compatible with Community Law will indirectly involve an innovation for us, as the European Court's decisions will be binding on our courts which might then have to rule on the validity or applicability of the United Kingdom statute.
The writ of a foreign power is not allowed under the British Constitution, which Heath was breaking.
Predicting monetary and military union
18..but it will be in the British interest after accession to encourage the development of the Community toward an effectively harmonised economic, fiscal and monetary system and a fairly closely coordinated and consistent foreign and defence policy. If it came to do so then essential aspects of sovereignty both internal and external would indeed increasingly be transferred to the Community itself.
No withdrawal, sovereignty diminished
22. Even with the most dramatic development of the Community the major member states can hardly lose the "last resort" ability to withdraw in much less than three decades. The Community's development could produce before then a period in which the political practicability of withdrawal was doubtful. If the point should ever be reached at which inability to renounce the Treaty (and with it the degeneration of the national institutions which could opt for such a policy) was clear, then sovereignty, external, parliamentary and practical would indeed be diminished.
Disinformation
After entry there would be a major responsibility on HMG and on all political parties not to exacerbate public concern by attributing unpopular measures or unfavourable economic developments to the remote and unmanageable workings of the Community.
Transfer of the Executive
24 (ii) The transfer of major executive responsibilities to the bureaucratic Commission in Brussels will exacerbate popular feeling of alienation from government.
Erosion of sovereignty
24 (v)...The more the Community is developed... the more Parliamentary sovereignty will be eroded....The right... to withdraw will remain for a very considerable time....The sovereignty of the State will surely remain unchallenged for this century at least.
The EU Bureaucracy will rule
25. The impact of entry upon sovereignty is closely related to the blurring of distinctions between domestic political and foreign affairs, to the greater political responsibility of the bureaucracy of the Community and the lack of effective democratic control.
The writers understanding of the future of the EU was bang on. They wanted the bureaucracy to take over from the democracy. The loss of sovereignty was desirable for them, legally traitors working deep inside our government.
With thanks to David Barnby. Who got the original documents. David Noakes.smallpt: Global Illumination in 99 lines of C++
smallpt is a global illumination renderer. It is 99 lines of C++, is open source, and renders the above scene using unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing (click for full size).
Features
Global illumination via unbiased Monte Carlo path tracing
99 lines of 72-column (or less) open source C++ code
Multi-threading using OpenMP
Soft shadows from diffuse luminaire
Specular, Diffuse, and Glass BRDFs
Antialiasing via super-sampling with importance-sampled tent distribution, and 2x2 subpixels
Ray-sphere intersection
Modified Cornell box scene description
Cosine importance sampling of the hemisphere for diffuse reflection
Russian roulette for path termination
Russian roulette and splitting for selecting reflection and/or refraction for glass BRDF
With minor changes compiles to a 4 KB binary (less than 4096 bytes) Added 11/11/2010:
Modifications including explicit light sampling and non-branching ray tree.
Ports to CUDA and BSGP featuring interactive display and scene editing. Added 3/12/2012:
Presentation slides explaining each line, by David Cline
#include <math.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <stdio.h> struct Vec { double x, y, z ; Vec ( double x_ = 0, double y_ = 0, double z_ = 0 ) { x = x_ ; y = y_ ; z = z_ ; } Vec operator +( const Vec & b ) const { return Vec ( x + b. x, y + b. y, z + b. z ); } Vec operator -( const Vec & b ) const { return Vec ( x - b. x, y - b. y, z - b. z ); } Vec operator *( double b ) const { return Vec ( x * b, y * b, z * b ); } Vec mult ( const Vec & b ) const { return Vec ( x * b. x, y * b. y, z * b. z ); } Vec & norm () { return * this = * this * ( 1 / sqrt ( x * x + y * y + z * z )); } double dot ( const Vec & b ) const { return x * b. x + y * b. y + z * b. z ; } Vec operator %( Vec & b ) { return Vec ( y * b. z - z * b. y, z * b. x - x * b. z, x * b. y - y * b. x ); } } ; struct Ray { Vec o, d ; Ray ( Vec o_, Vec d_ ) : o ( o_ ), d ( d_ ) {} } ; enum Refl_t { DIFF, SPEC, REFR } ; struct Sphere { double rad ; Vec p, e, c ; Refl_t refl ; Sphere ( double rad_, Vec p_, Vec e_, Vec c_, Refl_t refl_ ): rad ( rad_ ), p ( p_ ), e ( e_ ), c ( c_ ), refl ( refl_ ) {} double intersect ( const Ray & r ) const { |
a world of impending danger for the average person rather than immediate peril.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 6.8
The Giver, 1993
The world of The Giver is a little bit hard to rate, as people experience it in such a different way from how an average person of our own society would experience it if they were simply dropped in. A world without emotion and memory, it is in some aspects a utopian society, but a rather detached, cold and occasionally merciless one. The elders of the community take care of their subjects, and they lead FULL lives, but one must question what those lives are really worth without concepts such as true happiness or love. At the same time, negative emotions are also eliminated. It truly is a mixed bag. To the average citizen, their awareness of the negatives is minimal or nonexistent, making for a bland if relatively comfortable existence—unless you’re one of the twin births getting euthanized, that is.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 6.7
The Purge, 2013
Even moreso than other dystopias, livability in the world of The Purge is intrinsically tied to social status and financial well-being. If you’re poor, unable to fortify your home or—god help you—live on the streets, then yes, you’re in deep trouble during the governmentally approved 24-hour period of total lawlessness. If you’re a middle-class family, though, with adequate defenses, there’s really no reason to even expect the night to offer any difficulty or excitement. As long as you hunker down and don’t somehow get drawn into letting strange, armed people into your home, you can pretty much sit back and let all the crazies outside enjoy their annual night of debauchery. So in short, an “average person” of say, median income, should be able to deal with The Purge without too much trouble.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 6.5
Fahrenheit 451, 1953
Bradbury’s possible future in Fahrenheit 451 highlighted the intellectual wasteland he feared could be coming, and in some ways this particular dystopia feels chillingly possible. As college students willingly embrace censorship of anything they find offensive, we should consider the experience of those living in this particular dystopia. It’s implied that the wholesale burning of books began much in the same way that our own society has somewhat drifted away from serious reading, thanks to the immediate gratification available via digital entertainment. Seemingly as a result, the people living in this civilization have become increasingly shallow and petty, perfectly happy amusing themselves with pedantic programming and unable to hold actual discourse. It’s not quite as grim as some of the other dystopias in the list, but to an intellectual mind it’s a special sort of persecution.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 6.2
The Hunger Games, 2008
Quality of life tends to vary in The Hunger Games universe depending on which district you belong to, but seeing as this is “average” people we’re talking about, we’re not including any chance that you’d be a citizen of the Capitol. Aside from the obvious pitfall that one kid from each community is sacrificed to The Hunger Games each year, daily life in the Districts is hardly any better, and you’re just as likely to suffer from malnourishment or exposure as you are be violently repressed by the soldiers of The Capitol. Still, life and families are possible here, and the Capitol’s entire existence depends upon having the Districts to serve and power it, meaning that they have a vested interest in keeping the Districts operational. Life in the Districts is harsh, but ultimately not that much harsher than living a rural existence on Earth several centuries ago.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 5.9
A Clockwork Orange, 1962
The world of A Clockwork Orange is striking in the way the violence has completely permeated every aspect of daily life. Unlike some of these dystopias, which seem to have been created by attempts to forge nonviolent societies, the residents of this one just seem permanently pissed off and homicidal, with the government responding in kind. You can be enjoying a quiet dinner at home and BOOM, in barge a quartet of ultraviolent teens to mess up your shit for no reason at all. Moreoever, even after these psychos get arrested and thrown in jail, the prisoners are subjected to bizarre, equally cruel experimentation by the government. Your life here is really a roll of the dice. You would think that people would learn pretty quickly not to go on nighttime strolls past the PCP-laced milk bar, though.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 5.8
Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949
Orwell’s 1984 dystopia is a classic that, along with Brave New World, really established a lot of the dystopian tropes in this genre. Of the two, though, the 1984 setting is significantly more unpleasant to actually live in. The power structure keeps a very small segment of the population in total power, and rampant government abuse strips people of their personal freedoms and even of their lives, should they be found enemies of the state in any way. There’s a reason why anyone displeased with the U.S. government at any time is likely to draw parallels to 1984—it’s a dystopia not based so much on radical technology but on the inherent callousness in the hearts of men. An average person’s life in this world involves constant surveillance, rationing, war and an obvious lack of fulfillment. Still, you might manage to live your life out to a natural end.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 5.7
The Running Man, 1982
The novel by Richard Bachman/Stephen King envisions a totalitarian American dystopia where pollution, violence and rampant classicism is disguised via government-operated television station the Games Network, which shows hyper-violent reality programming. In some senses there are vibes of The Hunger Games here, but the number of people killed by the government is ultimately even higher, and the underclass possibly lower. Regardless, it faces many of the same issues of personal security, as even the people who are not forced onto deadly game shows may die from a tainted air supply.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 5.6
V For Vendetta, 2006
The dystopian setting of the V For Vendetta graphic novel and film is that of a pretty grim totalitarian government, where “undesirables” have been harshly dealt with following worldwide economic collapse. The experience of an “average person” in this particular dystopia depends on many factors, including gender, race and sexual orientation, but we do know that some limitations affect everyone. Personal freedoms are severely restricted, supplies such as food are scarce and morale, suffice it to say, is quite low indeed. If we choose one of the many Londonders who apply their own Guy Fawkes’ masks at the end of the film as “average,” then we can say that their daily life is very restrictive … but ultimately liveable.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 5.4
Brazil, 1985
The bureaucratic dystopia of Brazil reminds one of the central bureaucracy of Futurama in the sense that it’s onerous, blunt and very bad at actually dealing with real human beings. Society here is shallow and vain, obsessed with outward appearances and crumbling from the inside out. It’s inefficient and ineffectual in a way that would be whimsical if it wasn’t so depressing. When the bureaucracy would rather kill its citizens than admit to the possibility of a clerical error, that’s when you know you’re living in a pretty messed-up society.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 5.2
“Harrison Bergeron,” 1961
Vonnegut’s short story envisions a particularly twisted dystopia where the notion of “equality” has been taken totally literally, and measures have been implemented by the government to impede anyone of exceptional strength, beauty or intellect down to the acceptable “average.” The title character is an exceptional man destroyed when he tries to escape that system, but the “average” people mostly lead a dull, completely controlled existence. Personal freedoms are severely restricted in this setting, and most of the people seem to live in a foggy haze of semi-comprehension. There’s no wholesale murder or homicidal robots, but this is a particularly depressing and hopeless future.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 5.1
Battle Royale, 1996
The livability of the dystopia in Battle Royale, both the novel and the film adaptation, depends almost entirely on whether you’re one of the unlucky few forced to participate in the deathgames that make up its central plot device. On the positive side, if you’re out of school and don’t have any kids, it’s essentially implied that you don’t have anything in particular to worry about—besides hearing about the yearly atrocity of middle-school classes being forced to murder each other on an island for sport. If you’re in one of those classes, though, or are a parent of one of those kids, then this is a very grim and deadly future indeed. As such, it’s difficult to rank—if you’re forced to fight, this dystopia closes in on a 0.0 on my Dystopia Comfort Scale. If you’re already past school age, then it’s not so bad. It seems the only fair thing to do is average the final rating out.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 4.7
Kingdom Come, 1996
The DC Comics dystopian future presented in Kingdom Come is a world where the abundance of superpowers has finally devolved into total anarchy. Too many random yahoos have super strength in this universe, and the world’s greatest heroes such as Superman and Batman have largely retired or stepped out of the limelight, allowing a more violent generation of heroes to do as they please. Civilian casualties, unsurprisingly, are pretty high, as people fall victim to the random and roving bands of superpowered goons or get caught in the middle of godlike battles that pretty much incinerate the majority of Kansas as the story kicks off. It’s a world of totally random violence, and there’s nothing that can protect you. Average families sit in their homes and hope a passing superpowered person won’t choose to hurl the corpse of an elderly Blue Beetle or Animal Man through their roof, knowing there’s nothing they could possibly do to defend themselves. Still, the violence mostly comes as collateral rather than people actively being hunted for sport, at the very least.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 4.4
Truly Nightmarish Dystopias
Alright, now we’re really getting nasty. Disastrous events begin to threaten the very future of the human race. Personal liberties and freedoms are completely removed. Institutional violence wipes out entire nations or groups of people, and survivability plummets accordingly. In these dystopias, just staying alive is a hell of an accomplishment.
Children of Men, 2006
Talk about your hopeless settings. You might still be able to live a fairly long life in the world of Children of Men, but the constant question is “Should we even bother?” In a world of complete infertility, as mankind watches its elders pass away and youngest citizens approach their own mortality every day, every day is worse than the one that came before. Sure, Clive Owen’s character in the film adaptation of the novel spends his time safeguarding a pregnant woman, which suggests there might be a way of saving the world, but this is never even close to confirmed. For all we know, this woman is just giving birth to the first of the super mutants who will destroy what’s left of mankind. In short, you might be able to scrape together an acceptable existence, but your greatest enemy in this world is crippling ennui.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 4.3
Escape From New York, 1981
It’s safe to say that life anywhere in John Carpenter’s dystopian Escape From New York future isn’t too pleasant if the entire landmass of Manhattan had to be turned into an anything-goes concrete prison Thunderdome, but for our purposes we should probably evaluate life within Manhattan, given that the majority of the film happens there. And suffice to say, it’s pretty rough in there. Gangs rove the streets, and the island is ruled by a homicidal dictator who calls himself the Duke of New York. Look at somebody the wrong way and you could be thrown into a fight to the death in a derelict warehouse—or worse, be forced to listen to Ernest Borgnine’s war stories in his cab. Regardless, your life expectancy as a resident of Manhattan isn’t very long unless your name is Kurt Russell.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 4.1
Akira, 1988
The manga and 1988 anime of Akira create a dystopian, cyberpunk-tinged future that feels a bit like a more violent Blade Runner universe. Festooned motorcycle gangs in the style of The Warriors prowl through the streets and the average person stands an excellent chance of being caught in the line of fire—likewise via the violence of anti-government terrorism. You can also get blown up by a powerful psychic or wiped off the face of the Earth if the city you’re in happens to fall prey to powerful psychic backlash. Daily life seems to involve running around, trying not to get shot or exploded for no particular reason as those with real power carry out their own turf wars.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 4.0
Transmetropolitan, 1997
The comic dystopia of Transmetropolitan is complex and multi-faceted, but deeply horrifying. It seems to depict a society that continues to limp forward but has gone completely insane in its excesses. In the depths of The City, the average person can openly solicit child prostitution or engage in cannibalism, and no one even cares. Sure, rogue, truth-telling journalists like Spider Jerusalem still have some supporters, but society is more or less in the middle of devouring itself, voting for Presidents who actively wish to further their subjugation and suffering. Homicidal presidents who allow killer death storms to ravage the country’s biggest city in order to kill one pesky journalist make for some pretty tough living conditions.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 3.8
Divergent, 2011
Ah, more YA goodness. Obvious similarities in theme and dreamy teens to The Hunger Games aside, the dystopian future of Divergent is a rigidly controlled and postured place, with more structure than Katniss’ world and an even more controlling government structure. Everyone is divided up into different personality sects, which are meant to be one-size-fits-all. If you don’t fit? Then you’re “divergent” and hunted down for extermination—i.e. the way every teen has imagined themselves during their goth period. Likewise, if you do fit into a particular sect but aren’t capable enough to complete your initiation, you end up “factionless” and wandering the streets of Neo-Chicago as a hobo. And even if you DO fit into one of the factions, you could very well end up killed when one of the other scheming factions tricks the soldier camp into executing everyone. So in short: It’s pretty rough.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 3.6
THX 1138, 1971
There’s a bit of Equilibrium in the THX 1138 setting and some of The Giver, but it ultimately falls in between. Average citizens toil in dangerous factories and are ministered a bevy of drugs that steal their individuality and regulate their moods. It’s a highly industrialized, boring society where individual thought is largely eliminated and people toil by routine, overseen by android enforcers of the peace. It’s quite the dreary life.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 3.3
The Live, 1988
The dystopia of They Live is a secret one, and at first it seems pretty high on the livability scale. Aliens have secretly infiltrated society and taken over positions of power and wealth, but their operations don’t involve say, eating people but instead making them complacent, sluggish and blind to the takeover. However, we eventually learn that the alien endgame is to strip Earth of its natural resources and eventually leave it a used-up husk, which presumably would result in the death of the entire species. In light of this, and the realization that the direction of this dystopia is eventually the extinction of the human race, you have to give it a pretty damn low rating. The only thing that stops it from being lower is that at the time of the film, mankind isn’t facing that extinction event—yet.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 3.0
Wall-E, 2008
Hey, it’s Pixar! Cute and fun, right? Nothing horrible, right? Well, not so fast. The dystopian society of humankind in Wall-E is a mirage, a flying space ark that doesn’t look so awful from the surface but ultimately contains a doomed species. Generations of inactivity and incredible sloth have drained away mankind’s vitality, leaving the average people as corpulent monstrosities who can’t even rise out of their hoverchairs to grab their liquified lunch slurry. One scene shows the degradation in humanity’s bone structure, which is particularly shocking. It’s implied by the end of the film that humans will be “coming back” to Earth and recolonizing it, but one can’t really see this as anything more than a pipe dream. There’s no way that these people are going to be able to stand up to the strain of Earth’s gravity, much less construct any buildings. Unless they can regrow a functional femur, this society is headed for its final generations. And so, it may be “comfortable,” but it hides a deadly truth.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 2.9
Judge Dredd’s Mega-City One, via 2000 AD, 1977
Mega-City One, for the average person walking down the street, is a pretty nightmarish place where death can spring on you from any angle. It’s a setting of constant victimization that is only barely staunched by ultraviolent dispensing of justice from the judges, such as Dredd. But suffice to say, there’s just so many ways things can go wrong for you, living in one of the 50,000 resident City Block buildings. Your building could be ruled by a sadistic puppetmaster. It can literally go to war with the building next door, killing almost all the inhabitants. In one notable Dredd story the population of Mega-City One was reduced from 400 million to 50 million in the space of days by a terrible plague. Those are biblical challenges to overcome, if you want to stay alive.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 2.6
Equilibrium, 2002
Pro: The setting of Equilibrium looks really cool if you’re a teenage boy who loved The Matrix. Con: You’re probably going to die if you live there. The totalitarian dystopia of this film has outlawed any kind of emotions, requiring daily injections to remove them. Failure to obey in any way means death. Therefore, it’s sort of like The Giver, except with more deadly samurai policemen who will shoot you for slight infractions. Life is a drab, featureless crawl without any particular point. The only rewarding experiences are the ones that are likely to get you killed. This is a pretty hopeless place.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 2.3
Repo! The Genetic Opera, 2008
An epidemic of worldwide organ failures is the interesting driving point behind the dystopia in Repo!, and it inadvertently turns a megacorporation called GeneCo into the domineering force of authority usually filled by the government in these stories. They’ll sell you the new organs you need to survive—on extremely costly installment plans. However, few of the average Joes who require a new heart or liver can keep up with the payment schedule for long, leading to those parts then being “repossessed” in deadly fashion. The setting combines economic turbulence, disease and corporate-mandated violence into a rather deadly cauldron where life expectancy is anything but robust.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 1.9
Snowpiercer, 2013
Living on the tail end of the Snowpiercer train is a pretty damn awful existence with next to no redeeming qualities. When it began running, after the Earth froze into perpetual winter, the poor souls of the back were left to fend completely for themselves, away from any of the front’s plentiful resources. They were right down to eating each other until the front-enders began sending them terrible, processed protein bars that we later learn are made from ground-up cockroaches. The authoritarian government from the front end of the train views the back-enders as nothing more than cattle, completely disposable, and rules over them with an iron fist and harsh justice. Daily survival is difficult even without the active antagonism of those in charge, and there’s literally nowhere to escape to. With their backs to the wall, deadly revolution is practically a necessity.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 1.5
A Modest Proposal, 1729
A Modest Proposal is less fictional and more theoretical dystopia, one that was proposed in a 1729 essay by Gulliver’s Travels author Jonathan Swift as a form of satire against the British government. He begins by describing the plight of the poor in Ireland, but then zags hard into grim satire when he proposes a solution to this problem: We should just be eating the poor children, and the mothers should be raising them as livestock. To quote: “A young healthy child well-nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or broiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.” Damn, Mr. Swift. In going all-out to chastise his government’s ignorance and callous attitudes toward the disenfranchised masses, Swift imagines one of the worst dystopias anyone has EVER imagined, where Irish babies are Britain’s primary foodstuff.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 1.3 (because presumably you’re either eating babies or having your baby eaten)
Elysium, 2013
The surface of Earth in Elysium is an overpopulated, polluted, rather smelly-looking pile of junk where the average citizens toil in poverty and starvation. The rich, meanwhile, live on the floating space metropolis in orbit, Elysium. Pretty raw deal, right? Elysium residents have access to all sorts of physical pleasures, including machines that cure all disease, while the people on Earth are essentially doomed if they merely pick up a case of the sniffles. The prevailing government really doesn’t seem to mind, and is leaving the masses on the planet’s surface to slowly rot away. This is, therefore, one of the worse settings to try and make a living; a life of backbreaking labor for essentially no reward, with a high risk of death. But at least Matt Damon is there.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 1.0
Metropolis, 1927
This dystopia seriously sucks for the working man. Essentially a slave state where the majority of people making up the lower class toil day and night in the massive factories and machines that keep the city moving, it’s like Snowpiercer on a much grander and more horribly mechanized scale. Go back and watch the factory scenes of Metropolis again and think about how things would work for members of this society—can you even imagine how many limbs have been scissored off in all of the giant clockwork gears? Indeed, we see workers fainting on the job from exhaustion and explosions claiming the lives of numerous toiling serfs. It’s no wonder their response is to later start burning people at the stake! There’s pretty much no positive to this existence. You wake up, go to work, maybe get your arm scissored off, go home, and repeat. These people have never even seen real sunlight before.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 0.8
Soylent Green, 1973
Geez, what isn’t wrong with the Soylent Green setting? The word is polluted, crawling with overpopulation, in huge economic depression and the natural resources/wildlife is nearly destroyed. Most people are unemployed, roaming the streets and being scooped up by big trucks like they’re rodents. And that’s without even bringing up Soylent Green itself, the food ration product made from “plankton” that is later revealed to come from much higher-level hominids. This life is bad enough before you realize that you’ve been eating your neighbors every night.
Dystopia Comfort Rating: 0.5
Jim Vorel is Paste’s news editor. There’s really no arguing the fact that he spent way too much time and thought on this concept. You can follow him on Twitter.Josh Trank’s Fantastic Four has already promised a more “gritty, grounded” approach to fantasticness, a tone Fox’s comic-book movie hopes to achieve by staying away from the sort of outlandish stories one might find in comic books. In keeping with that, certain adjustments must be made to the characters themselves, giving them new origin stories, making them younger and hotter—and therefore more believable as scientists—and, in the case of villain Doctor Doom, updating them to a more contemporary version of evil.
For example, the old Doctor Doom was the gypsy son of a witch and medicine man who wielded sorcery and science as the ruler of the fictional nation of Latveria. He was a man of unparalleled arrogance who used his skills only to threaten the world. So obviously, in the modern parallel, he’s an asshole on the Internet.
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Doctor Doom (evil medical license pending) will be played by Toby Kebbell, who discussed his character’s new backstory in an interview with Collider. In it, he revealed the “minor change” of Doom’s name, lineage, and occupation:
The only thing I can tease you about is what I worked on most was the voice because nobody—even in the cartoons, when I was watching them I was like, ‘So where’s he from?’ There’s a mild change…He’s Victor Domashev, not Victor von Doom in our story. And I’m sure I’ll be sent to jail for telling you that. The Doom in ours—I’m a programmer. Very antisocial programmer. And on blogging sites I’m ‘Doom.’”
Kebbell did not specify which “blogging sites” face the godlike wrath of Doom, stoked by his daily, white-hot irritation at others’ sloppy coding and lukewarm sodas, and expunged in a series of progressively nastier subreddits. Nor did he mention Doom’s surely vast army of merciless Twitter Doombots, just waiting to clog up the mentions of any who would stand in his way.
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Still, it’s clear that this Doom will have his dangerous pride reinforced by something even more insidious than his vast wealth, scientific genius, or mysticism: the echo chamber of the Internet. Indeed, the new Doom firmly believes it’s about ethics in fantasticness.
However, the character’s first name will still be “Victor.” You don’t want to lose the important things.Oculus VR is kicking off E3 with an upgrade to its virtual reality console, the Rift. By simply upgrading its optics from one off-the-shelf cellphone display to another, the company has upgraded the goggles to 1080p — and based on a few minutes of time with Rifts old and new, the upgrade makes a huge difference. Gone is what CEO Brendan Iribe called "the screen-door effect," and everything comes in much sharper and clearer. We played a game rendered in the newly integrated Unreal Engine 4, and from the snowflakes outside to the large, horned monster inside, details just pop in a way they never did before. It makes the world feel more immersive, more immediate.
The 1080p screen is split in two, so each eye sees a 960 x 1080 portrait display — Iribe said the company was worried about how the switch from landscape to portrait might affect the games, but that he's seen no issues. Nor have they had problems with the games created by the 10,000 developers who now have Oculus Rift dev kits — the SDK is built to scale its resolution, so Iribe said this is only the beginning. As cellphone displays get better, so does the Rift, and the company gets to outsource its R&D to Apple, Samsung, and the like.
Play 1080p games, and watch 1080p movies
With HD comes a number of other possibilities as well. Iribe strapped the Rift to my head and fired up the Man of Steel trailer, which I had watched in high definition in a theater. Oculus' Virtual Cinema makes it look and feel like you're in a movie theater, from the seats to the lights in the aisles. (No popcorn, though, a problem I told Iribe to remedy as soon as possible.) The possibilities here are limitless: Iribe noted the possibility of filling the movie theater with your Oculus friends and watching the movie together, or even moving seats to get the perfect perspective. It's an immersive, active experience, and it looks far better in 1080p than anything we've seen on the Rift before. When Oculus can put a 1080p screen on each eye, or go even higher-res than that, the Rift could pretty quickly keep you away from the movie theater — just strap the theater to your face.
Oculus won't say when the HD version of Rift will be available to developers, as it had apparently only just gotten the high-def prototype working ahead of E3's start. Neither would Iribe say if this is as high-res as the Rift will get before coming to customers. But based on what we've seen, it's a huge leap forward — not least because it's now more fun than ever to shoot a fireball in a snowstorm and just watch it go.LOST. Season Six. Episode Eleven: Happily Ever After
Up And Atom!
Testing, 1, 2, 3.
I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning
thought
Oh, Dream Weaver. I Believe You Can Get Me Through the Night.
You All, Everyb – (Gurgle, Gurgle, Gurgle)
I Don’t Wanna Die in a Hospital, You Gotta Take Me Back Outside
Event Planning
She Ain’t Penny, She’s My Sister
actually experienced
Yes Man
stay
Manifest Destiny
Come Together. Right Now.
While every episode of LOST’s final season has (mostly) satisfied me, each one has also left me a little bit empty, with varying degrees of the feeling, “Okay, cool. So what?”Last night, LOST turned a corner, with a Darlton-penned, Desmond-centric, mostly-straightforward window into how, exactly, the alternate reality we’ve been shown will impact and be impacted by the story we’ve spent five years digesting. Into that window flew possibilities of reconciliation and resolution. And out of that window flew everything I thought I knew about where Season Six was headed. Let’s get after it.Every good episode starts with someone’s eye opening. This one did, as Desmond awoke from the coma induced by Team Widmore. Sadly, the first thing he saw when he woke up was Dirty Tina Fey. We learned that Widmore – perhaps tipped off by Ben’s warning phone call to him from the pier – knew Desmond would be vulnerable in the hospital, and used that moment to seize him for his master plan.As Widmore catches Desmond up on the events of the last few days, Hume’s lip twitches with rage, eventually boiling over into a short-lived beatdown of his nemesis. Desmond demands to be returned to Penny, at which point Widmore channels his estranged wife Eloise, telling Desmond, “I can’t take you back, the Island isn’t done with you yet.” Indeed it isn’t.Widmore informs Zoe to prematurely “start the test,” which takes place in the newest version of an Island mystery box. Test one failed due to a generator problem. Test two succeeded – in killing a Widmore flunky who was in the wrong electromagnetic hotbox at the wrong time. And test three? That one was for Desmond, who was dragged unwittingly into the mystery box, past the charred remains of an unlucky lab rat.But Widmore knew – or was pretty sure – that Desmond wouldn’t suffer the same fate as that poor chap. First, he warned his new subject that after the test, he would need Desmond to make a sacrifice. When Desmond claimed Widmore knew nothing of sacrifice, Charles retorted by lamenting his estrangement from his daughter, his isolation from his grandson and his son’s death. Touche, Chuck.So what was Widmore testing Desmond for? As he told Jin, “That man is the only person I’m aware of in the world who has survived a catastrophic electromagnetic event. I need to know that he can do it again, or we all die.” Clear as mud. And with that, Widmore flipped the switch, and Desmond’s mind was fried into another life…brutha.If you’re one of those people who frets LOST’s “mystery box” method of storytelling – in which a giant reveal is shrouded in a metaphorical mystery box – this scene should have assuaged your fears. LOST literally opened the box, showed us what was inside and explained it to us. I get the feeling a lot more mystery boxes are going to be opened in the coming weeks.The electromagnetic mystery box catapulted Desmond’s consciousness not forward or backward in time – the way the Swan implosion did – but sideways. He “awoke” in LAX (or LA[space]X, if you will), and Hurley wasted no time dropping a little metaphorical wink in the form of an accursed number, telling Desmond that his bags were on carousel four.After befriending poor, helpless, pregnant Claire – and casually predicting her baby will be a boy with an eerie, confident, certainty – Desmond meets up with his driver. And lo and behold, it’s our old friend George Minkowski, the communications expert from the Kahana freighter who, in this reality, is a sleezy limo driver who can hook you up with anything from a restaurant reservation to a restaurant reservation with a happy ending.But Desmond wants none of what George is selling. This Desmond is markedly different. The man who couldn’t beg for a job in his “other life” was now the #2 in a global corporation. He was not distracted by lovelorn exploits, or bogged down by inadequacies. This was a confident, smiling, suave Desmond Hume, making pregnant Aussies swoon and dropping some ABC (“Always Be Closin’”) in Sydney. So this Desmond had it all figured out, right? Not quite. His happiness was superficial, material, fleeting. And while he may nothe had a problem with that, the series of events about to unfold would prove to him otherwise.Widmore gives Desmond the assignment of babysitting a rock God who had OD’d en route to performing a benefit show with his son, organized by his wife. Not one to piss off the man he’s spent his whole alternate life trying to please, Desmond agrees. And to thank him, Widmore pours one out for his homie, offering him a shot of scotch from the same bottle that – in another time and place – he claimed Desmond was unworthy of sipping from. Ahh, MacCutcheon’s, you great diviner of worthiness.Charlie and Desmond then sit down for a drink of their own. Charlie goes on to recount the long, strange trip that was his near-death experience on Oceanic 815, complete with an other-worldly vision of a woman who he knew he loved, even though he’d never seen her. Charlie challenges Desmond’s perception of his own happiness, asking if he’s ever been in “spectactular, consciousness-altering love.” (Nice choice of words, by the way). Charlie describes his dream girl as “Blond, raptuously beautiful. And I know her. We’re together. It’s like, we’ve always been and always will be. This feeling, this love.”The vision (of Claire, no doubt) was interrupted by Jack-ass, who ruins everything for everyone in every timeline. You could see Desmond shaken a bit by this. Here was this complete stranger, exposing in him a deep insecurity about the quality of his happiness. Desmond tries to brush it off, posing an offer to Charlie to either keep drinking and end his music career or come with him and thrive. Not much of a choice, eh? “There’s always a choice, brutha.”Seriously, between Charlie referencing “conscious-altering love,” and Desmond positing that there’s “always a choice,” it’s as if our characters are beginning to channel each other in ways they don’t even understand. In a way, this predestined quantum entanglement that brought them all together on the Island has become a part of their hard-wiring, with each character subconsciously drawing on the philosophies and personalities of each other as if it were in their DNA all along. Desmond never gave a lab rat’s time-traveling ass about the power of “choice.” And Charlie “conscious-altering love” Pace was in bed with a heroine addict and two chicks at the same time, man, before getting on Oceanic 815. But their experiences with each other have altered their modus operandi, in ways subtle and monumental. It’s even why Jack became a man of faith – he learned it from Locke, whether he likes it or not. And it’s all pretty cool to see. As we’d later find out, perhaps that bleeding of personality traits wasn’t done on an entirely subconscious level.Desmond and Charlie hit the road, blasting some Driveshaft, when Charlie again tells Desmond he feels sorry for him. “Why?” asks Desmond, ”Is none of this real?” Another loaded question, which Charlie answered by yanking the car into the nearest harbor, in an effort to “teach” Desmond something.Desmond swims up to catch air, then descends again to save Charlie. While Desmond looks at him through the passenger window, Charlie puts his hand up to the glass, almost knowingly. Desmond, caught momentarily between worlds, sees a flash of the words, “Not Penny’s Boat,” on Charlie’s hand – the same scene that played out just before Charlie’s death. It was a carbon copy of Charlie's death scene, as he once again tried to guide Desmond with a last-ditch, suicidal effort. Only this time, Charlie was saved.Desmond and Charlie are taken to the hospital, where Desmond undergoes an MRI to examine his “hallucinations.” While the MRI scans Desmond brain, Desmond himself scans his own consciousness. And he |
the Ukraine events, and there has been a wave of court cases that show how edgy the authorities are.
Tatyana Shevtsova-Valova, an ethnic Russian, was put on trial for a Facebook post in which she called Kazakhs “darkies” and threatened the country with a Crimea-style takeover.
“If you start with the same shit about language and the rights of the native nationality here in Kazakhstan, then the same will happen as in Crimea. The north, and maybe even the whole of Kazakhstan will end up as part of Russia,” she wrote on her Facebook page. Shevstova-Valova was given a four-year suspended jail sentence for inciting ethnic hatred.
There have also been at least two trials in Kazakhstan of ethnic Russians who went as “volunteers” to fight for the pro-Russia rebels in east Ukraine. While in Russia, these people were lionised; in Kazakhstan, they have been jailed.
Yevgeny Vdovenko, an ethnic Russian from Astana, was sentenced to five years in prison for fighting on the side of the separatists. Vdovenko, who said he went as a volunteer after reading about the plight of Russians in east Ukraine, claimed he only stayed in the region for a matter of weeks and did not kill anyone. Last week, a court in Atyrau sentenced another Kazakh national to three years in jail for fighting with the separatists.
The events in Ukraine, where international guarantees given to the country over the inviolability of its borders proved meaningless, have spooked many in Kazakhstan.
“Kazakhstan is militarily weak, only international law protects us. We see how that worked out in Ukraine,” said Satpayev.
“The Crimean preparations were going on for years. Russia did everything to make sure Ukraine was never properly independent in terms of police, army, security services. The army and security services would be exactly the same in Kazakhstan, especially in the north,” says Rasul Zhumaly, a political analyst and former Kazakh diplomat.
There is no rational reason for Russia to create chaos in the north, but you need to look for irrational reasons as well
Cities such as Petropavlovsk are better linked to Russia than to the rest of Kazakhstan. Trans-Siberian trains dip into Kazakhstan and pass through Petropavlovsk several times a day, while the trip to Almaty takes between 19 and 30 hours across the endless steppe.
While the north remains predominantly Russian, demographics across the country are changing. In 1989, Kazakhstan was 39% ethnic Kazakh, while now it is nearly 70%, as many Russians have left and Kazakhs have enjoyed higher birth rates.
The president and those of his generation are more comfortable speaking Russian than Kazakh, and it is still possible to lead a successful professional life in towns such as Petropavlovsk without speaking a word of Kazakh. But that could soon change. The average age of the ethnic Russian community is 46, while the average Kazakh age is 27, meaning the proportion of Kazakhs will only grow. Among Kazakh intellectual circles, there is a fashion for patriotism: wearing Kazakh traditional clothes and listening to Kazakh music.
All of this leaves the Russian community worried that whoever comes after Nazarbayev could take a more nationalist line, especially if they need a unifying force to gain legitimacy. In turn, this leaves Kazakh analysts worried that such a turn would inevitably provoke responses from Russia, which has been keen to push political as well as economic integration as part of its Eurasian Economic Union, with signatories Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan.
“If there was a hypothetical future leader who wanted to withdraw Kazakhstan from the Eurasian Union, I am not sure Russia would like that,” said Satpayev. “I am sure forces in Kazakhstan could be found to ‘call on Russia for help’ and ensure Kazakhstan makes the right choice.”
Kazakhstan does not have the same strategic value for the Kremlin as Crimea. Russia’s Black Sea Fleet was based in Crimea, and Ukraine was seen as a vital bulwark against Nato expansion. But it does have important assets such as the Baikonur cosmodrome, a rocket launch site, as well as the psychological importance of a large ethnic Russian community, which Putin has pledged to defend across the former Soviet countries.
“Of course there is no rational reason for Russia to create chaos in the north, but you need to look for irrational reasons as well,” says Aidos Sarym, an Almaty-based analyst. “If things get really bad in Russia, they will need to find a way to keep the people distracted. War is the most obvious way to do so, and north Kazakhstan would be an obvious place to try.”Four Northampton body work businesses under investigation for allegedly offering sexual contact for money; two closed
NORTHAMPTON — Two Northampton body work businesses were shuttered by officials Friday for multiple code violations as part of a multi-agency investigation to determine, in part, if they and two other city businesses were offering sexual contact for money, according to Northampton police Capt. Jody Kasper.
At least three of the body work businesses were cited for multiple non-criminal code violations after a cooperative investigation by eight local, state and federal agencies Friday. No criminal charges have been filed yet, and the police investigation continues, according to Kasper.
Revival Body Works and Massage in the Potpourri Plaza at 241 King St. and Relax and Wellness Asian Massage at 6 Market St. were ordered closed after being condemned by the Northampton Board of Health. Relax and Wellness Asian Massage was also ordered closed by the state Department of Industrial Accidents for violating workers’ compensation law.
The inside of both businesses were dark Friday night and signs posted on their doors explained that they had been ordered closed.
Two businesses in Florence, Therapeutic Body Works at 44 Maple St. and Pine Street Inc. at 176 Pine St., are also subjects of the investigation.
The investigation began in April 2014 when Northampton police received a report that one of the businesses — which has not been publicly identified — was offering sexual contact for money. The ensuing investigation included surveillance, interviews with witnesses and victims and information-gathering from multiple websites, according to the statement issued by the Police Department.
During the investigation, police determined that the other three businesses were also allegedly offering sexual contact for money. Kasper said that some of the violations found Friday were a result of people living at some of the businesses. She was unable to provide further details because the citations were not issued by the Police Department.
Attempts to reach Northampton Health Department officials were unsuccessful Friday.
Over the course of the investigation, police worked with the Northwestern district attorney’s office, the Northwestern District Anti-Crime Task Force, the Massachusetts Division of Professional Licensure, the Northampton fire and health departments, and the Department of Homeland Security.
Representatives from most of these agencies conducted the administrative inspections Friday, according to the statement.
At Therapeutic Body Works, the neon “open” sign was turned off Friday night, although a woman who identified herself as the owner answered the door. The woman, who declined to give her name, said investigators erroneously cited her for not having proper insurance. She said she expected to reopen after she received proof of insurance by fax Monday and added that she is fully licensed.
Pine Street Inc., remained open Friday night. According to a sign on the door, the business offers Swedish, hot stone and foot massages. Both women inside the business said they did not understand a Gazette reporter’s questions about the investigation.
The investigation is unrelated to the Wednesday arrest of cosmetologist Eric P. Poulin of South Hadley, according to Kasper. Poulin pleaded not guilty in Northampton District Court to a single count of offering to engage in sexual conduct for a fee in the back of HairMasterz salon, at 141 Northampton St. in Easthampton.
Chris Lindahl can be reached at clindahl@gazettenet.com.Product Details
The world is big and your kingdom small. Small when compared to the world, that is; it's moderate-sized when compared to other kingdoms. But in a big world like this one - big when compared to smaller worlds anyway, if such things exist; it's moderate-sized when compared to worlds of roughly the same size, and a little small when compared to worlds just a little larger - well, to make a long story short - short when compared to longer stories anyway - it is time to stretch your borders.
You've heard of far-off places - exotic countries, where they have pancakes but not waffles, where the people wear the wrong number of shirts, and don't even have a word for the look two people give each other when they each hope that the other will do something that they both want done but which neither of them wants to do. It is to these lands that you now turn your gaze.
This is the 6th addition to the game of Dominion. It adds 26 new Kingdom cards to Dominion, including 20 Actions, 3 Treasures, 3 Victory cards, and 3 Reactions. The central theme is cards that do something immediately when you buy them or gain them.
Dominion: Hinterlands is an expansion, and cannot be played by itself; to play with it, you need Dominion, or a standalone expansion to Dominion (e.g., Dominion: Intrigue). Those provide the Basic cards you need to play (Treasure, Victory, and Curse cards), as well as the full rules for setup and gameplay. Dominion: Hinterlands can also be combined with any other Dominion expansions you have. We hope you enjoy this expanding world of Dominion!You didn’t really think I’d let Halloween come and go without some kind of food to mark the occasion, did you?! I may not be dressing up this year, but since I have to eat anyway, why not make it fun and festive? These goblin grins and monster mouths add creativity to a boring fruit and vegetable platter, making them a perfect appetizer for a creepy costume party on October 31st (one that I’ll regrettably miss while I hole up in my house reading – sadface).
Lucas was shocked that I wouldn’t be going all out for Halloween this year; it is my favorite holiday, after all. I delight in sewing entirely homemade topical costumes, and pretty much anyone who’s ever met me knows I have a wicked weakness for sugary treats. Needless to say, not partaking in the merriment this year is making me sad. And since I’m certainly not one to give up an opportunity to concoct themed kitchen creations, I share with you these super quick eerie eats I whipped up this weekend to get in the holiday spirit. These two spooky snacks are much healthier than celebrating by digging into a bag of discounted fun-sized candies I could pick up at Walgreens on November 1st.
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D.Va is a former professional gamer who now uses her skills to pilot a state-of-the-art mech in defense of her homeland.
Twenty years ago, South Korea was attacked by a colossal omnic monstrosity that rose from the depths of the East China Sea. The massive, lumbering construct caused catastrophic damage to coastal cities before it was driven back beneath the waves. In response, the South Korean government developed a mechanized armored drone unit, called MEKA, to protect urban environments in future engagements with the omnic threat
This Print Will be difficult to put together. theres alot of parts if you want to print it larger and it will require alot of sanding and mucking around.Breakfast at the Dolphin, Disney World. I’m seated next to two women, each about 5’6”, each 250 – 300 lbs. They’re tucking into their French toast with syrup, bacon-cheese omelets and sticky buns with butter, when one woman’s cell phone alarm goes off. “Oh, time to take my pills,” she cheerfully announces to her companion.
Many of you will read the above paragraph with some degree of moral disapproval; I wrote it to elicit that reaction. Others of you will blame Big Food. Others, who sympathize with the difficulty of losing weight, can be further broken down into those who seek:
a. better drugs for appetite suppression,
b. various forms of group or self-help programs, or
c. self-worth through affirmations—“Fat Power.”
All of which suggests total lack of agreement about how to address obesity.
But maybe it suggests even more. The obesity problem is a subset of a larger problem: how to get human beings—and companies–to change.
Options for Dealing with Obesity
It is a statistical fact that we have suddenly—like in the last 20 years—gotten significantly, massively, undeniably, across-the-board fatter. If you have any doubts about this at all, read the New Yorker’s XXXL: Why Are We So Fat? Believe it. The Dolphin is America. We have recently become Big Time Fat. And we are dying way younger, driving up health care costs massively, and lowering life quality by doing so.
You could, of course, go for the structural solution. The Dolphin also has a store called Sugar3. The Dolphin doesn’t offer microwaves, and they don’t sell plain popcorn. But you can buy caramelized, sugared popcorn in the stores. Change all that.
But fixing an industry that is laser-focused on profitable hi-calorie product creation is just not gonna happen in the US. We believe too strongly in other values—self-will, freedom of choice, individual responsibility. When these iconic values get into the hands of purely self-aggrandizing corporate profit machines, we are putty. We do not have the aggregate political self-will to systemically ‘just say no’ to the purveyors of deep-fried-quad-stacker-twinkies.
(It isn’t just the food itself, either. Bra sizes (I’m told) have been gradually getting smaller (i.e. the old B is the new C). Lady’s dress sizes have gone the other way (the old 8 is the new 6); I heard of one (highly educated) woman who only shops at one store, because only there is she a size 2.)
If the social and political system is inadequate to deal with this public health issue, then how about self-will? The growing magnitude of self-help books is testimony to the failure of self-help books.
What about groups? Whether Nutri-System or Weight-Watchers or Overeaters Anonymous, it works if you work it. (Oh, that darn ‘if’ clause). And we watch motivated, powerful people like Oprah or Kirstie Alley fail to work it—publicly, all the time.
Drugs? Been to a managed care facility for seniors lately? There is a several-times daily routine; the wheelchairs line up at the meds-dispensing window like obedient dairy cattle. Many of us very much want to believe there is a penicillin for everything; if the evening news tells us we can treat restless-pinky syndrome, then weight-control ought to be a piece of cake (sorry).
The obvious truth is: none of these solutions works with anything near dependability. There are no silver bullets; bullet peddlers also rep lines of snake oil. For a few souls, one solution works; but even then, it’s after having tried others.
The best answer seems to be: d. all of the above.
Now–what’s this got to do with organizational change?
Options for Dealing with Organizational Change
How do you change an organization? How do you improve sales, customer service, or total quality? How do you increase employee engagement, customer loyalty, or trustworthiness?
• Structure helps. Close the sugar-cubed stores, aka monetized mini-metrics and weekly quotas; sell fruit next to the Fatitos, i.e. talk to customers, role-model good behavior. Make it easier to be good.
• Keep it simple. Every diet ever invented is subject to Newton’s Law of Conservation of Energy—it is simply about calories. Every company ever invented has to sell something good to someone who wants it. The further away you get from the basics, the more people forget the basics.
• There is no pill. There is no pill. There is no pill.
• Fat Power is no better than Alcoholic Power, Smokers Power or Victim Power. The Brotherhood of the Similarly Fat is just another self-deluding drug. Spandex is not your friend.
• Will power alone is necessary but not sufficient: white-knuckling is sometimes required, but it’s a helluva way to live a life. Make the daily stuff of business itself the carrot, then use fewer sticks.
Corporate change isn’t only like personal change, it is personal change. Becoming fully adult and fully human is a lifelong pursuit. Ditto for companies.
Choose d. all the above.Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud (right) and US President Donald Trump attend a meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council in Riyadh (AFP Photo/BANDAR AL-JALOUD)
Riyadh (AFP) - Saudi Arabia's King Salman on Sunday accused regional rival Shiite Iran of exporting extremist Islamic movements to the world and vowed to eliminate the Islamic State group.
"The Iranian regime has been the spearhead of global terrorism since the (Ayatollah Ruhollah) Khomeini revolution" in 1979, King Salman said in a speech to leaders including US President Donald Trump.
"We did not know terrorism and extremism until the Khomeini revolution reared its head," he said.
Saudi Arabia was also determined to "eliminate the Islamic State group", the king said of the Sunni Muslim jihadist organisation.
The Saudi leader's speech came minutes before a highly anticipated address by Trump, who arrived in the Sunni kingdom on Saturday on his first foreign tour since taking office.
The United States and Saudi Arabia on Saturday announced an arms deal worth almost $110 billion, described as the largest in US history.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the deal was aimed at countering "malign Iranian influence".Zack Martin sees a bright future for the Dallas Cowboys even though this season ended without a trip to the playoffs.
Martin made it clear that his hope remains the same – he’d like to spend his career with the organization that drafted him in the first round of the 2014 NFL Draft.
“I was lucky enough to be drafted here, and I want to be here for my career,” Martin said. “Hopefully, we can get something worked out.”
The Cowboys and Martin’s agents discussed a long-term deal last off-season and throughout training camp. They didn’t reach an agreement, though, and each side agreed to table talks to avoid a possible distraction for Martin during the season.
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“We had good talks,” Martin said. “But just at that time, I didn’t want it to linger during the season and think about it. So kind of held it and played this year, so hopefully we can talk and get something done here in the off-season.”
Martin, 27, is under contract through next season as the Cowboys exercised their fifth-year option on him. He’s set to make $9.3 million in 2018.
But Martin is in line for a big payday as he’s arguably the top guard in football. His contract is expected to surpass the five-year, $60 million deal the Cleveland Browns handed Kevin Zeitler last off-season to make him the highest-paid guard in the league.
Martin, the Cowboys’ 2014 first-round pick, has been named to the Pro Bowl in his first four professional seasons. He garnered first-team All-Pro honors in 2014 and 2016 and second-team honors in 2015.
He’s a strong candidate to earn first-team honors again this season. Martin is having his best season, being called for no penalties and giving up just one sack in 15 games.
For his career, Martin has been flagged 13 times and given up seven sacks as he’s started 63 of a possible 63 regular-season games.
“He’s a great football player. He’s been a really good football player for us, right from the start,” coach Jason Garrett said. “Among the best players at his position from his rookie year on, and he’s getting better and better and better.
“It’s hard to get off to a better start to his career than he has. Because he loves it so much and cares so much about it, he just continues to get better. He works so hard at it, and he continues to grow, year by year.”
Garrett raved about Martin’s mental and physical traits. Physically, Martin’s balance might be the thing that sets him apart from other guards.
“He’s an outstanding athlete,” Garrett said. “He can generate power quickly. He’s a very explosive guy. In terms of his balance as a pass protector, it’s outstanding. The manifestations of that are sometimes you get in a situation where you might get overpowered here, but somehow he can right himself and get his feet back up underneath him and get back on balance to be able to sustain the block.
“If you watch him play, both as a run blocker and pass protector, his ability to sustain throughout the down and finish through the end of the down, is as good as anybody in the league.”
Martin and the Cowboys close out the season Sunday at Philadelphia.
The Cowboys view him as an integral part of their future after building one of the top offensive lines. And Martin likes what the future holds for this core group of Cowboys.
“I think we’ve got a ton of talent in this locker room,” Martin said. “Obviously moving forward, there’ll be new draft guys in here, but we have a ton of confidence in what we have in this locker room and us going forward.
“We have all the confidence in the world in this team, in our coaches and we know if we make a few more plays here and there, we would be playing after this weekend. But we didn’t.
“We’re going to have to sit and watch from the sidelines and get ready for next year.”The Diocese of Guyana’s 144th synod voted June 20 to permit the ordination of women to the priesthood.
Guyana Times reports:
This was a unanimous decision taken during the 144th Synod session of the regional Anglican Diocese, which includes Suriname and French Guyana. The highest decision-making forum of the Anglican Church in Guyana got underway with a Grand Mass at St. George’s Cathedral on Sunday.
However, the historical moment was made on Monday when the members unanimously voted to allow the ordination of women in the Diocese of Guyana. This means that the door is now open for women to be trained for the priesthood in Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.
Last year, Bolivia became the first Diocese in the Anglican Province of South America (formerly known as the Southern Cone) to ordain women as priests. Also in 2015, the Reverend Susana Lopez Lerena, the Reverend Cynthia Myers Dickin, and the Reverend Audrey Taylor Gonzalez became the first women Anglican priests ordained in the Diocese of Uruguay.
Before the vote, the Rt. Rev. Charles Davidson told radio station Demerara Waves that traditionalists would have to agree to disagree with those supporting women’s ordination.
“God calls all of us and empowers all of us, and at some point in the life of the church, our eyes are opened and we recognize that there is something we weren’t doing that we should be doing,” he said. “And because people are accustomed to tradition, it tends to cause uneasiness.”
Contact | Covenant | Facebook | RSS | Subscribe | TwitterCHICAGO -- Travis Wood will catch at least one break when he makes his first start of the season, but doesn’t figure to catch a second.
The Chicago Cubs left-hander will not have to face the Los Angeles Dodgers' Matt Kemp, who was a late scratch Sunday with left hamstring tightness. The less imposing lineup probably still isn’t enough to prevent him from heading back to Triple-A Iowa very quickly.
Wood, who was activated to the big league roster Sunday so that he could start in place of a sick Matt Garza, is expected to be headed back to the minor leagues after the game.
“We’ll see what happens,” manager Dale Sveum said. “We’re probably still going to have to do some kind of move there after the game because he won’t be available [to pitch] for three or four days.”
If Wood goes down, the Cubs will still have their full complement of pitchers so they will look to fill the void left by Blake DeWitt, who was designated for assignment early Sunday to make roster room for Wood.
Speculation on how the Cubs might fill the roster spot if Wood goes down has centered on middle infielder Adrian Cardenas, who is batting.326 at Iowa. His 17 RBIs are second on the team only to Anthony Rizzo's 25.
Interestingly, when Cardenas was claimed off waivers in February, DeWitt was taken off the 40-man roster. DeWitt then beat out Cardenas for a big league job this spring, but Cardenas could wind up with the utility role now.I’d like you to do me a favor. Please disregard everything you may have read this morning on Search Engine Land, Matt Cutts’ blog and even on the Official Google Blog. Flash is still evil; please don’t use it to design your entire Web site.
No, really. Don’t.
I think it’s great that Adobe is helping Google and Yahoo to read Flash files and even extract links out of them. TechCrunch explains how Adobe has created a special Flash player for the engines to use which will translate the.swf file into something they can read and understand. The engines will be able to click around and interact with a page the same way a user would. Even better, site owners will have to take no additional steps to get their content crawled. Google did note, however, that the crawler will not execute any type of JavaScript, so if your page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, you’re still out of luck.
It all sounds very cool and will be a great boon to the search engine optimization industry. We’ll no longer have to fight Google as we try and create workarounds to get previously invisible content to rank and in front of users. However, the news that Google may soon be able to index this content changes nothing. It’s still up to you to convince your clients to avoid Flash. As pretty as it may be in small doses, a Web site entirely in Flash still presents a poor user experience. No one wants to sit through that. I don’t care how indexable it is. There are still far better ways to present that content.
As excited as the SEO nerd in me was to hear Google’s announcement this morning, it also makes me worry.
Before today, Flash was considered mostly unindexable by the search engines. Sites were encouraged not to rely on it knowing that the search engines spiders would get tripped up and that their content would not be searchable. And despite all those warnings, how many God awful Web sites are out there designed completely in Flash? About a gazillion. And how much do you hate them? About a gazillion times over. And now Google is giving designers the green light to use Flash? Oh my goodness, Batman, get ready for a total Flash onslaught. Do not want!
Flash Web sites are still teh suck. They’re a lame attempt to make your boring site look interesting by distracting users with pretty pictures and moving frames. You should be using your content and product/service offerings to do that.
HTML and Flash may be becoming more equal to the search engines, but most users will still favor an HTML Web site that they can navigate easily. Today’s announcement is something worth watching, but I don’t think it changes anything yet. I also wonder why Google had to wait on Adobe to “invent” some kind of special Flash player for them to use. It seems to me that if it were that simple Google would have done it years ago, no? Or are the brains at Adobe really smarter than the ones at the Googleplex?
I don’t know. My SEO advice: Stick with creating HTML-based Web sites that users will want to interact with. Save the Flash stuff for the movie Web sites no one really cares about anyway.Minor Victories
Minor Victories (Rachel Goswell of Slowdive, guitarists Stuart Braithwaite of Mogwai and Justin Lockey of Editors, and film-maker James Lockey of Hand Held Cine Club)
Play It Again Sam
3 June 2016
Available formats:
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3. Breaking My Light
4. Scattered Ashes (Song for Richard)
5. Folk Arp
6. Cogs
7. For You Always
8. Out To Sea
9. The Thief
10. Higher Hopes
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July 7th, 2016DenisObama's straits are similar to those Clinton faced when the term triangulation was coined. The dirtiest word in politics
The naughty word is “triangulation,” and it does indeed sound like something that in some conservative locales might still be against the law, even if rarely prosecuted when practiced by consenting adults.
The question echoing through Democratic circles, among lawmakers and liberal commentators alike, is whether President Barack Obama might be trying to separate himself from his unpopular party through illicit acts of triangulation.
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The liberal New Republic and the conservative Daily Caller, among others, suspect the answer is yes. White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer is on the record with an emphatic denial that Obama is a triangulator. (See: Triangulation makes a comeback.)
The suspicions flow from Obama’s bargain with Republicans on taxes, in which he reluctantly embraced an extension of George W. Bush’s tax cuts, even for high earners, and followed that up with a White House news conference in which he lectured some of his fellow Democrats on the importance of compromise.
Were Obama’s laments about the impatience and impracticality of some liberals a sincere plea for more understanding from his own side? Or were they actually a calculated effort to advertise his tactical and ideological independence from fellow Democrats? (See: Dem leaders rip tax deal.)
As a political term of art, triangulation dates from some of the darkest hours of Bill Clinton’s first term, when Democrats got trounced in the 1994 midterm elections and the 42nd president found himself in straits remarkably similar to Obama’s now. Clinton fought his way back to health with the help of Republican consultant Dick Morris, who gleefully described his strategy as triangulation.
Clinton is back in favor with most Democrats and, in fact, is headed to the White House to consult with Obama Friday afternoon. But Morris, a commentator on Fox News, has enjoyed no such revival. For many Democrats, his triangulation methods are forever associated with the surrender of both principle and dignity. (See: Poll: Bill Clinton most popular pol.)
“Triangulation, as I understand it, is an intentional political strategy to win favor with swing voters by pushing off the left. That’s not what the president is doing, and that’s not our strategy,” Pfeiffer wrote POLITICO in an e-mail. “We want to convince all Democrats to support this [tax] deal because we think it is good for the economy and good for the middle and working class.”
Obama’s shoving match with the left, Pfeiffer noted, isn’t something the president sought. To the contrary, he was responding to the attacks of others.
“The president is responding to several very loud voices from the left who said we should fight even if people’s taxes go up. The president strongly disagrees with that position, and he is arguing his case,” said Pfeiffer. “Avoiding ideological rigidity and working with people he doesn’t always agree with to make progress for the country is at the core of the argument the president made on the campaign trail in 2008.” (See: Obama takes on deal's Dem critics.)
Pfeiffer’s quote underscores why the triangulation debate has relevance beyond a few bloggers and Clinton-era fetishists.Do you use FireFox? I bet you do because it is an awesome browser. What makes it even better is quite a number of tools you can add to enhance its functionality and customize it based on your needs. So let’s see how we can turn FireFox into a powerful shopping tool:
Woot Watcher monitors the Woot! web site, and keeps you updated with the current item, price, and if it is sold out.
BuyBuddy adds some social element to your Amazon shopping: as you browse the Web, the addon locates products that are offered through Amazon and ‘tags’ them. When you purchase these tagged products, the BuyBuddy toolbar will automatically select one of your buddies to associate with that purchase. Through the Amazon Associates program, a portion of the purchase price will be deposited by Amazon into your buddy’s Amazon Associates account.
If you don’t have any friends, you can always enter a list of charities or non-profit organizations that participate in the Amazon Associates program.
Price Protectr Toolbar has a huge number of cool features:
Search for any product right from the toolbar (the search will open on a new tab);
Watch the price with one click;
Save products to buy them later;
See retailer rating; etc
Currency converter: a very handy FireFox addon, especially if you often deal with different currencies. Just click on any currency data on any web page to convert that amount across over 180 foreign exchange rates right on your screen. A few more features include:
Invert the conversion you make and access to daily, weekly, monthly, and annual charts depicting the historical exchange trends of the currency pair that you selected;
Customize the settings based on your location;
Remember your last conversion and use those FROM and TO parameters for your next conversion request so that you don’t need to make the same selections each time.
Coupon Searcher is a multi-feature browser toolbar for deal searching. It includes Google-powered search engine and desktop alert feature. It has both FireFox and Internet Explorer versions.
RetailMeNot: when you visit any store, it will inform you if it has a coupon code available for that store. You don’t ever notice it, it won’t bother you. Then you visit an ecommerce site, and then it pops up quietly on the page. So it won’t bug you unless you go shopping: see it only when you need it! The add-on works by updating an internal database once per week from the collaborative coupon sharing website – retailmenot.com
KeepCash Coupon Notifier is a similar to above – it notifies you when online coupons exist for a site that you are shopping at. You can forget that it’s installed and then when you’re shopping, it acts as a friendly reminder that there are online coupons available. Enjoy!
Book Burro is another similar sites but for books. When you visit a webpage with a book on it, it pops up showing you prices for that book at other booksellers. It doesn’t slow down your browser as no communication with other sites will occur until it is clicked. Clicking the panel will open up a list of your libraries, book stores and online services. In addition, information about pricing and availability is added to the list – all without visiting any other pages.
Price Drop is another shopping tool for Amazon: it adds a link to each product on Amazon inviting you to track its price. Just go to an Amazon product page, and start tracking it; you’ll get a notification if its price drops.
You can also check out your tracked product list using the drop icon, or the Tools->PriceDrop menu.
PriceAdvance is a handy shopping addon for FireFox and Internet Explorer that will look for the lowest price offered by Amazon.com, BestBuy or WalMart. It will instantly alert you to current deals once you visit the merchant’s website.
While you shop for products at your favorite merchants, PriceAdvance will automatically search other retailers for better prices. When prices are found a small overlay window will appear in the top left of your browser window. To view a product in the overlay, click the price or company logo.
PackageMapping extension makes it easy to get tracking information for a package and display the tracking progress on Google Maps. Simply highlight the tracking number, right click, and select “Track and Map Package”. The tool currently supports 4 service providers: UPS, U.S.P.S., FedEx, DHL.
Grocery List Generator helps with your grocery shopping. It is a helpful little addon to store your recipe-ingredients and other groceries you need regularly. It creates a well-organized grocery list to help make your grocery shopping as easy as possible.
A few tools for eBayers:
eBay Buddy is a Firefox addon for active eBayers. It provides comprehensive menus which allows you to easily access hundreds of sections on eBay as well as several related sites and tools.
eBay Counter is a Greasemonkey user script which adds a live countdown timer to active eBay auctions.
myTimeZone for eBay is a Firefox addon that allows to customize dates and times on eBay listings for your specific location. Besides, it provides automatic currency conversion and total price sorting options.
Post image by GlutnixIndia's foreign minister said India and China have resolved a tense, two-week military border standoff in the northern Himalayan region.
Sushma Swaraj said Friday after meeting with Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in New York that Chinese troops would begin withdrawing Friday and would be finished by Tuesday. She described the resolution as a "big accomplishment."
Hundreds of Chinese troops moved into a territory claimed by India, sparking the standoff on the remote mountainous frontier of Ladakh.
India said the Chinese troops wanted to extend a road they were building on their side of the border into territory claimed by India.
Officials say China has agreed not to extend the road into the disputed territory. In return, India has agreed to demolish a recently built observation hut.
The two countries have long been embroiled in a bitter territorial dispute and small incursions occur frequently across the Line of Actual Control, the de-facto border that runs 4,000 kilometers across the Himalayas.
The border tension overshadowed last week's visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to India and prompted Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to call for a quick resolution to the border dispute.
India alleges the border incursions by China have increased in recent years, but says the latest one was one of the most serious incidents in recent times.Nato has condemned the latest ballistic missile launch by North Korea, noting that the act violated resolutions made by the UN Security Council.
North Korea has launched a ballistic missile near the northwestern city of Kusong on 12 February, according to the US Strategic Command (Stratcom).
The missile, which |
in pictures – February 29: A protester runs for cover as riot police clash with students during a demonstration in Barcelona, Spain. Tens of thousands of students protested education cuts announced by the Catalan government. Hide Caption 20 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – March 7: Children and adults scavenge for recyclables and other usable items at the Trutier dump on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Following the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed more than 220,000 people, the number of daily scavengers at the landfill grew from about 200 to an estimated 2,000. Much of the country is still in crisis. Hide Caption 21 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – March 20: A soldier faints as Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, and Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, arrive for a wreath-laying ceremony at the National Monument at Akershus Fortress in Olso, Norway. The royals were on a Diamond Jubilee tour of Scandinavia. Hide Caption 22 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – March 26: A Tibetan exile runs after setting himself on fire in New Delhi, India, during a protest against Chinese President Hu Jintao's upcoming visit. Hide Caption 23 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – March 28: Sgt. 1st Class Paul Brady of the 182nd Infantry Massachusetts National Guard embraces his 6-year-old daughter, Regan, during a welcome home ceremony in Melrose, Massachusetts. The 182nd Infantry Regiment, one of the original units in the United States military, returned from a yearlong deployment in Afganistan. Hide Caption 24 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – April 1: A supporter kisses Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the National League for Democracy, as she visits polling stations in her constituency as Burmese vote in parliamentary elections in Kawhmu, Myanmar. She won a seat in parliament in Myanmar's first multiparty elections since 1990. Hide Caption 25 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – April 17: A Sudan Armed Forces soldier lies dead in a pool of oil next to a leaking oil facility. He had engaged in heavy fighting with Sudan People's Liberation Army troops from South Sudan. Hide Caption 26 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – April 26: Rupert Murdoch, chief executive officer of News Corp., and his wife, Wendi, are driven from their London apartment. Testifying before an independent British inquiry into journalistic ethics, Murdoch admitted to a cover-up of abuses at the News of the World tabloid and apologized for not paying more attention to the phone-hacking scandal. Hide Caption 27 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – May 7: A young girl looks over the Doro refugee camp in South Sudan in May. More than 500,000 people have fled from Sudan into South Sudan as a result of the ongoing conflict between the two states. Hide Caption 28 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – May 8: Tonya sticks her trunk out of a container during her removal from the Zoo Blijdorp in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. She had to leave the zoo with her mother, Douanita, because she did not get along with the other elephants. They were moved to a zoo in Prague, Czech Republic. Hide Caption 29 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – May 15: Young Afghans bowl in Kabul at the Strikers, Afghanistan's only bowling alley. It has gained popularity since opening in the fall of 2011. Hide Caption 30 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – May 21: The sun is obscured by the moon during an annular solar eclipse in Tokyo. Hide Caption 31 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – June 5: Britain's Queen Elizabeth II waves from her seat in the 1902 State Landau coach during the carriage procession from Westminster Hall to Buckingham Palace to celebrate the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Hide Caption 32 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – June 13: Taquoka plays with a log in a pond in his enclosure at the Alaska Wildlife Conservation Center in Portage, Alaska. The 2-year-old male brown bear began a trip to his new home in Sweden. Hide Caption 33 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – June 15: Lebanese children and Syrian refugees play in a natural spring close to the Syrian border. Behind them, a line of trucks and tractors collect fresh water to supply villages in the area. Tens of thousands of people have fled from Syria to Lebanon since the conflict started. Hide Caption 34 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – June 15: Aerialist Nik Wallenda walks the tighrope over Niagara Falls in Canada. Wallenda walked across the 1,800-feet-long, 2-inch-wide wire as the first person to cross directly over the falls from the United States into Canada. Hide Caption 35 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – June 21: LeBron James of the Miami Heat celebrates with teammate Chris Bosh during the NBA Finals game between the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder in Miami. The Heat won the series 4-1. Hide Caption 36 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – June 24: Egyptians celebrate the election of President Mohamed Morsy in Tahrir Square in Cairo. He was sworn in on June 30 as the country's first democratically elected president. Hide Caption 37 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – June 27: Protesters run for cover as police arrive to disperse a rally demanding human rights reforms in the village of Buri, south of Bahrain's capital, Manama. A court in Bahrain sentenced prominent activist Nabeel Rajab to three years in prison in August "for participating in illegal rallies and gatherings." Hide Caption 38 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – Sometime in July: Magnum photographer David Alan Harvey's assistant sits on a rocking horse at his apartment on the water in Brooklyn, New York, for this fine-art photograph, "White Horse No. 2." Hide Caption 39 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – July 8: A wild bull hurdles over people blocking the animal's way into the bullring at the close of the second bull run during the Fiesta de San Fermin in Pamplona, Spain. The festival attracts thousands of people who attempt to outrun the bulls through the narrow streets of the old city. Hide Caption 40 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – July 19: Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, take part in a parachute game during a visit to Saumarez Park in St Peter Port, United Kingdom. They were taking part in a Diamond Jubilee visit to the Channel Islands. Hide Caption 41 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – July 22: A Palestinian refugee plays in between makeshift tents in the Al-Zaiton neighborhood before breaking fast on the third day of the holy month of Ramadan in Gaza. During Ramadan, Muslims fast from dawn to dusk. Hide Caption 42 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – July 23: Icebergs from nearby glaciers float in the bay in Narsaq, Greenland. Hide Caption 43 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – July 28: Visitors gather and pray around a cross erected at a memorial set up across the street from the Century 16 movie theater in Aurora, Colorado. James Holmes is suspected of killing 12 people and injuring 58 others during a shooting rampage on July 20 at a screening of "The Dark Knight Rises." Hide Caption 44 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – August 12: Fireworks explode over the stadium during the closing ceremony of the London Olympics. The Summer Games started on July 27. Hide Caption 45 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – August 13: A man dives into the water near Kaaterskill Falls in the Catskill Mountains in the Hudson Valley. Hide Caption 46 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – August 19: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is seen on the balcony of Ecuador's embassy in London. Facing extradition to Sweden because of allegations of sexual assault, Assange was granted political asylum by Ecuador. Hide Caption 47 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – August 21: A woman rides through the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Hide Caption 48 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – August 23: NASA's Curiosity rover transmits an image that shows the base of Mount Sharp, its eventual destination. Curiosity successfully landed on Mars on August 6. Hide Caption 49 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – August 30: Actor Clint Eastwood speaks on the final day of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida. During his speech, he addressed an "invisible" President Barack Obama sitting in an empty chair. Hide Caption 50 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – September 9: A rescue worker carries a child in Yiliang County, China. At least 80 people were killed and more than 800 others were injured after two earthquakes jolted southwest China. Hide Caption 51 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – September 11: The U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, is consumed in flames. Chris Stevens, U.S. ambassador to Libya, was killed in an attack on the compound, as were three other Americans. The Obama administration has been criticized for its response to the attack. Hide Caption 52 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – September 17: Palestinian youths practice their parkour skills in Khan Younis in southern Gaza. Parkour athletes run along a route, using obstacles to propel themselves. The practice originiated in France. Hide Caption 53 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – September 17: Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Prince William, Duke of Cambridge, travel in a traditional canoe during a visit to Tavanipupu Island on their Diamond Jubilee tour of the Far East. Hide Caption 54 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – September 21: People stand outside a store in Tokyo before the launch of the iPhone 5. Based on first-day orders, the iPhone 5 became the fastest-selling device Apple has released. Hide Caption 55 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – September 26: A gust of wind blows Pope Benedict XVI's cloak into his face in St. Peter's Square in Vatican City. Days later, the pope's former butler, Paolo Gabriele, was convicted of aggravated theft for leaking confidential papal documents. He was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Hide Caption 56 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – October 9: Former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky leaves the courthouse in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, after being sentenced to at least 30 years in prison. Sandusky, 68, was convicted in June on 45 counts of child sexual abuse. Hide Caption 57 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – October 12: Space Shuttle Endeavour is transported to The Forum arena for a stopover and celebration in Inglewood, California. The space shuttle was on 12-mile journey from the Los Angeles International Airport to the California Science Center to go on permanent public display. Hide Caption 58 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – October 12: The European Union wins the Nobel Peace Prize while grappling with the worst crisis since its founding -- devastating debt and the threat of disintegration. The flag of the 27-nation union, left, flies alongside the flag of debt-ridden Greece in front of the Acropolis in central Athens. Hide Caption 59 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – October 19: Free Syrian Army fighters watch a regime army position through a hole in a wall in Aleppo, Syria's most populous city.. Hide Caption 60 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – October 19: George Zimmerman watches during his hearing at the Seminole County Courthouse in Sanford, Florida. He will go on trial June 10, 2013, for the killing of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The neighborhood watch volunteer is charged with second-degree murder in the February 26 shooting. Hide Caption 61 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – October 28: The San Francisco Giants celebrate defeating the Detroit Tigers in the 10th inning to win Game Four -- the deciding game -- of the World Series at Comerica Park in Detroit. Hide Caption 62 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – October 30: Taxis sit in a flooded lot in Hoboken, New Jersey, after Superstorm Sandy devastated the region. The storm slammed ashore near Atlantic City, New Jersey, after forming in the Caribbean and sweeping northward, killing 182 people from Haiti to Canada. Hide Caption 63 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – October 31: Waves break in front of a destroyed amusement park wrecked by Superstorm Sandy in Seaside Heights, New Jersey. Hide Caption 64 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – November 1: An aerial view of New York reveals a widespread power outage after Superstorm Sandy. Photographer Iwan Baan credits his camera for allowing him to capture the memorable image from a helicopter at night. He told the Poynter Insitute that with older equipment, the shot would have been impossible. Hide Caption 65 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – November 4: Syrians take cover as a second bomb explodes during a rescue attempt in a nearby building that was hit during an air raid by government forces in the northern city of Al-Bab. Hide Caption 66 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – November 6: Mike Wigart picks up his ballot at a polling station in the garage of the Los Angeles County lifeguard headquarters. Americans headed to the polls to vote in the race between President Barack Obama and Republican candidate Mitt Romney. Hide Caption 67 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – November 6: President Barack Obama stands on stage with first lady Michelle Obama, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden after his victory speech on Election Night in Chicago. Obama was re-elected with 332 electoral votes and 51% of the popular vote. Hide Caption 68 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – November 8: Hundreds of New Yorkers from Rockaway wait in line for gasoline in the aftermath of Sandy. Hide Caption 69 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – November 10: Terraced rice paddies of Shiroyone Senmaida glow with 20,000 solar-powered pink LED lights in Wajima, Japan, to be recorded in Guinness World Records. The rice paddies were registered as Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems last year. Hide Caption 70 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – November 20: Men on motorcycles drag the body of a man through the streets of Gaza City. The men dragging the body claimed it was the body of a collaborator and an Israeli spy. Hamas and Israel agreed to a cease-fire on November 21 after eight days of round-the-clock warfare. Hide Caption 71 of 73
Photos: 2012: The year in pictures 2012: The year in pictures – December 14: State police personnel lead children away from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A gunman killed 18 children and six adults at the school before he died; two more children died later at a hospital. Hide Caption 72 of 73Plane seat safety tests faked
Updated
Japan's biggest manufacturer of airline seats has admitted that it falsified seat safety tests.
Koito Industries has sold about 150,000 of the suspect passenger seats to major airlines including Japan Airlines, Singapore Airlines and possibly to V Australia.
After a company employee blew the whistle, the president of Koito Industries Limited this week formally apologised at a press conference in Japan.
He said the company and the management were responsible for the falsification of fire resistance data for tens of thousands of plane seats.
Industry expert and aviation editor for West Australian Newspapers, Geoffrey Thomas, says the revelation is extremely disturbing.
"The seats are a critical part of an aircraft," he said.
"It's related to the fabric covering of the seats. There's a possibility that they may not have passed the fire certification standard.
"Of critical importance is the fire retardancy of the fabrics, of the seats, and the internal structure of the seats, the foam.
"[They] all have to meet very rigorous standards, burn-through standards, because one of the major killers in an air crash is smoke."
Mr Thomas says a number of Japan-based carriers are certainly affected.
"It affects Japan Airlines and All Nippon airlines. It also, I understand, affects one or two aircraft being delivered to Singapore Airlines," he said.
But concerns also stretch to Australia, where some planes belonging to the new international arm of Virgin Blue, V Australia, may also be affected.
"One or two of their aircraft [may be affected], but that is still being determined and the actual effect of this has to be worked through with the authorities," Mr Thomas said.
"It is very surprising because normally the Japanese are meticulous with their standards, although this is not the latest problem from Japan.
"We've had Honda and Toyota with massive recalls as well. So it comes at a time when a lot of question marks are being asked about standards.
"Of course Japan Airlines just went into bankruptcy as well, so brand Japan is really taking a hammering at the moment."
A spokesman for the Federal Minister for Transport, Anthony Albanese, says although the safety information for the seats was falsified, it is yet to be determined whether they are unsafe.
He says Japan's safety bureau is currently investigating and if it does issue an air worthiness directive, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority in Australia (CASA) will do the same.
When contacted, Singapore Airlines declined to comment, referring all inquiries to the seat manufacturer.
Virgin Australia was unavailable for comment.
Topics: air-transport, manufacturing, world-politics, occupational-health-and-safety, safety, japan, australia
First postedA self-described perfectionist who paid out of his own pocket to have his Porsche fully repainted after an accident — because he wasn't happy with the ICBC-approved repairs — has lost his civil claim to recover the costs of his self-funded fixes.
ICBC had already determined that Porsche driver Bruce Jackson was fully at fault after his Porsche was hit by a semi-trailer while merging onto Highway 1 in Coquitlam in 2013, according to a recent B.C. Provincial Court judgment.
In his civil claim, Jackson alleged it was the truck driver, Edward Davies, who was actually responsible for the accident — and wanted to be awarded damages that would cover the cost of his repairs.
Perfectionist repaints Porsche
According to the judgment, Jackson said that he was "unsatisfied" with the body and structural repairs that were approved by ICBC, including the respraying of the rear-end parts of his 1983 Porsche 911 SC.
Jackson chose to spend his own money to have the Porsche completely resprayed in its entirety — "noting that the paint's appearance was not exactly the same in all areas" — and was seeking to recover that additional expense as damages in his claim.
However in his Dec. 5 decision, Judge Thomas Woods wrote that Jackson could not recover those costs, because the Porsche owner had already signed a document to say that his car had been'repaired satisfactorily."
He also added that because there were paint chips and scratches on Jackson's luxury car before the accident, awarding damages to cover the cost of the respray "would over-compensate" him for the damage caused by the accident.
Judge Woods said that Jackson "candidly described himself as a perfectionist.
"Indeed, he went so far as to admit that he had the Porsche wholly resprayed because he is a perfectionist," he wrote.
"Respraying the entire Porsche would have had the effect of providing to Mr. Jackson a vehicle, post-accident, that would have been free of those many pre-existing cosmetic problems and, thus, a good deal closer to perfect than it was before the accident."
Gesturing to merge?
Jackson's claim was also dismissed because of differing testimony on what happened in the seconds before Davies' semi-trailer struck the rear of Jackson's Porsche on Aug. 25, 2013.
According to the decision, the accident occurred when the driver of the Porsche tried to merge onto Highway 1 ahead of a semi-trailer. (Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Jackson, who was merging from the Brunette Avenue on-ramp, claimed that he made eye-contact with and waved at Davies, who was travelling in the far-right lane and who gestured for him to enter the lane ahead of his truck.
According to the B.C. Provincial Court judgment, Davies denied seeing the Porsche at any time before the accident and denied waving or gesturing with Jackson.
Judge Woods wrote that, unlike Jackson, the truck driver's evidence was consistent throughout his testimony.
"Why would someone in Mr. Davies' position, having just signaled to Mr. Jackson that he could enter the lane in front of him, roll forward and collide with his Porsche?" Woods wrote.
"Mr. Davies' actions do make sense however if, as he testified, he made room for another vehicle that sought to enter the traffic, saw it do so and then began moving forward himself again without seeing Mr. Jackson's second, low-slung vehicle begin to enter his lane behind the first one."
By doing this, Judge Woods wrote, Jackson was "violating a well-known custom of merging in an alternating fashion.""Anyone who goes to that movie and wants a fact-based account should read 'Into Thin Air,' " the author, who's played by Michael Kelly in the Universal film, says.
Into Thin Air author Jon Krakauer, who wrote about the 1996 blizzard on Mt. Everest that left eight climbers dead, is fine with audiences not flocking to see Everest, the new disaster film that tells the same story, in which he is a character.
"It’s total bull,” Krakauer told the Los Angeles Times. "Anyone who goes to that movie and wants a fact-based account should read Into Thin Air."
House of Cards' star Michael Kelly portrays the now 61-year-old Krakauer in the film. Krakauer saw Everest last weekend, according to theTimes. He wasn't pleased.
One scene in particular really irked Krakauer, he said. In the film — which has a 73 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes — his character is asked to help with the rescue by Russian guide Anatoli Boukreev, but he declines, claiming he is "snow blind."
"I never had that conversation," Krakauer told theTimes. "Anatoli came to several tents, and not even sherpas could go out. I’m not saying I could have, or would have. What I’m saying is, no one came to my tent and asked."
Everest director Baltasar Kormakur told the Times there was no malice meant by the film.
"Our intention in the tent scene that Mr. Krakauer mentions was to illustrate how helpless people were and why they might not have been able to go out and rescue people... " Kormakur told the Times through his publicist. "They were not malicious. They were helpless."
Krakauer sold the rights to his book, around the time it was published, to Sony Pictures, which in turn made the TV movie, Into Thin Air: Death on Everest. In that adaptation, Krakauer is played by Christopher McDonald.
"People told me, 'Movies never get made. Take the money. What do you have to lose?' " Krakauer told the Times. "I curse myself for selling it at all. What I learned from the TV movie was that dramatic films take dramatic license, and when you sign a document, you can do whatever you want with me. It wasn’t worth the money I got."We imagined a smoky room 40 years ago where founding publisher Joe Parkhurst, then-executive editor Allan Girdler, and the rest of the Cycle World crew were hard at work looking for the Next Big Idea and came up with Ten Best Bikes. But under the heading: There are No Truly New Ideas, Girdler says he “borrowed” the 10-best notion from a now defunct car magazine and had applied it with success at his old job with CW’s counterpart car publication, Road & Track. So he and Joe thought they’d try it with motorcycles. And a four-decade tradition of excellence was born!
We are so glad to continue Ten Best in its 40th year because we are honored to honor the finest motorcycles the world has ever seen.
Looking at the vibrancy and diversity of products in 2016, it’s hard not to think we have hit a New Renaissance. The top end of the market is absolutely sizzling with amazing machines and big-dollar bikes that offer electronic everything to control their fantastic power and allow for suspension and other tuning at the push of a few buttons. On the low-cost side, even bikes less than $4,500 often offer ABS. In between is a selection of fun and stylish motorcycles of every type that offer better value than ever. Now, as it was in 1976 and throughout riding history, motorcycle enthusiasts are the luckiest people on earth.Just when you thought it was safe to go back on the Internet…
I have been reporting for weeks now about the D.C.-based “pizza pedophilia” ring that is being exposed based on thousands of “Podesta emails” released by Wikileaks in the past month or two.
As of last week, the case became even more explosive.
https://twitter.com/ThomasBernpaine/status/797090222819315712
Now, don’t get nervous because it looks like computer mumbo-jumbo. You only need to remember two things.
1 – Every picture file is actually a code/pattern of numbers that our computers “translate” into images on the screen.
2 – Some “extra” information has been discovered in at least one picture code/pattern from a Wikileaks email.
I reported weeks ago about this “pedo ring” something called “photo steganography,” which is just the fancy term for the two points I explained just now.
The image (.jpg) of the two girls eating pizza was discovered as an attachment in the Podesta emails by Wikileaks. Data can be hidden in a.jpg file. In that image, a zipped directory (PK) was hidden inside. That doesn’t happen by accident. The directory likely contains illegal imagery and/or discussion. It is highly suggestive of illegal activity connected to child pornography, child exploitation, and child abuse.
Some have objected that the pizza.jpg file size is simply too small to contain any useful data (like an image, a link, a message, etc.), but the point is this: all the file would have to “smuggle” is a short password to open a secret website or.zip file. The hidden data could literally just be a few bits of information but it could open up thousands of gigabytes of data in the right website or compressed file. That’s how the users would access the dirty pictures, videos, messages, etc.
So, from a technical angle, this method is very possible, and it makes sense of why the Podesta emails include so many strange photo attachments. Are all those attachments little “Trojan ponies” for sharing images, videos, passwords, payment resources, etc.?
WATCH (Language/NSFW Warning):
“Why do we even have an FBI? Is the FBI just covering for these people?”
Let me be honest:
I have researched corruption cases like this for many years, whether in current events or from historical records. So, I believe I have a somewhat thick skin when it comes to facing human sinfulness and evil like this.
Last Friday night, however, I won’t lie: I totally lost it.
All of a sudden, too many lightbulbs went off at once, too many connections hit me at once, too many implications dawned on me at once–and I just went into a kind of panic attack about how massive this whole cartel is, how well protected it is, and how truly destructive it is in real children’s lives.
If you want to get an idea of what set me off, let me show you three images.
BUT I WARN YOU: When you understand the context, these images are EXTREMELY DISTURBING.
First, here is a photo of Tony Podesta’s favorite work of art in his home:
Tony Podesta is a big fan of “The Arch of Hysteria”
Next, here is an ad from Ping Pong Pizza, a restaurant in D.C. that has numerous, very disturbing connections to pedophilia and D.C. elites like the Podestas.
Another “arch of hysteria”?
Next we come to a police photo from the Jeffrey Dahmer case.
VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED:
I wonder if Tony Podesta would also like this “arch of hysteria”…
Finally, here is the logo for Comet Pizza, another D.C. restaurant with deep connections to Ping Pong Pizza and the Podestas.
Can you see now why I “lost my [bleep]” last Friday?
Worse, in terms of how protected this satanic ring of perverts is, I recently reported that even the DOJ is compromised.
A man named Arun Rao has shown a disturbing interest in some sexually “creepy” images and expressions that are connected to the Podestas and this pedo ring. The problem is that Rao is an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the DOJ.
Specifically, Rao is Supervisor of the Southern (“Greenbelt”) Division office for the DOJ’s District of Maryland in Chevy Chase, Maryland. This means that Rao’s district is virtually on top of the area in D.C. where Besta Pizza operates. In addition, Besta Pizza and two other associated properties are directly over abandoned underground tunnels, many of which could easily connect to Chevy Chase.
On top of his social and geographical proximity to Alefantis, Rao’s DOJ division handles cases that seem tailor-made for busting—or covering up—the dark circles that sex traffickers hide in: federal racketeering, conspiracy, national and international fraud and corruption, immigration violations, counterfeiting, and—wait for it—child pornography.
In closing I will leave you with three “infographics.”
They are very complicated and “dense” so I don’t expect everyone to examine them.
However, even if you don’t look into the details yourself, I want you to be aware of how vast this whole network of evil is, and, therefore, of how many hands and prayers we need on deck to expose it and bring it down.
(NOTE: You don’t have to download these images to view them. You can just right-click open them in a separate internet browser tab, and click “+” to zoom in.)
https://twitter.com/ThomasBernpaine/status/797183893333884929
First, a diagram of “key players” in the pizza restaurant side of the pedo ring. You can see the diagram for yourself here.
Second, a much larger diagram of how this pizza-pedo ring connects to international kidnapping (esp. the Madeleine McCann case) and other DNC allies like “spirit cooker” Marina Abramovic.
Finally, a truly massive diagram of connections that implicate nations and leaders around the world, and put the sex trafficking cartel in the context of a global network of drug dealers, slave traders, murderers, and media elites.
This is an ongoing investigation so stay tuned for more.
Share this article to inform and encourage your friends and family!The Co-Main Event Podcast has never smelled so clean, nor felt so fresh in its … uh … groin … area. Be warned, CME Universe, this week Ben and Chad record the show under the influence of Dude Wipes, which came in the mail as a thoughtful gift from listener Coleen H. Or maybe it wasn’t so thoughtful. Maybe it was just her subtle way of telling them they stink. In any case, there is a lot of non-odor related MMA news to discuss as well, what with Chris Weidman putting it in the haters’ faces, Ronda Rousey playing Andre Arlovski to Alexis Davis’ Paul Buentello and Frankie Edgar mopping up what was left of B.J. Penn’s career and wringing it out like the tears of a thousand tarnished angels.
All that, plus MasterTweet Theatre, AYFKM and Just Sayin’ Stuff.
Direct downloaders can lie about what percentage of time they are Beastin’ right here.
Sounds: This week’s music comes from listener Joey Schroeder and The Apache Revolver. They describe themselves as a “surf rock/black metal band” (weird, right?) and if you like their music, it’s available for free download at theapacherevolver.bandcamp.com or via their website apacherevolvermusic.com.We’ve all been waiting with bated breath for the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to release its long-awaited regulations to enable safe operation of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) in United States airspace. Well, probably only a small subset of us actually have been anxiously awaiting these FAA rules, but with the increasing visibility of even small UAS on TV, most of us have probably given these things some passing thought.
If you didn’t already know, the FAA has been mandated by Congress to integrate UAS into the National Airspace System (NAS) by September 30 of this year.
I’ve been following what’s been going on quite intently as far as FAA regulations for UAS. For the most part, the FAA has been making noises that it has not been able to maintain the planned schedule to achieve this objective. The UAS industry — and GNSS is a major component for that industry — has been quite disappointed by the FAA’s progress and has made quite a deal about the delays and lack of concrete results. So, for me, it seemed to be a good sign when the FAA recently started to issue restricted exemptions from its existing rules for regular manned aircraft, which may allow people to legally use UAS, for:
TV and movie making (7 exemptions),
Construction site monitoring (1 exemption)
Precision aerial surveys (3 exemption granted to Trimble and Woopert Inc.)
Flare stack inspections on 14 Shell Oil Gulf of Mexico production platforms (1 exemption)
Aerial video to augment real-estate listings (1 exemption)
Photogrammetry and crop surveying for precision agriculture (1 exemption)
As of January 9, that’s the list, but — given that the FAA has found this way to move forward on an individual basis to allow commercial UAS use — it’s quite likely there may be more. I pulled up these exemptions on the FAA unmanned aircraft systems site, which lists exemptions granted so far and explains the Section 333 regulation under which the FAA has chosen to proceed.
It seems the exemptions are being done now because the overarching regulations to integrate small UAS (sUAS) into routine NAS operations have still not made it out of the FAA barn — even following several years now since it was due to emerge. It’s once again scheduled for release for comment “later this year.” The FAA site goes on to say,
Section 333, “Special Rules for Certain Unmanned Aircraft Systems,” provides flexibility for authorizing safe civil operations in the NAS by granting the Secretary of Transportation the authority to determine whether airworthiness certification is required for a UAS to operate in the NAS.
The FAA regulations that govern today’s aircraft are found in Title 14 of the Code of Federal Regulations (14 CFR). There are 68 regulations organized into three volumes. A fourth volume deals with the Department of Transportation, and a fifth volume is focused on NASA.
Three primary regulations govern the airworthiness of an aircraft.
The “Big Three” are:
14 CFR Part 21 — Certification Procedures for Products and Parts |
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